HAERVI helps widen options for students visiting higher education libraries
21 September, 2007
A new guide has been launched to improve the service offered by Higher Education Institutions to visiting students and researchers wishing to access digital resources.
The new guide tackles a long-standing problem within the academic community. The problem is around how to enable academic visitors to gain access to electronic materials not held by their home institution, such as specialist research items, without infringing licensing regulations held by the host library.
Now however, the conclusion this month of the HAERVI (HE Access to e-resources in Visited Institutions) project has seen the production of a new guide to help provide a workable solution to the problem. The new HAERVI guide brings together for the first time a group of other schemes and services within a single location. This group includes services such as JANET Roaming, a service that lets a guest user authenticate themselves via a shared network.
The HAERVI project was managed by SCONUL - the membership body for UK and Irish higher education and national libraries - in conjunction with partners at UCISA (Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association).
The progress made by HAERVI on e-resources follows the success of previous SCONUL schemes, such as SCONUL Research Extra, to allow academic visitors to consult printed materials. These hardcopy arrangements have proved popular and by 2005/06 SCONUL Research Extra had around 11,000 registered academics and researchers responsible for around 115,000 loans and renewals.
Toby Bainton, Secretary of SCONUL said,
"An increasing proportion of HE library stock is now held in electronic form only and this proportion is likely to increase. So this guide is a big step forward on an important issue."
"Electronic resources are not owned outright by a library or institution so enabling access is a different challenge to that presented by traditional print resources. This best practice guide finds potential solutions to those challenges and we believe can produce a simple access system for visitors and frontline staff. It will also be technically robust enough to ensure visitors cannot inadvertently access resources that are not licensed for their use".
In the longer term it is hoped that HAERVI and JANET will work together to enable visitors to use their own laptops to access e-resources via the JANET Roaming system.
notes to editor
- The HAERVI project ran between October 2006 and September 2007.
- Full copies of the guide can be viewed at: www.ucisa.ac.uk/haervi/haerviguide.pdf
- For more information contact Elliot Frankal, SCONUL Communications Manager on 07989 524780 or elliot@linstockcommunications.com