CCL-EAR Committee Chair Report
By Nancy Golz, CCL-EAR Committee Chair
CCL-EAR Wednesday Webinar
Greetings form the CCL-EAR committee! We hope that you were able to participate in the recent Wednesday Webinar where the CCL-EAR committee presented about the ongoing work of CCL-EAR committee reviewing databases with a California community college lens. As a standing committee of the Council of Chief Librarians, our charge is to review cooperative ventures for electronic information resources and databases. We are committed to doing this work with equity considerations in mind. Our reviews consider the content available on a platform, as well as accessibility, equity statements, representation among content area experts, and vendor responses to CCL values and concerns with respect to equity. The committee can bring DEIA issues to the attention of the vendors and our colleagues and advocate for increased representation of historically-underrepresented groups. Our in-depth reviews also review cost/affordability, usability, support, interoperability, privacy, and usage tracking. In case you missed the webinar, the recording is now available.
New Review: O'Reilly for Higher Education
The CCL-EAR committee has a new Quick Look review ready for you. The O’Reilly for Higher Education platform (formerly known as the Safari Tech Book Online) contains over 55,000 items including 45,000 eBooks, videos, and audiobooks. This database is included in the ProQuest offerings from the Community College League of California consortium. Topics include programming, data science, security, business, and design. The content is made available from O’Reilly Media Inc., and includes content from many publishers including Josey-Bass, Packt and the For Dummies series of e-books. We found that this database is significantly more expensive than other eBooks subscriptions, and similar in price to some streaming media subscriptions. You can read the full O’Reilly for Higher Education review on the CCL-EAR website under reviews.
Continuing Weeding Process of the Shared NetLibrary E-book Collection
CCL-EAR has a continued commitment to ensuring that the shared NetLibrary E-book collection contains materials that are still relevant and useful. The committee has been piloting a new process for reviewing and weeding the shared NetLibrary collection. This process allows us to consider titles for removal on a more frequent basis from the shared collection. The good news is that Pawel Szponar, our network zone manager, is able to delete outdated titles at the network level, and then communicate directly with EBSCO to have them removed from the EBSCO database.
A common reason for suggesting that an e-book be weeded from the collection might be if the book contains outdated information or terminology. The form to suggest a title for deletion is located on the CCL-EAR website.
Requests may be submitted at any time, and the CCL-EAR will review the suggested deletions at their regularly scheduled meetings. In order to give the CCL-EAR committee members time to review suggestions, only titles received two weeks prior to the scheduled meeting will be considered at that meeting. If you have titles that you like to suggest for weeding, we would ask that you submit them before April 15, 2024. Before any titles are deleted from the shared collection, the CCL-EAR chair will send out a list of the titles through the CCL listserv to allow member libraries the chance to review and appeal any specific titles that they think should be kept in the shared collection.
If you have any suggestions for books that should be considered for deselection from the shared collection of over 27,000 titles, we invite you to submit them through a brief form. Thank you helping us to keep our shared e-book collection current and useful!
As always, please let me know if you have databases that you would like CCL-EAR to review.
Dr. Nancy Golz
CCL-EAR, Chair
Faculty Librarian
Merced College
nancy.golz@mccd.edu