This morning my colleague and I finished recording our brief video that will be a part of MLA’s ABC’s of E-Books: Strategies for the Medical Librarywebinar on November 10th. You can see the agenda for the presnterson MLA’s website.
Marian Simonson and I will have a brief 4-5 min. video presenting how we manage our ebooks at the Cleveland Clinic. We will talk about how/why we add them to the catalog and how we originally created a plain old web page listing all of our ebooks by title and by subject. Then as we started to collect more and more ebooks the web list became difficult to manage, time consuming, and too long to scroll through. So we decided to manage our electronic books using our Electronic Resource Management system. Our ERM is through our ILS which is Innovative Interfaces. In the video we discussed how we are using our ERM to manage our ebooks and what our patrons will see and how they might use it as well as what the librarians will see and how they use it. (Side Note: We didn’t mention this in the video but you don’t have to have III to have an ERM, many other ILS providers have ERMs, including systems specializing in small to medium size medical libraries.)
Our video was only meant to be 4 minutes and I feel like we could have talked longer on the topic. After the webinar on November 10th I will post about some of things that I think I would have liked to have said or expanded upon if we had more time. It is easier to do it after the webinar so I when I refer to things, you will have already seen the video.