If you’ve used the Consortium Library recently, chances are you’ve come into contact with the electronic materials we offer. The library currently owns or subscribes to almost 70,000 electronic books and 60,000 electronic journals and provides access to thousands more freely available resources. The Library also has hundreds of specialized online databases that cover a broad range of subject areas and formats, such as streaming video, interactive tutorials, and audio files.
While electronic resources, or e-resources, for short, can make research materials accessible to many more students, allowing you to study at a time and place convenient to you, they also bring some challenges with them. Publishers have many different pricing and access models and they vary widely in what they allow you, the researcher, to do with their materials.
It’s my job as Electronic Resources Librarian to get new resources up and running and make sure they are accessible to you through the Library website. I track renewals and license information and monitor usage data. I also troubleshoot any problems that might arise, such as maintenance outages, broken website addresses, and log in issues. It’s a full-time job keeping up with all the changes in the e-resource world, but it’s also fascinating to see how electronic resources continue to evolve.
Stay tuned to this blog for news and announcements about all that is happening with electronic resources here in the Library–from new resources to access problems to tips for using our ebooks, ejournals, and specialized databases.