Jenny Emanuel
Digital Services & Reference Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
emanuelj@illinois.edu
300 Main Library, MC-522
1408 West Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801
Biography
Jenny Emanuel is the Digital Services and Reference Librarian at the University of Illinois. Her
role is to integrate technology into different areas of librarianship, especially with collections, reference
services, and web design. She has worked extensively with electronic resources in libraries, at both the
University of Illinois and at the University of Central Missouri from 2004 to 2008. At the University of
Central Missouri, her title was electronic resources librarian and she handled all of the reviewing,
purchasing, and assessment of electronic resources such as journals and databases. She also worked on
making electronic resources available to users on the library website and maintained a proxy server to
allow users to access electronic resources outside of the library and university.
At the University of Illinois, Jenny has continued to work with electronic resources, though her
collection development duties are now limited to the Main Library’s Reference Collection, which covers
general and interdisciplinary materials, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. The collection is
noted for worldwide biographical information, general encyclopedias in a variety of languages, statistics,
directories, western language dictionaries and indexes, and international bibliographies. In her three
years of maintaining the reference collection, she has transitioned it from a primarily print collection to
a collection that is half electronic and half print. She is constantly looking for new online resources that
can replace print materials. She also oversees the online reference collection at
http://www.library.illinois.edu/rex/erefs/ which displays and organizes reference materials available
through the library and available free on the Internet.
Apart from collections, Jenny also researches the tools that people use to conduct research and
how they can be made easier to use. Examples of these tools include library websites, library online
catalog interfaces, citation management software, and electronic resources. Her research involves
interviewing people about how they do research and observing how they interact with library tools. She
has published several articles on these topics, has used her data to make changes to tools developed at
the University of Illinois, and make recommendations to tools supplied by outside vendors.
About the University of Illinois
The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is a large university located in the cites of
Champaign and Urbana in Illinois, which is about two hours by car or train south of Chicago. It is a state
supported school, which means that students who are from Illinois pay considerable less tuition than
students from other states because the tax payers of Illinois pay part of the cost. Tuition is still
expensive—about $20,000 a year for students from Illinois and $30,000 a year for students from other
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places. There are about 32,000 undergraduate students, 10,000 graduate students, and 3,000 faculty,
making it one of the largest universities in the United States. Students come from all 50 U.S. states and
4,100 students are international, coming from 115 countries. There are 17 colleges at the University,
and over 150 fields of study. The campus has 310 buildings, 23 undergraduate residence halls, four
theatres, and a museum.
Research is very important among faculty, and librarians are faculty members. The University of
Illinois is well known for its research in library science, business, and engineering fields. The Graduate
School of Library and Information Science is the number one school in the country, the College of
Engineering is 6th for undergraduate education and 5th for graduate education, and the College of
Business is 14th in undergraduate education. Overall, the University of Illinois is the 45th best school in
the United States and 13th among state supported colleges.
The University Library is the largest publically funded university library in the United States.
Only the Library of Congress (the national library) and the library of Harvard University are larger. There
are over 24 million items in the collection. Most of the collection is print based, and it has materials
from the 14th century to the present. There are currently 280,000 electronic resources and more are
constantly added. There are also large collections of films, maps, audio recordings, and video games.
Some highlights of the collection are the Slavic and Eastern European History Collection, instruments
and papers from American composer John Phillips Sousa, papers from Marcel Proust, and collections of
items about Abraham Lincoln. The library has a large digitization program, and many rare materials are
being scanned and made available online. There are also more than 20 smaller subject specific libraries
across campus, though the three largest libraries are the Main Library, the Grainger Engineering Library
and The Library for the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences. In recent years,
the library has closed or combined many small subject libraries to make better use of university facilities
and resources as well as reflect the multidisciplinary nature of research. The library’s Main Stacks,
which hold twelve million volumes and are located in the Main Library, were traditionally closed, but in
recent years anyone with a university identification card can enter the stacks. Librarians at the
University of Illinois are faculty, do research, actively participate in national and international
associations for libraries, and are considered to have one of the most difficult tenure systems among
librarians in the United States.
Introduction to Electronic Resources
Libraries began accessing information electronically in the late 1970s, when a handful of
institutions purchased networked computers that could access information from remote services.
