Selection and Presentation of Commercially Available Electronic Resources: Issues and Practices.

This report focuses on practices related to the selection and presentation of commercially available electronic resources. As part of the Digital Library Federation's Collection Practices Initiative, the report also shares the goal of identifying and propagating practices that support the growth of sustainable and scalable collections. It looks in depth at how a number of leading research libraries select, license, present, and support the use of commercial online materials. Uncovering a variety of practices, the author is careful to identify those that converge and illuminate the most effective means for integrating commercial online materials into library collections. The main body of the report discusses 10 issues and practices related to selection and presentation. The first issue is the economic context of electronic resource selection. Discussion of this topic focuses on the two most visible means libraries have developed for dealing with the pricing of electronic resources: consortial purchasing and alternative scholarly communication initiatives. The next two sections cover selection policies and strategic plans, and organizational matters. The remaining sections deal more directly with operational questions and are organized roughly in a "resource life cycle" sequence. The discussion starts with initial selection issues and proceeds through ordering and purchasing, establishing and organizing access, providing support, and evaluating and assessing how information is used. The report concludes with a discussion of some local databases and systems devised to support or help rationalize the treatment of electronic resources. The most promising selection and presentation practices are assembled and briefly discussed in the concluding section. Many local practice documents and related Web links are cited throughout the report; these references, as well as additional relevant documents and Web links, are organized into a table in Appendix A. Appendix B provides a table of function and data elements for managing electronic resources. (Contains 130 references.) (AEF)