Electronic Access To Resources CCL-EAR Committee Report -- Norman Buchwald
New Year, New Members of the Committee
Greetings! I am Norman Buchwald, Information Literacy and Technology Librarian from Chabot College, and new Chair of the CCL-EAR Committee. I have served as the East Bay/San Francisco Representative on this committee from 2003-2009 and this last year as Chair Elect and now I have officially stepped in as Chair.
In addition, I am proud to say for the first time in quite a while, the committee has a full slate of current, active representatives. New to the committee this year are Shelley Blackman, another CCL-EAR Veteran from Evergreen College (Vice Chair/Chair Elect), Jeff Karlsen from Sacramento City College (Northwest Region Rep.), Julian Prentice from City College of San Francisco (East Bay/San Francisco Rep.), Stephanie Rosenblatt from Cerritos College (South Coast Rep.) and Lauren Saslow from Los Angeles Pierce College (Los Angeles Rep.).
Also new for this year will be the style of our reviews as we make our eye for Charleston Advisor-like detail be more readable for your busy schedules, more effort for review teams to work on and writer reviews more interactively, and write more previews on new products that are coming down the pike. We have also updated our vendor questionnaire and were delighted to get 100% responses from vendors for our currently planned upcoming reviews!
Accomplishments
Last May and June, the review team published three new reviews: a comprehensive review on JSTOR, our first review using our new style on CountryWatch, and the important comparison review that reveals our year-long exhaustive hard work on Discovery Systems. These reviews should be found at: http://www.cclibraries.org/reviews/ Please take note that the Discovery Systems review team opted to not provide ratings or recommend one product over another but instead give what we believe is a fair review with deep scrutiny.
The Committee said goodbye to our hard working members who were termed out and/or had to rotate off: Darryl Swarm, past Chair, Elizabeth Horan, Southcoast Rep., and Rochelle Perez, Northwest Rep. They worked very hard on key projects and provided lots of innovative feedback and I want all to give them a round of applause for their hard work and service.
Upcoming
The next CCL-EAR meeting will take place Thursday, September 15 and Friday, September 16 in Oakland. If you would like to attend as a guest, please contact Norman Buchwald (nbuchwald@chabotcollege.edu) or James Wiser (jwiser@ccleague.org) on attending. Guests slated to present before the committee include Sean Keegan from CCC Accessibility and Franny Lee and Tish Wagner from ProQuest/SIPX (Thursday) and Walter Bremer and Maggie Wligora from Cengage/Gale (Friday). Reviews being planned to be written this Fall include: Comparison Review of Library Tutorials Subscriptions (ProQuest Research Companion, Credo Infolit Modules, Searchpath), a comprehensive review on SIPX and previews on three new consortium offers (ACLS Humanities eBooks, APA Style Central and Rittenhouse). Swank Digital Campus has been postponed due to interface change but a preview on this product should come soon.
New Web Home for EAR
In May the CCL-EXEC board decided to consolidate the official records of the CCL EAR Committee with the primary location of the organizations’ records at http://www.cclccc.org/. As of this week you will find our committee contact information, minutes, meetings calendar, and more at the CCLCCC website. Access to the minutes will continue to use the same username and password as in the past. One item soon to return is our Master Index of vendors we discuss at all of our meetings. The CC Library Consortium website at http://www.cclibraries.org will retain all our reviews for important and essential reading paired with vendor offers from at the consortium website.
Other Tidbits
The CCL-EAR Committee is currently establishing Universal Accessibility Checkers for determining accessibility and Section 508 compliancy in all our future reviews. Last May, the Committee decided on WAVE and AC Checker but we may revise this decision with what OEI and other state-wide community college groups have concluded.
As Chair Elect, I did investigate trends in E-books which unfortunately are grim. The quality and appropriateness of resources in the EBSCO and Proquest/Ebrary subscriptions appears to have gone down in the past couple of years, most notably the major pull from the ABC-CLIO publisher from the EBSCO product and ProQuest’s questionable addition of already seriously dated Kluwer/Lippincott titles in their product, and in general the inclusion and addition of questionable open access publishers such as Nova Science that appear in both vendors’ numerous products. In addition, in this issue of Outlook, please read my article updating Gale’s questionable practice of selling E-books that have “suppressed text” particularly from the Greenhaven imprint and For Students series. Also please read the long awaited response from the Gale vendor to both of my articles to get more perspective.
Finally, EBSCO removed the Ebooks that our committee and other participating California Community College librarians slated to be weeded (due to dated content) from the shared ten NetLibrary Ebook collections California Community Colleges perpetually own. EBSCO removed the titles at the end of May, 2016, at a time where there was least disruption.