Overtime, computers became more important to libraries, and by the 1990s, many library vendors were
putting information online in a basic textual format that could be used by computers connected to a
phone line. Also, vendors began putting multimedia and data files on CD-ROMs that allowed for large
amounts of data to be stored on a single disc that used up considerably less physical space than printed
materials. CD-ROM data included audio, video, and data such as United States Census data. However,
by the mid-1990s, World Wide Web access was becoming common at Universities, often with a very fast
connection, and library publishers and vendors began to place materials online so that they could be
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accessed anywhere and anytime. The World Wide Web was better than previous networked computer
access because the connection was faster and advances in personal computing allowed for more
multimedia experiences with formatted text, color images, and mechanisms for individuals to interact
with the information. As more students and individuals outside of universities began to have Internet
access, it was clear to libraries that putting materials online was how information would be accessed in
the future because the Internet allowed people to access library information anytime and anywhere.
Electronic resources have become very important to libraries and are now in a variety of
formats, including articles from scholarly and popular publications, data sets that can be manipulated
with software either online or offline, electronic books, and digitized materials. In the United States, it is
expected that new articles are almost always found online, and to many people, especially
undergraduate students, they will not take the time to go to the library to get an article that is only
available in print. Undergraduate students, especially, rely on online articles to do most of their writing
for their coursework because they can do research where and when they want to. If an article is only
available in print, undergraduate students will most likely find a different article that is available online.
Librarians believe that only serious researchers, such as undergraduates working on a thesis, graduate
students, and faculty, are likely to spend the extra time to come to the library and copy an article that is
not available online. Additionally, librarians see that most researchers who come to the library to get a
print article are more likely to scan the article into a digital copy than photocopy it. The digital copy can
then be viewed on any electronic device, is free to do, and no costly paper is wasted.
Since library users are now used to doing research online and demand increased access to more
resources, many libraries and vendors are undertaking digitization projects to make their resources
accessible to remote users. Many libraries and vendors have projects to scan their rare collections so
that people do not have to travel to see them. For example, at the University of Illinois, we have an
extensive 18th century literature collection from the United Kingdom that that the company Gale
digitized for us, combined it with content from other libraries, and created a database called 18th
Century Collections Online that allows researchers anywhere to have access to unique documents that
were previously only available to people who came to our campus. The vendor ProQuest is also
scanning many historical newspapers and putting them online, allowing library users affiliated with
subscribing libraries the opportunity to see the entire archive of many newspapers. At the University of
Illinois, the New York Times and Chicago Tribune are digitized and users can do historical research or
look up what happened on an exact date with minimal effort. Google is also digitizing many print
materials held in libraries with the Google Books Project and many Universities are scanning in content
themselves, including dissertations, theses, and other unique collections so that people can view them
for free online. The University of Illinois’ digitized collections are available at
http://illinoisharvest.grainger.uiuc.edu/
Electronic books are the newest electronic resources to become popular in libraries. Although
there have been electronic books available for over ten years, they were slow to catch on in libraries
until recently. Originally, electronic books were very hard to view because their interfaces were difficult
to navigate and early devices to read them remotely were equally hard to use and very expensive.
However, in the past couple of years, more vendors have published books online that do not require
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users to be connected to the Internet and can download the entire book or individual chapters easily.
Also, electronic readers, now mostly called tablets, such as the Kindle and iPad are less expensive, have
better screens, and are easier to use, and so have become very popular in the United States. It has
become very common for individuals to read on tablet devices, which has helped to make electronic
books very popular. Even if many students cannot afford these devices, they want one, and now think
of books as electronic and available anytime and anywhere just like articles. In the past several years,
library electronic book use has increased and more librarians are purchasing them for their collections,
often preferring them to print books.
E-Resource Collection Development/ What is an E-Resource and how it is Different than Print
Electronic resources have changed how librarians do collection development. Everyone does
this differently, but I will try to examine what I do, how my library handles collection development, and
how others at my institution purchase materials. Most librarians at the University of Illinois are
constantly reviewing electronic resources for purchase. We often refer to many electronic resources as
databases, but there are many different types. Databases can be indexes of either single or multiple
subjects and may or may not include the full text of any or all citations. Some databases are original
content, others may have the same content as a printed index or other book, and some can be
aggregations of multiple print and/or electronic materials. Databases can also be a collection of
electronic journal articles that may or may not have extensive indexing. They can also be collections of
electronic books.
Often, librarians purchase new electronic resources to replace print volumes. Once these types
of resources are acquired, they can withdraw the print counterparts, give them to libraries that may not
otherwise be able to afford any access, or move them to an off site storage location. Not only can
electronic resources replace current print volumes, but also they can contain digitized archival content
from older print volumes and can make these volumes more accessible and free up valuable shelf space.
Things librarians look at when purchasing electronic resources include cost, the ease of use, how many
users the resources allows to use the product at any given time, and how much overlap it may have with
electronic and print resources the library already has access to.
