- Email: [email protected]
Providing Alumni Access to Electronic Resources
Serials Review 39 (2013) 172–174
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Serials Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/serrev
Providing Alumni Access to Electronic Resources Dianne E. Ford a,⁎, Nancy J. Gibbs b a b
Belk Library, Elon University, 100 Campus Dr, 2550 CB, Elon, NC 27244, USA Duke University, Box 90187 Acquisitions Department, Smith Warehouse, Durham, NC 27708-0187, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Available online 19 August 2013 Keywords: Alumni access Electronic resources
a b s t r a c t University alumni are frequently surprised and dismayed to find that access to online library resources is terminated at graduation. Alumni have been vocal for years about their need for library resources as they move into the working world, and campus alumni offices are frequently eager to provide this service in order to maintain ongoing relationships with alums. Publishers are beginning to include alumni as authorized users in electronic resources contracts with models for free or paid access. Most academic libraries have not begun or are in the early stages of working with alumni offices to provide this service. This article discusses opportunities and challenges of designing and implementing successful alumni access to electronic resources. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction In response to increasing requests, Duke University and Elon University are early implementers of programs offering alumni access to electronic library resources. Duke's program is in place, and Elon's is in development. For the purposes of this article, alumni are defined as graduates from any of the university degree programs. Duke alumni are eligible to access some of the electronic resources to which the Duke University Libraries currently subscribes. This is a small subset of the e-resources authorized users have access to and could in some instances be a smaller subset of a larger product offered to those authorized users. With Project Muse, RefWorks, and Sage offering free alumni access as a standard feature and JSTOR launching paid access for alumni in late 2012 (Duke was part of a pilot in 2009), a critical mass of available resources has made designing an alumni access program worth the needed effort. The opportunities for collaboration and the challenges are many. Duke e-resources for alumni are up and running; Elon is in planning and implementation stages. We hope our experiences and suggestions will be useful to other campuses that are exploring their options within this landscape.
2. Step 1: Building a Team Getting started in designing an alumni access program will require dedicated players from the library, the alumni office, and from Information Technology (IT) departments on and off campus. Let the meetings
⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 13362786584. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (D.E. Ford), [email protected] (N.J. Gibbs). 0098-7913/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2013.07.005
begin! Collaboration will be useful in defining a manageable scale for such a new program.
3. Step 2: Choosing Electronic Resources and Vendors Early decisions will revolve around the list of resources that the campus wishes to offer and sources of funding for those that require additional payment. Feedback from the library and alumni office about which resources have been most requested will help to prioritize choices for the alumni access list. Resources offering free alumni access will, of course, be an easy inclusion, and we applaud publishers who offer this service. It is vital to remember that each institution will approach this project at their own pace and in their own realm, and no two institutions will offer the same resources or accomplish those tasks in the same environment. Some content for alumni can be purchased separately at the time content is purchased for subscribed patrons. It is also possible to add alums to existing or new licenses as these are negotiated on your campus. In all of these cases, adding alumni access needs to be expressed at the time of contracting with vendors so any costs can be separately funded by designated sources of revenue. Challenges for the library will include tracking all contractual changes as well as finding and tracking funding for vendors who charge for alumni access. Additional challenges may arise in expectation management, as many of our resources are not available for alumni access. Knowing your alumni base is especially important if you are considering pointing alums to statewide-funded resources. If many of your alums are within your state borders, offering a link to statewide-funded resources such as NC LIVE certainly makes sense and strengthens your list of alumni e-resources. Duke University is currently offering, or is working with vendors and the alumni office to offer, the following list of e-resources to alumni.
