Hello everyone,
I have received several requests to summarize results of the ERM
questions sent to the list a few weeks ago so I'm going to list the
results below. There were just a few responses, so if anyone gets an
inkling to respond that hasn't had the opportunity, that would be great!
Note that I have left off names and schools.
Hope this helps.
Maria
Survey Questions
1. Name of your ERM system:
2. When did you begin implementation of your ERM system?
3. Can you describe the various stages you’ve encountered as you’ve
implemented your system? For example – review of ERM elements to
include or use, evaluation of personnel to work with ERM, design
of workflow to incorporate ERM into departmental duties, etc.
4. Briefly discuss 3 problems or issues encountered during the
implementation.
5. Briefly describe the primary purposes for which you’d like to use
your ERM system. (for example, display licensing terms to public,
centralize all e-resource information, facilitate e-resource
workflow).
6. Briefly discuss one or two capabilities you’d like to see
developed within your ERM system over the next few years.
7. Briefly discuss the greatest strength of your ERM.
8. Do you have any advice for someone beginning the process of
implementation?
Response 1:
Capabilities I'd like to see:
Links to place next to non-serial resources (e.g. ARTstor);
Acquisitions would like to see integration with our ILS Acq module
(personally, this wouldn't help much as we have a lot of post-migration
issues with the ILS and Acq and adding a new system is the last thing
they need right now - it's not going to resolve anything until other
things are taken care of first);
Strengths:
Not an ILS vendor-->different priorities & probably more easily integrated with more libraries
Fairly responsive company Interface is fairly friendly
Will be wonderful once I get everything populated (hoping to do that
this summer) ILL loves having license info available right from the A-Z serials list
License manager is very flexible and comprehensive; can add notes or
just select "allowed," restricted" etc; can determine which information
is publicly available; almost everything I've needed is there; only once
did I have something that wasn't in there ("online copy is considered
the official copy") that I stuck in "other public notes"
Greatest strengths: first & last ones listed above in Strengths.
Advice:
We went with SerialsSolutions, because we have their other products. It
seemed logical to keep everything with one company to better integrate
with our knowledge base. Ultimately, when I looked at all the ERMs out
there, the same two companies rose to the top, imo, as I've seen with
OpenURL: SerialsSolutions & Ex Libris. I sent questionnaires to all the
companies, asking which features they had, were in development, or were
planned in the next year. The other companies, at that time (about a
year ago), had much less in all categories.
Depending on your organization, I would also say, have patience. I've
implemented A-Z serials list, OpenURL, an open source database-driven
system for generating dynamic web pages of our electronic resources,
federated search, and now ERMS in the last 6 years - fortunately,
one/year. As a result, I knew not to expect the ERMS to be fully
populated when we got it in the fall! Major projects happen in the
summer around here, and this is a major project. To help myself, I
created an email folder in January, determining that would be the start
date for documenting in the ERMS problems with vendors/resources. I have
been putting trials information in there as well, as I seem to have a
vendor every year who calls me a few months or so after the trial to ask
why we didn't subscribe and what we thought of the resource. But, I know
licenses will have to wait until I have fewer meetings & desk hours.
Response 2:
1. Name of your ERM system: Innovative
2. When did you begin implementation of your ERM system?
Start of 2005
3. Can you describe the various stages you've encountered as you've implemented your system? For example - review of ERM elements to
include or use, evaluation of personnel to work with ERM, design of workflow to incorporate ERM into departmental duties, etc.
Identify sources for ERM data; identify and order matching ERM elements (ISSNs, titles, etc.); identify staff; assess training needs;draft workflows; consult with other players (Acq., Cat., etc.); coordinate workflows with other players; establish documentation
procedures; trial run of workflows; review the process; revise as necessary; repeat.
4. Briefly discuss 3 problems or issues encountered during the
implementation.
1) Initial choice of matching data was too narrow. As a result,
ERM often failed to match links to records.
2) Misjudged staffing:
Acq had a dozen people to devote to ERM work; cataloging had one
person.
3) Keeping everyone on the same page during initial training was
difficult. There was some resistance to the process, in part, because
ERM wasn't "marketed" very well within the organization. In other
words, players didn't understand why it was important.
5. Briefly describe the primary purposes for which you'd like to use
your ERM system. (for example, display licensing terms to public,
centralize all e-resource information, facilitate e-resource
workflow).
Primarily Acq area. She would like to display licensing information in the catalog, and she constantly identifies new uses for ERM (such as loading e-monos and digital maps, for example).
