Professional development and chat cooperatives

As happens at least once a week, a librarian who is in the chat reference cooperative my library participates in and who is helping a patron from my library assumes that electronic access to periodicals will only be indicated in our OPAC. Like many other libraries, we have been unable for various reasons (read "money") to add all that information into our online catalog. As lots of other libraries have done, we provide a separate tool that is linked to from our web site and that allows users to type in the periodical name and see if electronic access is available in any of the library databases. Here at Baruch, we use a product from Serials Solutions. There are many other companies that have such tools; other libraries have even put together their own home grown versions. And of course, there are tools like SFX that serve as article linkers (which the library at Baruch College and all the other libraries in CUNY are trying out now).

I'm not really in love with these tools, all of which seem a bit mysterious to our users, but it's all we've got right now. What I find frustrating is when librarians at other college libraries assume that all libraries use the same system of indicating electronic access to periodicals. If the librarian is unaware of other ways such access might be indicated, then the librarian is likely to steer user in the wrong direction. Yes, of course it would help, too, if our library's web site did a better job of indicating how to find electronic access to a known periodical (we're working on it, I swear).

I'd like to suggest that all librarians who work in a cooperative chat environment do all they can to try to keep up with at least the major tech trends in libraries. There are numerous ways to do this, such as subscribing to the feeds of one of more of the blogs written by librarians (see my blogroll for an ever-expanding list of feeds that I find valuable).

Although it is nearly impossible to keep up, I do find it frustrating that so many librarians in my cooperative are unaware of the main technologies that libraries are using to alert users to a library's e-journal collection. In college libraries, finding articles is probably the second-most sought after information format (books are still probably more sought after, at least here at Baruch College). Knowing how to navigate different systems for looking up specific e-journals should be a given for any librarian in a cooperative these days.