For the August/September 2010 issue of "Library Technology Reports" (LTR) published by the American Library Association Techsource division, the author and her colleague, Rachel A. Fleming-May, focused on use and usage, both of electronic resources and use of libraries in general. In this article, the author discusses a few of the findings from an…

Subscription agents have had to reinvent themselves over the past 15 years as the numbers of print subscriptions have dramatically dwindled. Many libraries have chosen to bypass the subscription agent and its extra fees in favor of dealing directly with the publisher for e-journal and e-journal package procurement and management. Especially in…

Library school courses focusing on management and budgeting are as important as ever, as are continuing education opportunities for librarians who may not have encountered a severe economic recession. The journal crisis of the 1990s is still a fresh and unpleasant memory for many. However, for other librarians who may have graduated from library…

Library schools may be teaching some of the theoretical framework necessary to perform the duties of electronic resource librarianship. However, a gap remains "between practical needs, as expressed in position descriptions, and the theoretical way in which library school courses address those needs." To fill this gap, professional associations…

While mission statements for various libraries and information centers necessarily vary, all librarians face "two very pressing charges: make voluminous numbers of electronic resources as visible as possible in a landscape of multiple access points and simultaneously manage all the technology, tasks, and data necessary to facilitate such…

Electronic resource management (ERM) systems have inundated the library marketplace. Both integrated library systems (ILS) vendors and subscription agents are now offering products and service enhancements that claim to help libraries efficiently manage their electronic resources. Additionally, some homegrown and open-source solutions have emerged…

Librarians engage in some sort of negotiation all the time. Unfortunately, library schools do not uniformly teach negotiation theory or skills. New librarians are left to their own devices to self-educate, and self-educate they must. Most of the library-specific negotiation literature and continuing education opportunities focus almost entirely on…