E-Library Collection Plan
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Leslie J. Savage Library E-Library Collection Plan
9 April 2008
Original Document location
Introduction:
The Leslie J. Savage Library at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado is beginning to systemically organize its online resources, including both free and subscription databases, for use by the College's various user communities. The main purpose of Western State's E-library collection is to provide relevant, easy-accessible, and high-quality electronic resources for use by the academic community. The Western State E-Library's focus is on liberal arts undergraduate education with a broad collection of general and research materials on the subject areas taught by the college.
Undergraduate students are the main focus of Western State College's E-Library collection. Other important groups served by the E-library are faculty and staff at Western State. Finally, community users can use Western's E-Library but access to paid subscriptions is limited to in Library use.
Collection Strategy:
The Western State E-Library will focus on collecting resources supporting the educational mission of the college. The main subject areas for Western E-Library's collection are: Natural Sciences (with an emphasis on basic biology and environmental science), Social Sciences (psychology, economics, anthropology, ans sociology), Fine Arts (music, studio art, communications, and theatre), Humanities (English, French, Spanish, and philosophy), Exercise Sports and Recreation, and Education.
The following resources could be included in Western's E-Library: Meta-sites, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, full-text and citation serials databases, news, primary sources (government documents, digital resources collections), and Western State College's institutional repository. Adding a resource to Western's E-Library will involve multiple individuals in the library. All staff involved in collection development activities and reference will be encouraged to add resources to Western's E-Library. Selecting and evaluating new information resources should be a continuous process with any library staff member being able to recommend or even being able to add links to Western's E-Library's database. A wiki contribution model could be used as a means to contribute to the Western's E-Library.
Collection Organization:
The Western State E-Library resources will be organized using different modalities for use by the library's patrons. The Savage E-Library resources will be organized by subject, by resource type, and by title with all being displayed through the Savage Library website located at http://www.western.edu/lib/. The Savage Library E-Library will support a number of Savage Library services including one-on-one reference interviews, virtual reference including chat and e-mail reference, and bibliographic instruction.
Building the underlying web-accessible database application to support the Western State's E-Library requires additional computing and human resources. With the recent release of Google's App Engine (http://code.google.com/appengine/), this technology is a good candidate to provide a free web-accessible database for use by the E-Library with an added bonus of the new application being usable by other institutions. Another advantage of using Google's AppEngine to host the E-Library is that searching the E-Library's content is simple using Google's search. By developing and then using Google to host the E-Library, the challenges of storing and hosting the application can be shifted from the Savage Library and Western State College to Google's cloud computing environment. While there will still be challenges in maintaining the application, these can be more easily met if application development is shared among other institutions.
While the Savage Library does not have any plans to catalog web sites through the Library's catalog, the Library will look at adding specific websites to the Library's new federated searching service.
Collection Maintenance:
To maintain currency and relevance, Western State's E-Library will periodically undergo evaluation by the electronic resource librarian or other designated employees, including student-workers. Link checking on web-based resources will be performed on a weekly basis with more detailed manual/visual review of the E-Library's resources done at least once a semester by library staff. Depending on the resources available, the E-Library's organization should at least be reviewed once a year by the library's collection development committee. The committee is typically composed of the library director, librarians, and staff. Any softwares upgrades will need to be decided by the library's current priorities and budget constraints.
Users of Western's E-Library should have the option to e-mail comments about the content from the e-library. A wiki component could result in a more social aspect for tracking the suggestions and providing responses from the library. If the feedback will improve the e-library, from suggestions for additional content to improvements in the user interface, then the library will act, otherwise reasons for not implementing a suggestions can be explained through the E-Library's wiki.
