UW worked with Cornell for a few years serving users on both campuses, until they both joined the national program. Now virtual reference is marketed on all subject web pages. UW is assigned 10 hours a day for the national virtual reference work and UW users get help 24/7. QuestionPoint has Chinese interface now, but can not handle multi-language?
Day: July 29, 2008
FTE/Head Count
UW has 42,000, but for Chinese e-resources, Size, nature of programs should be the right model. Concurrent User is another one, and may save some money, but not good for course reserves. Tiers, Carnegie classification, works for resources on broad subjects such as JStore and Mute. Budget or Resource Budget and Custom quote are other models.
Bundling and big deals like Elsevier was developed with publisher goals as build market share and decrease transaction costs. What we want to do is to limit price increases, add content and retain flexibility. Platform examples: Ebrary, EBL may not give perpetual access. Serial Solutions has moved into ebook management. For consortial buying, all libraries should do better through group, and libraries don’t subsidize others.Case Studies:
Korean Studies librarians from Korean Collections Consortium of North America is flexible. But people here think the vendor set the price too high. What prospects for consortial buying of China Studies resources? Tim advises us to be patient, since it’s a time consuming work.
Very impressive! Taiwan U’s 淡新档案，National History Museum’s art works can be searched by image (content-based retrieval). Prof. Chen used searching butterflies as an example. National Repository of Cultural Heritage has tons of old photos, ancient contracts and multi-media resources.
Yunshan was telling me how difficult to find anything like this from the Mainland, such as modern dance, which reminds me about the request for paintings sold recently by auction. Chinese government protects the competition among digital content providers for profit making, not encouraging cultural heritage preservation and digitaization, lacks of high quality and free digital projects for its 1.3 billion people and the rest of the world. Taiwan’s success, I think, is because of its wide social application and open attitude.
Mr. Wang and Ma followed up my question. Prof. Chen said that she didn’t care about money at all, and is happy to see those projects, if not growing, still exist. Library school students no longer care about traditional operation, but keen on working for .com companies or digital projects. She only picked graduate school students who are innovative or creative. Huayi, Hanzhen and Bokelai are all commercial providers. The challenge is how to balance between OpenAccess and commercialization. Taiwan spent 5 billion purchasing overseas, but not selling its knowledge and publications out. Taiwan has about 20,000 ebooks ready by the end of this year.