Are We Really Balancing the Ledger with E-Journals?

Electronic journals have dramatically changed all the layers of the research landscape. This change affects how researchers conduct their research and how libraries support those research efforts. The acquisition and support of e-journals has required budgetary reallocations, personnel work shifts, and workflow altering in technical services departments. Additional resources for heightened access and support of e-journals have become a big market in the library industry. Link resolving software and open URLs, which allow the ability to link to the original content, are now ubiquitous. The landscape has now changed so dramatically in this regard that vendors offering noncompliant content can count on reduced rates of usage for their electronic products. 1 Negotiating and administering licenses represent significant legal and time commitments on behalf of universities. The confluence of these elements has created a market for electronic resource management (ERM) software. The process of managing e-journals thus continues to become an increasingly complicated and costly enterprise. These complications are further exaggerated by varied vendor/publisher guidelines, specifications, and expectations. That being said, e-journals provide considerable added benefits, including remote access for multiple users, desktop convenience, the virtual elimination of theft and mutilation incidents, and the potential addition of multitudes of titles to library collections.