EAR Committee Report

REPORT: ELECTRONIC ACCESS TO RESOURCES (CCL-EAR) COMMITTEE
Darryl Swarm (Feather River College): Committee Chair

The CCL-EAR Committee held their first meeting of the new academic year on September 11, 2015. This meeting took place virtually in teleconference format. We welcomed our newly-designated chair elect, Norman Buchwald, to our group and also enjoyed working with our witty new consortium director, James Wiser. One of our new members, April Cunningham from Palomar College, joined in on the meeting as our new member from Palomar College representing the San Diego region. Our group initially discussed progress on the eBook deselection project. We would like to remind everyone that the deselected materials will be deactivated by EBSCO by the end of December, 2015, so if any of the participating libraries have these records active in their respective library catalogs, the links will eventually not present the related eBook content to your patrons in their search process. Fortunately, this may lead your patron to seek reference consultation and potentially open up a world of more relevant materials for their use. In any event, this serves as a reminder to please remove those records from your catalog as appropriate. There may or may not be an easy way for you to do this, so it would be advisable to look into possibilities now if you have not done so already. We have received generous thanks and accolades for the deselection team on the tremendous effort that was invested in completing this project. It was a concerted effort from a team of highly qualified professional peer librarians volunteering their time and energy to this important project. CCLEAR committee teams are ambitious with a remarkable workload and eagerly working on reviews and previews for LexisNexis, Mango Languages, Medcom RN, Swank Digital, JSGTOR, Discovery Services (not a small task), and Slack Digital Repository. 

Additional new products being considered include Gale Primary Source Collection, IBIS World (market research data),  ACLS Humanities eBooks, Data-Planet (statistical data repository), BrowZine (mobile-friendly journal content) and perhaps a comparison of few promising agricultural resources (please let us know if these products are of any particular interest to your library). In other news, reportedly ABC-CLIO has decided to pull out of several aggregators, including EBSCOhost. Approximately 4,000 titles could be lost from these platforms, including those titles published by Greenwood and Praeger. A preview of the ABC-CLIO platform (including potential implications for their withdrawal from popular platforms) is of potential interest since this could be an important consideration for their popular culture content for community colleges. Recent reviews by the committee are available at https://cclibrarians.org/consortium/reviews and we would appreciate your feedback and perspective. Many of our recent reviews feature an interactive component where you can post comments, feedback, and share your experiences with the database. Please send suggestions for any electronic databases you would like the CCL-EAR Committee to consider to Darryl Swarm (dswarm@frc.edu) or to your regional representative (CCL-EAR Committee Roster https://cclibrarians.org/committees/electronic-access-and-resources-committee#members). If you would like to attend any of our virtual or in-person meetings as a guest, please contact me, Darryl Swarm (dswarm@frc.edu), and I will forward you the details.