EAR Committee -- Darryl Swarm
On April 30 and May 1, 2015 the CCL-EAR Committee met in Oakland, California for their Spring 2015 in-person meeting. April Cunningham from Palomar College joined us as a new member representing the San Diego region. Former CCL-EAR member Shelley Blackman from Evergreen Valley College also joined us as a guest on Friday and thoughtfully offered her help on several upcoming reviews. We would like to congratulate our consortium director, Sarah Raley on her upcoming retirement after many years of service. She sends a special thank you to Daniel Keily from Diablo Valley and Tamara Weintraub from Palomar College for contributing six productive years of generous service to the CCL EAR committee. They have participated in the fun and games of evaluating offerings and answering questions posed to the committee by CCC librarians. CCL thanks them for their commitment to the Consortium and for their hard work. In the transition, we welcome Ann Buchalter of Laney College representing San Francisco/East Bay, and April Cunningham of Palomar College representing the San Diego region. Nancy Golz of Merced College will also be an important part of our team while our East Central representative is sabbatical.
During our most recent meeting, the group spent considerable time on the e-book deselection project, going over contested titles one-by-one to generate the final list of titles for weeding. The process centered on the original deselection criteria and also involved examining e-book content on individual titles as needed. The group identified 143 titles to remain in the collection.
Part of the meeting also entailed a workshop where teams gathered information on several prospective products and reported back to the group for consideration. Our ambitious members will be working hard on a number of upcoming projects and reviews/previews. One team will start a preview comparison of Mango Languages and EBSCO Rosetta. Another group will look at Swank Digital Campus. A third group will start looking at discovery products and will be sending out a survey to help determine which products will be included in a comparison study.
Reviews for Salem Press, Oxford Art Online and Oxford Music Online are now posted on the CCL-EAR website (https://cclibrarians.org/consortium/reviews). Reviews currently in progress include LexisNexis Academic and OED Online. The OED Online review is essentially completed and will appear on the CCL-EAR website soon, while the LexisNexis review will likely be completed sometime mid-summer 2015. Reviews by the committee are available at https://cclibrarians.org/consortium/reviews and we would love to have you take a look at them. Many of our recent reviews feature an interactive component where you can post comments, feedback, and share your experiences with the database. Also, please send suggestions for any electronic databases you would like the CCL-EAR Committee to consider to Darryl Swarm (dswarm@frc.edu) or to your regional representative (CCL-EAR Committee Roster) https://cclibrarians.org/committees/electronic-access-and-resources-committee#members. If you would like to attend any of our virtual or in-person meetings as a guest, please contact me, Darryl Swarm (dswarm@frc.edu), and I will forward you the details.