D.E. Ford, N.J. Gibbs / Serials Review 39 (2013) 172–174
Contracting alumni access is free for some of these products, and others are supported by library endowment funds. Details about alumni access and costs can be found at most of these vendor Web sites; pricing negotiations with a customer representative may be necessary. • ALTA Religion Database — https://www.atla.com/products/support/ Pages/Accessfor.aspx. • Business Expert Press ebooks — http://www.businessexpertpress.com/ files/downloads/ Business%20Expert%20Press%20Terms%20&%20Conditions.pdf. • EBSCO Academic Search Alumni Edition — http://www.ebscohost.com/ academic/academic-search-alumni-edition. • JSTOR — http://about.jstor.org/service/access-alumni. • ProQuest ABI/Inform Complete Alumni edition — http://www.proquest. com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/abi_inform_complete.shtml. • RefWorks — http://www.refworks.com/content/products/alumni/ content.asp. • University Press Scholarship Online — http://www. universitypressscholarship.com/. • ProjectMuse — http://muse.jhu.edu/about/order/license_review.html. • Sage/CQ content — http://www.sagepub.com/press/2012/november/ SAGE_newlicenseenablesaccessscholarshipUniversityalumni.sp. • Adam Matthew content — http://www.amdigital.co.uk/librariansresources/welcome/.
4. Step 3: Choosing a Home for the Alumni Access Web Page A critical decision is where the alumni access page will be housed and managed, either within the alumni office or the library. Frequently, the campus alumni office is eager to provide this requested service to alums. The process of setting up and maintaining log-in information builds bridges with alumni, and their ongoing use of online library resources keeps alums well-connected with their campus. As discussions begin about offering alumni access to e-resources, important questions for the alumni office include: o Is this a service they want to offer? o Are there available funds to support funding of paid resources? Could costs be shared across several constituencies? o Is the alumni office responsible for its own web site, authentication schema, registration of alums, etc., or is this service contracted out to a third party? If the later is the case, who has the final say on decisions? o Who will offer support for alums that have problems accessing the resources? o Who is responsible for the design of the site? Where/How will the resources be displayed? What can be included in that display? How extensive are the summaries for the databases that are offered? o What is the expectation of time involved and what is the “Go Live” date? o Who is responsible for marketing this new service to alums and how will that occur? Will the library be involved in that initiative? o Will there be links from the library's home pages to the alumni portal? o What instructions are need to be included on the portal for accessing services? o Is there a dedicated person assigned to this project that the library can work with going forward? o Are usage statistics important to either group? o What evaluation techniques will be used for those products that are paid for? Who will do that evaluation and make final decisions? o How does the library staff work with alums to resolve access issues? o If the alumni access page is hosted by the alumni office, will that office have a designated contact person who understands the electronic resource access program and who can troubleshoot access problems?
173
Once all of these questions have been answered, the actual work begins of getting the resources contained within the alumni portal, listing them appropriately, and testing access. Marketing of this service to alums can then begin. All parts of this project are time consuming, may involve many more persons than usually are involved in bringing new resources to currently enrolled patrons, and can be very frustrating if you are dealing with a third party vendor who is not familiar with what it is you are trying to provide to your alums. Using a team approach helps, building on the expertise of representatives from groups within the library that are already familiar with many of these issues. Patience is certainly a needed virtue with this venture, but the outcomes can be enormous and can reap benefits for both the library and the alumni office. Regardless of its home base, some time and effort must go into building an attractive alumni access page. Here is an effective page that details online databases available to alumni and donors at Duke University: http://library.duke.edu/services/alumni_donors.html. 5. Step 4: Resolving Authentication Issues Authentication issues will vary from campus to campus, but often prove to be the most hair-pulling challenge. Do alumni retain a campus log-in, or will a new system for log-in be needed? Will username/passwords be generated by the alumni office using existing alumni ID numbers? Is off-campus access typically provided through a VPN, where all resources are either ‘on’ or ‘off’? Shibboleth, which is compatible with JSTOR and Muse, allows categories of users to be defined and is often the best bet for access control. But different resources may be authenticated in various ways on other campuses, and designing access for a small category of users may test the patience of the best IT staff. 