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Formed as a result of the University Library's reorganization, the new Electronic Resources and Collection Analysis (ERaCA) Department will support online collection building, acquiring and managing access to online content, and providing collection and budget analysis for assessment of the impact of collections in support of university academic programs, their place in consortial efforts, and library administrative needs.
The mission of ERaCA is to acquire and license online resources as selected by the subject specialists for the collections. ERaCA staff establishes and maintains seamless access to online content. ERaCA initiates and fulfills requests for collection analysis and supports collection budget management. With these three broad goals of the mission, there are countless tasks to achieve them. Acquisitions of electronic resources commingles ordering, often licensing of the content, building lists of titles already subscribed to for a single publisher, and getting the publisher paid for uninterrupted ongoing access. Managing access to content involves setting up the initial link, taking care of broken links, tracking down rights to content in backfiles, as well as titles sold from one publisher to another, or just migrated from one delivery platform to another, access through article linking and federated search software, and some cataloging work. Collection analysis and planning evaluates collections from many viewpoints and is built on drilling into data that helps describe the Library’s collections and the use of them. This analysis will be done for more than electronic resources. Similarly, collection budget management support interfaces with collection analysis and will be for all of the collections. Collection analysis will aid subject specialists with evaluation of and decision-making on existing collections and those under consideration for acquisition.
ERaCA Department Staff Directory
Electronic Resources and Collection Analysis Department
Northwestern University Library
1970 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
jblosser@northwestern.edu
phone
(847) 491-2933, fax (847) 491-4345
