Backups are a modern fact of life. Every organization that has any kind of computing technology (and that is all of them these days) needs to back up its data in case of technological or user errors. Traditionally, large-scale backups have been done via an internal or external tape drive that takes magnetic tapes (minicassettes, essentially) and…

One of the toughest challenges in an academic library systems office is how to manage and present the extensive selection of electronic resources from a variety of vendors. At York College of Pennsylvania, the authors participated in an admissions-driven web revision cycle and used a campus-provided CMS for 8 years. During this time, they tried…

When the electronic resource management system (ERM) at Kansas State University Libraries suffered a horrible data loss, the "contract db" presented a challenge for the librarians responsible for electronic resources. It was a decent data repository, but it had no ability to manage the tangled process of licensing, acquiring, activating,…

The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse's Murphy Library provides access to approximately 200 subscription databases. As with many academic libraries, methods and tools for managing these resources were sorely needed. However, the budget has been cut repeatedly over the past few years--thus the possibility of purchasing a commercial electronic…