In addition to learning about the evaluation project's process, participants will be able to:
- Discover a variety of open access databases recommended for community and technical college populations.
- Learn criteria found useful for comparison and how effective it was/is in this type of review work.
- Consider challenges of OA database as research tools/academic resources.
In this presentation, we will describe and explain our open source database evaluation group project that we led in Summer 2018. This project, which was coordinated by the LWTech librarians, was conducted with a group of regional community college librarians, including many from the Washington Community and Technical Colleges Library Consortium (who all subscribe to Ex Libris's Alma and Primo products). This is the second of two years of review, and is the first time this extensive work was done with the voluntary help of so many academic librarians.
We will cover our initial survey criteria and share how this manifested in a final spreadsheet. We will share the experience of librarians participating in the study, what worked well, challenges, and insights gained in the form of survey data and comments received. We will give comparative search examples to highlight useful versus problematic database features. We will use real-time polls to direct the relevancy of the discussion to the audience and small group discussions to engage and solicit feedback from the audience to guide the continuation of our OA database evaluation.
The conversation will conclude with implications on the offerings of these "free" resources and the potential relevance (or lack of relevance) the content contained within is to the academic communities we are serving. The OA review will be connected to the rest of the OE work being done at LWTech and throughout Washington, and we will discuss future possibilities for similar projects.