6. Step 5: The Roll-Out Marketing of your new alumni resources is a MUST and needs to involve both the libraries and the alumni offices. Any mailings that go to alumni need to point out this new service, and the message probably needs to be repeated a few times during the first few months to entice alums to give e-resources a try. Any library publication that goes to friends and alumni also needs to feature articles on the new services being offered to alums and again probably needs to be repeated a few times over the course of the first six months. Public service and e-resources staff within the library need to know details of the alumni access program, and they need to know how to report problems when alumni contact the library asking for resolution of access issues. You know they'll contact the library before they contact the alumni office! If you have a reporting form, can it be used for these resources too? Is the form available to alums or are staff taking service calls over the Web and phone? If your alumni portal is serviced by a third party provider, immediate resolution of access issues could be problematic. It is best to assure alumni that they will be notified when problems are corrected, but they also need to know a probable time line. And, of course, for anyone reporting problems with alumni access, the contact person at the alumni office needs to be easy to determine. Is it the original person you dealt with as you set up the service, is it someone in the IT department, or is it someone at a third party office that maintains the portal? Knowing this and the correct procedures for reporting issues is essential to making alumni access to e-resources successful. 7. Step 6: Tracking Usage Almost all vendors provide usage stats for alumni separately from other authorized users. The process of separating that usage data between subscribed patrons and alumni patrons can be a challenge. Most often, the library staff will harvest usage data for alumni as they
174
D.E. Ford, N.J. Gibbs / Serials Review 39 (2013) 172–174
collect regular data and will provide and interpret usage data to the alumni office. The level of detail desired by the library may be more extensive than that needed by the alumni office. In many instances the alumni office is only interested in knowing that the resources are accessed by x number of users, whereas the library wants to know how much usage there has been and during what time periods. Detailed usage stats can also support additional funding requests from the library to the alumni office to support alumni e-resources. 8. Step 7: Moving Ahead As electronic resource contracts are negotiated in the future, an increasing number of libraries are considering adding alumni to their list
of authorized users. Knowing disciplines of interest for your alumni is a good way to talk with content providers at the time of renewals to determine if your library can afford to offer access to new alumni resources. In some instances, professional organizations offer reducedprice or no-cost access to schools that offer degrees in a specific field; this is how many institutions with a divinity school can offer the ATLA database to its alums. It never hurts to ask! As we build our stable of e-resources for alumni, continued marketing of new resources will be required. In addition, our experience and success with offering offcampus access for our usual authorized users will equip us well in working with a new alumni patron group. Please contact the authors if further information would be helpful: Nancy Gibbs [email protected] or Dianne Ford [email protected].
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Serials Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/serrev
Providing Alumni Access to Electronic Resources Dianne E. Ford a,⁎, Nancy J. Gibbs b a b
Belk Library, Elon University, 100 Campus Dr, 2550 CB, Elon, NC 27244, USA Duke University, Box 90187 Acquisitions Department, Smith Warehouse, Durham, NC 27708-0187, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Available online 19 August 2013 Keywords: Alumni access Electronic resources
a b s t r a c t University alumni are frequently surprised and dismayed to find that access to online library resources is terminated at graduation. Alumni have been vocal for years about their need for library resources as they move into the working world, and campus alumni offices are frequently eager to provide this service in order to maintain ongoing relationships with alums. Publishers are beginning to include alumni as authorized users in electronic resources contracts with models for free or paid access. Most academic libraries have not begun or are in the early stages of working with alumni offices to provide this service. This article discusses opportunities and challenges of designing and implementing successful alumni access to electronic resources. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction In response to increasing requests, Duke University and Elon University are early implementers of programs offering alumni access to electronic library resources. Duke's program is in place, and Elon's is in development. For the purposes of this article, alumni are defined as graduates from any of the university degree programs. Duke alumni are eligible to access some of the electronic resources to which the Duke University Libraries currently subscribes. This is a small subset of the e-resources authorized users have access to and could in some instances be a smaller subset of a larger product offered to those authorized users. With Project Muse, RefWorks, and Sage offering free alumni access as a standard feature and JSTOR launching paid access for alumni in late 2012 (Duke was part of a pilot in 2009), a critical mass of available resources has made designing an alumni access program worth the needed effort. The opportunities for collaboration and the challenges are many. Duke e-resources for alumni are up and running; Elon is in planning and implementation stages. We hope our experiences and suggestions will be useful to other campuses that are exploring their options within this landscape.
