Electronic Access to Resources (EAR) Committee Report

normanbuchwald— Norman Buchwald (Chabot College) Committee Chair  Hello, everyone and hope you have enjoyed your Spring breaks!

The CCL-EAR Committee has actually had quite a busy semester, continuing to work on reviews, have active discussions on databases and technology issues across campuses, and continue to represent all of our constituents.  Since the January meeting, we have been working on at least six reviews, two of which are already published at: https://cclibrarians.org/consortium/reviews 

A comparison review on information literacy tutorials and a Quick Look review on Sage Humanities and Social Sciences Journals.  We are currently working on two comparison reviews:  Test preparation products (Prep Step, Gale Testing and Education Reference Center and Mometrix) and a large video streaming comparison review, which includes Films on Demand, Swank, Kanopy, Ambrose, Intelecom, and NBC Learn.  A regular review on New York Times and a Quick Look preview on Bloomsbury are also in the mix, and by this Fall, a Quick Look review on PressReader.

We had a teleconference meeting on March 6th and have our next teleconference meeting on April 28th.  Three committee members, Brian Greene of the East Central region, Sally Chuah of the West Central Region, and Stephanie Rosenblatt of the Southcoast region will be rotating off and new members Nancy Golz and Yvonne Reed have already been approved by the board to replace Brian and Sally, and a Southcoast region nominee has been forwarded to the Board for approval (who will replace Stephanie).

CCL-EAR alum, Tamara Weintraub is working with both past and present members of CCL-EAR to author an article on our ambitious EBook de-selection project as we became aware that other consortia who have had either present or past shared collections have not pursued much up to this point on a de-selection policy.  The plan is to submit it to a traditional, professional publication such as College and Research Libraries News, once written.

Finally, I am sure you are aware of CCL-EAR’s recommendation last Fall for ADA Compliancy from all of our vendors and how CountyWatch, unfortunately, admitted they could not guarantee they could even strive toward that goal (and as announced at the Dean and Directors meeting, the statewide subscription will cease on December 31st).  For information on how to effectively learn current Web accessibility standards, the committee did follow up with an inquiry to Sean Keegan, Accessibility Consultant of the California Community Colleges Technology Center and he suggested that the best site to learn is from the University of Washington: http://www.washington.edu/accessibility/web/

Sean also wrote an article for the CCL Outlook last November on current ADA Compliancy standards and how to address vendors on this issue at: http://cclccc.org/outlook/2016/11/letter-to-ccl-sean-keegan-accessibility-consultant/