EBSCO an evil empire?

Librarian in Black

I’ve been thinking about vendors lately. Mostly about vendors who don’t do so well, who hurt their customers, rip every last dollar from our wallets that they can, and walk away laughing haughtily.

I read some articles from people discussing virtual reference solutions, and what products are better than others, including what vendors provide better support and sales experiences. In California, we are losing our statewide online reference cooperative, so we’re left scrambling with only a few months to pick new products. The resulting fracas is intriguing — the gloves have come off and the anger people have felt at particular vendors is coming out full force.

Also, Meredith Farkas recently wrote about EBSCO’s role as an evil empire, and lists several major faux pas they’ve made in recent months. Incidentally, Farkas’s boss received a phone call from EBSCO’s VP of Marketing right after her post. Nobody called Farkas, just her boss. That in and of itself is interesting.

My general opinion of EBSCO is not a good one. As I commented on Meredith’s site, I have worked with EBSCO & other database vendors for the last 9 years. EBSCO consistently pulls titles, has ridiculously long embargos (which they also change at will), gives misleading or incorrect information during sales presentations, pressures publishers into exclusive deals (it’s either only us, or we won’t work with you), and repackages and sells the same content in different bundles–double-charging libraries and giving a false impression that the library is getting more content than they are. I was very disappointed when our library switched from Gale to EBSCO this past year and these problems further solidify my position. I would love to think EBSCO could change but the long term pattern of behavior makes me think it’s corporate culture…and that’s hard to change.

However, it’s not just the virtual reference companies or EBSCO, and we all know it.

Why do we in libraries tolerate this kind of arrogant behavior from a vendor? We’re the ones with the money. They should be doing what we want. We need to vote with our wallets and choose to work with vendors who provide the best possible products for the money, are fast to respond to technology trends, do not engage in shady business practices, and treat their customers with respect.

I'm so new to this Teacher-Librarian gig and every library I've been in all have EBSCO, I don't think I've even seen an alternate supplier.

Blog recommendation

Adventures in Pencil Integration Blog

I highly recommend this blog for educators. Go back and start reading from the beginning.

Assignment #1

Overall, I truly believe that everything we do as TLs revolves around student learning and this course has highlighted that the organization of the space, schedule and resources should be examined periodically in this regard. In my library, physical access is a main issue as I am only there two days a week. I can see even more clearly now that the organization of the space, resources and systems are very important and that a well organized, current website could be vital to my colleagues and the students of my school, especially in this situation where they do not have enough access to the TL.

The thing that I particularly enjoyed being challenged to think about in this course was the concept of access in terms greater than just physical access. I specifically enjoyed the notion of folksonomy or tagging as is done in online environments versus the traditional subject headings. I enjoyed the readings, “The Ghost in the Catalogue” and the one on folksonomy and tend to lean towards agreeing with them, however, a post that Brenda made on March 31^st made me pause yet again. In her post she mentioned something her district librarian had posed to her about how the researching student could be overwhelmed by results when searching dinosaurs if every picture book that has a picture of a dinosaur is catalogued so that it comes up when the word dinosaur is searched. Too many results obscure the valuable in a sea of mediocraty and worse, much like the number of hits in a Google search and we certainly don’t need that to happen in our OPACs. Even now, there are some searches where I wish I could narrow my search results in Destiny like I can when using the EBSCO databases for example.

The Module 2 lessons on cataloguing were great overall, a good reminder of the importance of MARC though most of the concepts, in general, were not new to me. At least I learned more about other fields, especially from the LOC website, and can now better spot inconsistencies in our district's union catalogue (learned that term here and ODLIS) and can have even more intelligent conversations with our district cataloguers. Adding to the intelligence of the conversations I can hold with our district cataloguers, though the school-based TLs do not need to concern ourselves with this generally, Lesson 10 brought out another topic that I’d never thought about before, where the MARC records in our OPAC come from. It was interesting to find out about the services of Follett, ULS, Amicus and the LOC as sources of MARC records and to be able to see in the MARC record itself where it has come from.

As for the major assignments, I did quite enjoy assignment #3 mostly because it gave me the opportunity to experiment with a variety of technology I had never used before and can now share with my colleagues and students. I did end up focusing mostly on physical access, but it was a good exercise in considering the variety of areas that could have been improved. Assignment #2, however, I did not enjoy. I would have preferred to have had smaller weekly assignments on this topic where I could have received feedback more frequently rather than floundering around in a monster-sized assignment hoping I had it right. I did not require that kind of stress in order to have been engaged in thought about the topic.

Considering my participation in the discussion forums I would rate my participation in this course as good, perhaps even excellent but I really hate selling myself and am my own worst critic. I may not have posted a lot of responses in the “discussion” forum but there are two main reasons for this. One, the Vista forums are a place I do not like to be as I find them to be extremely frustrating to navigate. Two, I also find that they are often used as a repository for each person’s individual thoughts, not discussion. I do read the posts, many that repeat the same points over again, and I refuse to post meaningless responses to each post. Unless I am truly challenged by the content I will not post. I also found that I tend towards actually talking to my colleagues that I work with rather than posting when batting around a concept as the discussion is what drives my learning.

"Why the iPad is dangerous"

Some interesting thoughts here.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html

I like this one for thinking about ...

I mean, look at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book kid, and I'm a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. And the used market for comics! It was -- and is -- huge, and vital. I can't even count how many times I've gone spelunking in the used comic-bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I'd missed, or sample new titles on the cheap. (It's part of a multigenerational tradition in my family -- my mom's father used to take her and her sibs down to Dragon Lady Comics on Queen Street in Toronto every weekend to swap their old comics for credit and get new ones).

So what does Marvel do to "enhance" its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.

E-books anyone?