Northwest Accreditation Standard 5: Electronic Resource Collection
As students and faculty become increasingly reliant upon the online environment to produce and communicate scholarship, the maintenance of the electronic collection underlying the research apparatus of the university is ever more vital. The Merrill-Cazier Library supports electronic resources covering every area of the university’s curriculum. While many of our resources are locally licensed, the Library also participates in major consortia database offerings from the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), the Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC), and the Utah Pioneer statewide online library in order to leverage scarce resources. We provide access to over 27,500 licensed and 3,290 open access e-journal titles; 189 licensed and 53 open access electronic reference sources; and 175,300 electronic books.1
Access to all electronic resources is made available via the Library’s web page. Electronic reference and full text packages (including e-journal portals and e-books) are grouped alphabetically, by broad subject, and by genre.2 This page is generated from a locally developed database. All e-journals to which we have access are tracked in a third-party vendor’s database system, which produces A-Z, publisher, and subject lists of e-journals.3 The same third-party database also tracks coverage information for specific journal titles and produces OpenURL links in our citation databases, promoting electronic access to full text whenever it is available.4
As of this writing, we do not have records for the vast majority of our electronic resources in the Library’s online catalog. However, we are working on a project that would allow us to export brief MARC records for all electronic journals from our Electronic Resource Management System (ERMS) into the catalog. We are hoping to be able to accomplish this during spring 2007.
The Merrill-Cazier Library serves the entire USU community and has a mandate for openness, accessibility, and service to the people of the state of Utah. Accordingly, the Library makes every attempt to negotiate electronic resource licenses that permit both remote access to current USU faculty, students, and staff and onsite access by visitors. With only one or two exceptions, all resources available to the on-campus community are also available to the distance community. Students and faculty who are remote from the Logan campus can authenticate as authorized users by means of either the university’s proxy server or a VPN client. Both of these services are maintained outside of the Library by the Office of Network and Computing Services.
More Information About the Electronic Collections.
1Numbers as reported to ACRL for FY2006 and available with further explanation at: http://library.usu.edu/elecres/nerhome/reports/acrlfy2006.php.
2See http://library.usu.edu/main/inabs/index.php for complete lists of e-resources (excluding e-journals).
3See http://xz6kg9rb2j.search.serialssolutions.com for complete lists of e-journals.
4More information on the OpenURL resolver is available at http://library.usu.edu/elecres/nerhome/resolver/resolver.php.