CCL-EAR Chair's Report

By Steve Hunt, CCL-EAR Committee Chair

The CCL Electronic Access and Resources Committee has released new and updated reviews for the following products: Nexis Uni,  Nursing Community College Basic Journal Collection and EZproxy. We hope you find them interesting and helpful in choosing electronic resources. Please read them and share your thoughts on these products in the comments section on our website.

The EAR committee held a joint meeting with its counterparts in SCELC recently.  SCELC is a California group for private colleges that also does consortial purchase of database products like our CCL consortium does.  We also attended the vendor fair held in conjunction with the SCELC annual meeting. There our members had a chance to speak to Proquest and Ebsco staff about our hope that they would work together to share metadata so that users can find resources no matter what discovery service or database product they are using.  Regrettably there does not seem to be much progress in this area.

EAR members also attended interesting presentations from many vendors including Springshare, who are improving their flagship LibGuides product.  We learned that there are license-free, royalty free photos for use on your library or LibGuide pages from Morguefile.com and Unsplash.com and for on-the-fly image editing you can use a site like Webresizer.com to crop, resize, rotate, add borders and do other simple edits.

Aggregated databases are in trouble.  There is a growing trend for publishers to pull their best content out of aggregated products and instead make them available in their own independent database products.  This is happening for journal content as well as streaming video content.  Your consortium will keep fighting to get you the best value products for our students.  On the positive side, more and more journal content is available as open source.  Use of discovery services such as EDS and Primo helps make it easier to find this free content and make it available to our students.

CCL-EAR is looking for librarians!  Serving on the EAR Committee is a great opportunity to help select electronic resources for all California community colleges and to network with your colleagues from across the state.  Please contact CCL President Doug Achterman if you would be interested in serving on this important committee.