University of Washington, 2 April 2008

I've mentioned in conversation before that it is amazing to meet with ground breakers in the world of librarianship, especially in the field of electronic resources. I had a conversation with one such person today, Tim Jewel. He was involved in the development of DLF ERMI (electronic resource management) and SUSHI (usage statistics). Tim currently holds the position of Director, Information Resources, Collections and Scholarly Communication at UW Libraries. My other big meeting of the day was with Bill Jordan, Associate Dean of University Libraries, Resource Acquisition and Description/Information Technology Services.

Some of the topics that came up in these conversations:

• UW is swinging to e-only access for journals. For this reason they are concerned about the preservation of online access and are participating in LOCKSS and Portico.
• eBooks: There has not yet been a strong move to eBooks at UW.
• Institutional repository: UW is using DSpace. They have not been too successful in populating the IR yet.
• ERMS: Implementing ERM module from Innovative Interfaces: Millennium.
• Link resolver: WebBridge.
• Electronic resources usage statistics: UW is using ScholarlyStats.
• WorldCat local: Implementation has resulted in a dramatic increase in interlibrary loan requests.
• Datasets: UW Libraries has started to look at dataset curation.