Electronic books are increasing in popularity, and at the University of Illinois, librarians are
generally purchasing them as part of a large package that can include access to hundreds or thousands
of electronic books from one vendor. Some subject librarians purchase books online through an
approval plan that automatically selects books in their subject area for them. Generally, these approval
plans are for print books, but in many subjects books are available both in print and electronically, and
librarians use their judgment to determine which format is best for their users for a particular title.
Factors that are involved in deciding between print and electronic books are how scholars in a subject
feel about electronic books, cost, ease of interface, and type of book being purchased. As for journals, if
a title is available electronically, we no longer purchase the print. The University of Illinois is also
aggressively moving print journal titles to off site storage if we have reliable access to the title online.
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One big debate regarding collection development of electronic resources is how we should
purchase them. With print collection development, librarians buy materials and they own it. Electronic
resources have ongoing maintenance costs, especially with the servers and staff required by vendors to
make sure they are always accessible. As a result, electronic resource vendors generally offer libraries
the opportunity to license materials, which is an annual fee to have access to a particular resource. The
problem with licensing is that if the library stops subscribing to a resource, they do not have access to it
after it ends. For some resources, this is fine, but for others, it is troubling. For instance, if you
subscribed to a print journal for ten years and then ended your subscription, you get to keep the ten
volumes you physically have in the library. But if you have a subscription to an electronic journal for ten
years and cancel it, you no longer have access to those ten volumes. For this reason, some vendors
allow libraries to purchase, instead of license, electronic resources so that you own the content. Most
vendors also charge a small maintenance fee because the materials are stored on their servers. The cost
to purchase electronic resources is considerably more than a year’s license, and many smaller libraries
cannot afford to purchase. But many large research libraries, including the University of Illinois, attempt
to purchase as many electronic resources as possible.
For the past several years, I have been in charge of collection development for the general
reference collection at the University of Illinois. I purchase both print and electronic resources including
biographical information, language encyclopedias, statistics, directories and indexes in western
language. My main goal of collection development is to purchase electronic resources whenever
possible, due to their convenience and because it is easy to look up a quick fact online. We have also
had a goal of cleaning out our Reference Room. Several years ago, there were bookshelves in the center
of the room that were ugly and made it hard for librarians to observe users. We replaced many of the
materials on these shelves with electronic resources and moved the print either to our Main Stacks or
our off site storage facility. Today the room is much more open and more students are able to use it for
studying. I keep track of new reference materials through resources such as Choice Reviews
(http://www.cro2.org/), American Reference Books Annual (ARBA) online
(http://www.arbaonline.com/) and by talking to vendors at conferences. I am one of the few librarians
at my institution that does not purchase books through an approval plan
How to Access Important E-Resources
Accessing electronic resources is area of growing importance within librarianship. The biggest
issue is how to connect users with the resources that the library purchased for them. Libraries generally
do this by placing URLs for the resources online, but that can be done in many ways and each library
does this differently depending on what they perceive as user needs and their staffing model. Some
smaller libraries may just link to all of their databases from a webpage. However, since most libraries
have large numbers of journals, they usually contract with an OpenURL vendor to provide an A-Z list of
journals. There will be more information on OpenURL later. As for ebooks, probably the most common
way to access them is through links in the online catalog, by cataloging ebooks similarly as print books
are cataloged and adding a link. At the University of Illinois, we attempt to put records in our online
catalog for databases, journals, and ebooks, and individual libraries also create links to electronic
resources from webpages that they create.
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A technology called OpenURL has changed how electronic resources are displayed from the
library website as well as how electronic resources are linked together. When electronic resources were
just beginning to enter libraries, a researcher would often search an index to get a citation for
something they wanted to read, and then have to search for the journal title and volume in a different
interface, such as the library catalog. With OpenURL, data is transferred from the online index through a
standard link that then searches for the full text of the article in other electronic resources that the
library owns. So, if a researcher finds a citation in a database without full text, they only have to click
once to be taken directly to the full text in another database. OpenURL technology has made access to
electronic resources very easy and users do not need extensive library knowledge to find the full text.
However, OpenURL depends on having accurate data for both electronic resources using the
technology, and is probably accurate only 90% of the time. If an electronic resource changes its holdings
or has incomplete data, the process to find the full text can be very frustrating.
OpenURL resources, or “link resolvers” as they are often called, require that librarians input all
of their electronic resource holdings information into the software backend so that it knows what the
library has access to. As a result, the link resolver can automatically create lists of electronic resources,
especially journals and databases so that library users can easily see what their library has. These lists
can also organize electronic resources by subject, provide an A-Z list, and allow researchers to access
resources remotely. An OpenURL service is something that has become very important for libraries.
The only thing that is not compatible with OpenURL is electronic books. However, library vendors are
working on similar solutions for electronic books and there is hope in the near future that libraries can
provide a list of ebooks to browse by subject, similar to how people can browse print books on a
physical shelf.