2. Step 1: Building a Team Getting started in designing an alumni access program will require dedicated players from the library, the alumni office, and from Information Technology (IT) departments on and off campus. Let the meetings
⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 13362786584. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (D.E. Ford), [email protected] (N.J. Gibbs). 0098-7913/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2013.07.005
begin! Collaboration will be useful in defining a manageable scale for such a new program.
3. Step 2: Choosing Electronic Resources and Vendors Early decisions will revolve around the list of resources that the campus wishes to offer and sources of funding for those that require additional payment. Feedback from the library and alumni office about which resources have been most requested will help to prioritize choices for the alumni access list. Resources offering free alumni access will, of course, be an easy inclusion, and we applaud publishers who offer this service. It is vital to remember that each institution will approach this project at their own pace and in their own realm, and no two institutions will offer the same resources or accomplish those tasks in the same environment. Some content for alumni can be purchased separately at the time content is purchased for subscribed patrons. It is also possible to add alums to existing or new licenses as these are negotiated on your campus. In all of these cases, adding alumni access needs to be expressed at the time of contracting with vendors so any costs can be separately funded by designated sources of revenue. Challenges for the library will include tracking all contractual changes as well as finding and tracking funding for vendors who charge for alumni access. Additional challenges may arise in expectation management, as many of our resources are not available for alumni access. Knowing your alumni base is especially important if you are considering pointing alums to statewide-funded resources. If many of your alums are within your state borders, offering a link to statewide-funded resources such as NC LIVE certainly makes sense and strengthens your list of alumni e-resources. Duke University is currently offering, or is working with vendors and the alumni office to offer, the following list of e-resources to alumni.
D.E. Ford, N.J. Gibbs / Serials Review 39 (2013) 172–174
Contracting alumni access is free for some of these products, and others are supported by library endowment funds. Details about alumni access and costs can be found at most of these vendor Web sites; pricing negotiations with a customer representative may be necessary. • ALTA Religion Database — https://www.atla.com/products/support/ Pages/Accessfor.aspx. • Business Expert Press ebooks — http://www.businessexpertpress.com/ files/downloads/ Business%20Expert%20Press%20Terms%20&%20Conditions.pdf. • EBSCO Academic Search Alumni Edition — http://www.ebscohost.com/ academic/academic-search-alumni-edition. • JSTOR — http://about.jstor.org/service/access-alumni. • ProQuest ABI/Inform Complete Alumni edition — http://www.proquest. com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/abi_inform_complete.shtml. • RefWorks — http://www.refworks.com/content/products/alumni/ content.asp. • University Press Scholarship Online — http://www. universitypressscholarship.com/. • ProjectMuse — http://muse.jhu.edu/about/order/license_review.html. • Sage/CQ content — http://www.sagepub.com/press/2012/november/ SAGE_newlicenseenablesaccessscholarshipUniversityalumni.sp. • Adam Matthew content — http://www.amdigital.co.uk/librariansresources/welcome/.
4. Step 3: Choosing a Home for the Alumni Access Web Page A critical decision is where the alumni access page will be housed and managed, either within the alumni office or the library. Frequently, the campus alumni office is eager to provide this requested service to alums. The process of setting up and maintaining log-in information builds bridges with alumni, and their ongoing use of online library resources keeps alums well-connected with their campus. As discussions begin about offering alumni access to e-resources, important questions for the alumni office include: o Is this a service they want to offer? o Are there available funds to support funding of paid resources? Could costs be shared across several constituencies? o Is the alumni office responsible for its own web site, authentication schema, registration of alums, etc., or is this service contracted out to a third party? If the later is the case, who has the final say on decisions? o Who will offer support for alums that have problems accessing the resources? o Who is responsible for the design of the site? Where/How will the resources be displayed? What can be included in that display? How extensive are the summaries for the databases that are offered? o What is the expectation of time involved and what is the “Go Live” date? o Who is responsible for marketing this new service to alums and how will that occur? Will the library be involved in that initiative? o Will there be links from the library's home pages to the alumni portal? o What instructions are need to be included on the portal for accessing services? o Is there a dedicated person assigned to this project that the library can work with going forward? o Are usage statistics important to either group? o What evaluation techniques will be used for those products that are paid for? Who will do that evaluation and make final decisions? o How does the library staff work with alums to resolve access issues? o If the alumni access page is hosted by the alumni office, will that office have a designated contact person who understands the electronic resource access program and who can troubleshoot access problems?
