Acquisition and Control of Electronic Legal Resources in the 21st Century

Jean M. Pajerek
Cornell Law Library
jmp8@cornell.edu

Like many libraries today, the Edward Bennett Williams Library at Georgetown University Law Center was confronted with the challenge of adding more electronic resources to its collection. Kristina Kuhlmann and Janice Snyder Anderson, both of Georgetown, presented a well-attended program at the AALL conference in Philadelphia that described how the staff at Georgetown met this challenge successfully.

Ms. Kuhlmann, who is the acquisitions librarian at Georgetown, presented the first part of the program, which focused on the practicalities of selecting and acquiring electronic resources. The staff at Georgetown discovered that the procedures they used for acquiring paper titles had to be modified to accommodate the acquisition of electronic resources. It is very important, Ms. Kuhlmann stated, to have one person whose job is to coordinate the entire process of selecting and acquiring electronic resources, ensuring communication and cooperation among the parties involved.

In selecting electronic resources, Ms. Kuhlmann advises learning as much as possible about a resource from advertisements, reviews in the literature, and from peer libraries that already use the resource. A pre-purchase try-out period (typically 30 days) is another valuable way to glean important information, enabling librarians and users to evaluate a resource’s content, quality, user interface, and appropriateness for the library’s collection. Other factors to consider in the selection process include the format of the resource (i.e., CD-ROM vs. networked or Web-based resource), security (IP restrictions vs. user name and password), access (what is the number of simultaneous users; is off-campus access possible?), pricing structure, and add-ons (is there a paper or e-mail service that comes with the electronic resource?). [...continued]