One big limitation with electronic resources is that vendor agreements require that libraries only
give access to their users. When an institution is in a single building or campus, this is easy because you
can give vendors a list of all internet protocol (IP) addresses for computers on the institutions network.
For people outside of the institution, they cannot access the electronic resources. But, many students
and faculty do not live on campus and may wish to do research from home, so their computer will not
have a campus IP address. So, libraries need to provide a way to allow their users to access electronic
resources remotely. As a result, most libraries have set up something called a proxy server. A proxy
server is a simple tool that, when someone clicks on a link to an electronic resource from a library
webpage, it forces that link to the proxy server before going to the resource. The proxy server
determines if the user is coming from an IP address at the institution, and if the user is not, it asks them
to log in with a username and password before allowing them access to the resource. Most of the time,
this login is the same as the one they use for their institution’s email. If the user do not provide the
correct login, then they are refused access. The only problem with a proxy server is that researchers
must go through the library website to access electronic resources. If they search for an article through
Google, they will not get access. That is because the proxy server requires the URL for the server as a
prefix before every electronic resource URL.
An additional way that libraries support instruction at their institution is by putting materials on
electronic reserve at the request of teaching faculty. Most of the time, electronic reserve materials are
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electronic journal articles and book chapters, though occasionally the library scans printed materials or
even digitizes multimedia that students need access to for their class. They then place these materials
online and route them through the proxy server so that only students enrolled in a specific class have
access to the materials. This is done because of copyright limitations. In the United States, educators
have a copyright exemption and can reproduce materials used in a class. Once online, the professor can
link to the course materials through Moodle or another resource. At the University of Illinois, we have
programmed our own course reserve service, but other institutions use features within their online
catalog or a commercial product called Docutek to automate electronic reserves processing.
Western Trends in Digital Librarianship
My title, Digital Services and Reference Librarian, reflects how librarian roles are changing with
technology. When I first started at the University of Illinois, Digital Services meant that I was the
technology person working in a traditional reference position. Although this is still true, I believe most
librarians can refer to at least part of their job responsibilities as digital services. Technology skills are
quickly becoming a requirement of all jobs in libraries, and at my institution, all new jobs created must
have a minimum level of technology skill. All librarians must have basic skills to create webpages and
instructional materials within a content management system. They also must have extensive skills
about searching for information online, both within library electronic resources and on the greater
Internet. Librarians must also be aware of current trends online, both for tools that can be used in one’s
private life, but also tools used for research.
Since my position deals with higher level technology skills, I must stay one step ahead of
technologies related to libraries and research. Not only do I know how to create web pages, but I study
on the best trends as far as what content to put in library webpages and the best ways to organize both
the content on a page and the organization of an entire website. I also stay familiar with tools that
individuals utilize for research. These tools are very diverse and can include online libraries and
bookstores (focusing on how they organize information); citation management tools such as RefWorks
(www.refworks.com), EndNote (www.endnote.com), and Zotero (www.zotero.org); social media such as
Facebook, Twitter, and blogging software; and tools for organizing information such as Delicious
(www.delicious.com) and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. I am constantly scanning the Internet
for new things that can make research easier and more accessible to library users. I can then answer
questions that librarians receive about these tools, integrate them into new and continuing library
services, and offer training to both library staff and students.
My area of research has evolved into usability testing, the library user experience, and how
people do research. All three types of research use the same methods and seek to understand how
people interact with various library services and resources, with the goal of using data to make changes
to make things easier on the user. Much of my job involves aggregating reference questions, looking at
trends in library instruction within my library, and observing library users as they interact with library
webpages and resources. My goal is to collect data to make informed decisions on how we should
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organize information for researchers. My research has resulted in the creation of new search tools for
the library, improved library website content, recommendations as to how we can improve both web
and in person instruction, and an understanding about the process researchers undertake to find
information.
Before I came to the University of Illinois, I did substantial information technology work in a
smaller library. Instead of spending time doing research, I was in charge of implementing and
maintaining servers for the library, doing basic computer troubleshooting, and maintaining an entire
library’s electronic resources. I learned valuable skills about how backend technology works in a library,
skills that allow me to understand how library systems work now that I only work with them from the
public side. I believe that more public service librarian jobs in the future will require these types of skills.
I also see an increasing need for librarians who have a substantial understanding of library technologies,
and programming, as these are the people who will create the technologies of the future in libraries.
In short, the librarian as we are used to define them—individuals who answer reference
questions and assist students and researchers in finding information for a project, are going away. Now
all librarians have a basic understanding of technology and will need even more to create the library of
the future.
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