173
Once all of these questions have been answered, the actual work begins of getting the resources contained within the alumni portal, listing them appropriately, and testing access. Marketing of this service to alums can then begin. All parts of this project are time consuming, may involve many more persons than usually are involved in bringing new resources to currently enrolled patrons, and can be very frustrating if you are dealing with a third party vendor who is not familiar with what it is you are trying to provide to your alums. Using a team approach helps, building on the expertise of representatives from groups within the library that are already familiar with many of these issues. Patience is certainly a needed virtue with this venture, but the outcomes can be enormous and can reap benefits for both the library and the alumni office. Regardless of its home base, some time and effort must go into building an attractive alumni access page. Here is an effective page that details online databases available to alumni and donors at Duke University: http://library.duke.edu/services/alumni_donors.html. 5. Step 4: Resolving Authentication Issues Authentication issues will vary from campus to campus, but often prove to be the most hair-pulling challenge. Do alumni retain a campus log-in, or will a new system for log-in be needed? Will username/passwords be generated by the alumni office using existing alumni ID numbers? Is off-campus access typically provided through a VPN, where all resources are either ‘on’ or ‘off’? Shibboleth, which is compatible with JSTOR and Muse, allows categories of users to be defined and is often the best bet for access control. But different resources may be authenticated in various ways on other campuses, and designing access for a small category of users may test the patience of the best IT staff. 6. Step 5: The Roll-Out Marketing of your new alumni resources is a MUST and needs to involve both the libraries and the alumni offices. Any mailings that go to alumni need to point out this new service, and the message probably needs to be repeated a few times during the first few months to entice alums to give e-resources a try. Any library publication that goes to friends and alumni also needs to feature articles on the new services being offered to alums and again probably needs to be repeated a few times over the course of the first six months. Public service and e-resources staff within the library need to know details of the alumni access program, and they need to know how to report problems when alumni contact the library asking for resolution of access issues. You know they'll contact the library before they contact the alumni office! If you have a reporting form, can it be used for these resources too? Is the form available to alums or are staff taking service calls over the Web and phone? If your alumni portal is serviced by a third party provider, immediate resolution of access issues could be problematic. It is best to assure alumni that they will be notified when problems are corrected, but they also need to know a probable time line. And, of course, for anyone reporting problems with alumni access, the contact person at the alumni office needs to be easy to determine. Is it the original person you dealt with as you set up the service, is it someone in the IT department, or is it someone at a third party office that maintains the portal? Knowing this and the correct procedures for reporting issues is essential to making alumni access to e-resources successful. 7. Step 6: Tracking Usage Almost all vendors provide usage stats for alumni separately from other authorized users. The process of separating that usage data between subscribed patrons and alumni patrons can be a challenge. Most often, the library staff will harvest usage data for alumni as they
174
D.E. Ford, N.J. Gibbs / Serials Review 39 (2013) 172–174
collect regular data and will provide and interpret usage data to the alumni office. The level of detail desired by the library may be more extensive than that needed by the alumni office. In many instances the alumni office is only interested in knowing that the resources are accessed by x number of users, whereas the library wants to know how much usage there has been and during what time periods. Detailed usage stats can also support additional funding requests from the library to the alumni office to support alumni e-resources. 8. Step 7: Moving Ahead As electronic resource contracts are negotiated in the future, an increasing number of libraries are considering adding alumni to their list
of authorized users. Knowing disciplines of interest for your alumni is a good way to talk with content providers at the time of renewals to determine if your library can afford to offer access to new alumni resources. In some instances, professional organizations offer reducedprice or no-cost access to schools that offer degrees in a specific field; this is how many institutions with a divinity school can offer the ATLA database to its alums. It never hurts to ask! As we build our stable of e-resources for alumni, continued marketing of new resources will be required. In addition, our experience and success with offering offcampus access for our usual authorized users will equip us well in working with a new alumni patron group. Please contact the authors if further information would be helpful: Nancy Gibbs [email protected] or Dianne Ford [email protected].