ALA Midwinter, Philadelphia, USA, January 2003

Joyce Grenfell, a British actor and writer, once stated that “progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.” In librarianship, nowhere has this seemed truer than in the management of electronic resources. Electronic resources collections bring with them challenges that no traditional library management system has the capability to handle. As a result, librarians have been forced to rely on their own creativity and skills to develop local solutions. These local solutions were recently showcased in a symposium entitled ‘Managing electronic resources: meeting the challenge.’ On 24 January, 150 librarians, publishers, vendors and other industry professionals spent a day at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia sharing their experiences with e-resource management. Sponsored by the ALCTS Serials Section and supported by contributions from Swets Blackwell, and Springer Verlag, New York, the symposium sought to provide practical information and advice to librarians faced with increasingly unmanageable digital collections. Four months into my new job as an electronic resources librarian, I went to the symposium with the hope that, even though most of the speakers came from major academic libraries, I would hear something that would help me cope at my relatively small special library with licenses, aggregators, payments, technical management, usage statistics and selection, to name just a few of the issues I face on a daily basis. I was not disappointed. In addition to providing general overviews of a variety of complicated topics, all speakers identified solutions, often home-grown ones, to the myriad challenges facing anyone who works with electronic resources. By the end of the day, I had a head full of practical information and a notebook full of ideas to implement at my institution. The first two presentations grappled with the idea of what managing an electronic resource collection actually entails. Dan Greenstein, who has served as the University Librarian and Executive Director of the California Digital Library since May 2002, started the discussion with a look at the complications of managing a collection shared by multiple campuses in ‘Managing electronic resources: co-operative strategies for meeting the challenge.’ In 1997, the University of California developed the California Digital Library to help control the costs of acquiring and managing an electronic collection. Over the past six years, the shared management has allowed the university to gain leverage in the market and significant cost savings, bringing benefits to its 11 campus members. The consolidation of licensing and acquisition has also decreased the resources member libraries must allocate to those tasks, making the acquisition of e-resources more efficient. Nevertheless, these benefits are undercut by the costs associated with co-operative decisionmaking the members must incur. Greenstein spoke in particular about the difficulties of co-ordinating print and digital selection decisions across multiple campuses. Beth Warner, the Director of Digital Library Initiatives at the University of Kansas, then moved On the circuit