The UK Serials Group (UKSG) recently published new chapters of The E-Resources Management Handbook, its open access guide to the issues and challenges facing those in the information community. Two of the new chapters follow the book's original formula by providing analyses of specific areas of e-resource management.
Louise Cole, Senior Information Advisor (Collections) at Kingston University gives up-to-date guidance for UK librarians relating to copyright in the digital age. Her chapter covers licences, digital rights management, sharing and adapting content, multimedia and open access. Jo Cross, Market Research Manager at Taylor & Francis, provides an introduction to impact factors that explains how they are calculated and what variables need to be considered when evaluating them. An additional five new chapters take the form of interviews with thought leaders from the information community.
The interviews are designed to summarise the current state of scholarly communications while providing a broad range of insights into what the future may hold, from professionals with differing perspectives and comprehensive experience. They provide a milestone in the handbook's evolution, and a benchmark against which future developments in e-resource management can be measured. The E-Resources Management Handbook now incorporates 21 chapters covering licensing, statistics, archiving, resource discovery, marketing and ERM systems among many other topics.
As a "living" e-book, chapters are reviewed periodically and updated when necessary - but they are never removed, even when superceded, so that the book is an evolving record of the state of the field. Planned updates for 2009 include chapters on peer review, repositories, e-learning and the semantic web.
