The Acquisition and Collection Development (ACD) Section invites colleagues to attend an hour-long open session at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress (WLIC), Dublin, Ireland, 24-28 July 2022. See further details in the conference program.

This Panel Discussion connects to the Congress themes of Enable and Connect. Every year, more and more scholarly and research publications are made available through open access (OA), yet even as more content becomes available on the open web, it is often not easy to connect to this content in library discovery systems. Put simply, we are failing at integrating OA content into our collections.

As more and more OA content becomes available, librarians are faced with the challenge of how to manage access to that content in a way that fits into their collection development policies and philosophies. How does a library integrate all of the OA content that meets their collecting needs while excluding content that is unneeded? Existing library workflows and technologies, which are designed to manage licensed content to which libraries have some sort of entitlement, are not particularly helpful for managing open content. For instance, the knowledge bases we use to manage our discovery systems control access at the level of the journal volume or issue, but for OA articles within a hybrid journal, that access needs to be managed at the article level. It’s easy to turn on access to all of the journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals, but how does one easily control for particular topics or other subsets of journals. Green OA (often in multiple versions) introduces additional challenges, and OA monographs (and other formats) may be even harder to manage.

In this session, we invite panelists that can address any one or more of the following topics related to the challenges and opportunities of integrating OA content into the collection:

  • How are libraries managing OA?
  • Are there particular best practices you can share?
  • Are there standards (either existing or in development) that other librarians should be aware of?
  • Are there technologies or resources that make this work easier?
  • How do we integrate OA into our collection management practices? And more…

Panelists include:

  • Jill Emery, Collection Development & Management Librarian, Portland State University Library, USA
  • Emma Booth, Metadata Manager for Content Management, University of Manchester Library, UK
  • Ahava Cohen, Head of Cataloguing Section, National Library of Israel, Israel

Moderated by Michael Levine-Clark, Dean of Libraries, University of Denver, USA

For enquiries, please contact: Lilly Hoi Sze Ho, Chair of Acquisition and Collection Development Section at lillyho@gmail.com and/or Michael Levine-Clark, Dean of Libraries, University of Denver at Michael.levine-clark@du.edu.