6. Briefly discuss one or two capabilities you'd like to see
developed within your ERM system over the next few years.
Again, we're looking at ERM as a platform that will allow us to batch-load just about any kind of digital or electronic information
resource. In order to achieve this level of performance, it would be advantageous to have an ERM that was supremely customizable in
terms of creating and maintaining any number of loading profiles.
7. Briefly discuss the greatest strength of your ERM.
I have been impressed with the flexibility of the system to load e-resources other than serials.
8. Do you have any advice for someone beginning the process of
implementation?
This survey is a great idea; canvassing the community for
information is a very, very wise strategy as you begin this process. Also,
we decided to try and stop (at least temporarily) doing certain
work in order to get ERM up and running. Trying to implement such a
complex service that required cooperation throughout an
organization the departments of which are in competition for
resources (people, time, money) is best served if you can hit the
ground running. Create a big splash at the outset, so people can
experience the positive impact of ERM on users, and then parlay
that experience into leverage for resources.
Response 3
1. Name of your ERM system: *Verify (VTLS)*
2. When did you begin implementation of your ERM system? *We've been
developing the product with VTLS since March 2005. **
3*. Can you describe the various stages you've encountered as you've
implemented your system? For example -- review of ERM elements to
include or use, evaluation of personnel to work with ERM, design of
workflow to incorporate ERM into departmental duties, etc.
*We built a home-grown ERMS in 2002, so our first hurdle was data
mapping. We needed to see which local elements fit exactly within the
DLF dictionary; which could be coerced into fitting within the DLF
specs; and which couldn't map, and therefore needed to be added as local
extensions to the DLF. As part of this initiative, we spent a year
redesigning our e-resource workflows, and this redesign is driven by the
Verify workflow module. We are presently thinking about ways of
automating data ingestion. ONIX for Serials and SUSHI on the stats side
are a couple of the standards we're hoping to exploit.
* 4. Briefly discuss 3 problems or issues encountered during the
implementation.
*1. Lack of one-to-one mapping between source and destination ERMS;
2. Dealing with the consortial aspect of the system, since the DLF spec
for the most part ignores consortial needs;
3. The quantity of manual data entry needed to populate the entities to
the degree we desire.
* 5. Briefly describe the primary purposes for which you'd like to use
your ERM system. (for example, display licensing terms to public,
centralize all e-resource information, facilitate e-resource workflow).
*Communication and workflow trackin*
6. Briefly discuss one or two capabilities you'd like to see developed
within your ERM system over the next few years.
*Ability to ingest usage stats via SUSHI and marry them to financial
data over the lifetime of the resource; Ability to communicate with our
link resolver; Ability to ingest licenses if the publisher and library
community can agree to do this*
7. Briefly discuss the greatest strength of your ERM.
*It facilities in a robust way the various workflows that revolve around
e-resources.
*
8. Do you have any advice for someone beginning the process of
implementation?
*Plan well ahead, and have a clear understanding of what you want the
ERMS to do/fix/improve. Too many colleagues with whom I speak don't know
what they want to achieve. In some cases, their e-resource management
problem isn't big enough to warrant an ERMS, thus implementation of a
fairly complex system seems unneccessary and daunting. For others, their
problem is so big, so out of control that they don't know where to
begin. To me, any ERMS that doesn't facilitate communication and
workflows isn't worth the sticker price. If this aspect of e-resource
management isn't a problem at one's library, purchasing an ERMS is
probably overkill.
*Response 4
While we would love to have a commercial ERMS, one of our primary
requisites is that it be integrated into our ILS. We're a Voyager
library and, at present, Meridian is not integrated into the rest of the
system, so we have no immediate plans to use it.
Four or five years ago we built a very basic ERMS in-house, using the
9xx fields on the holdings record. This was a collaboration between our
serials acquisitions librarian and the head of our Cataloging
Department's IT Unit. The system allows us to store information that
can be found easily by anyone with authorization (e.g., passwords). It
also generates information to the OPAC (e.g., number of simultaneous
users) and elsewhere on our webpage (for example, it generates our list
of indexes and databases). It's a very basic system, but it meets our
current needs. And it's extensible (we can always define more 9xx
tags). The library's Systems Department recently hired a full-time
programmer, and we have been talking to him about building a second
generation in-house system that would be more dynamic and would still be
integrated into the rest of the ILS.
--
Maria Collins
Serials Librarian
North Carolina State University Libraries
Maria_Collins@ncsu.edu
(phone) 919-515-3188
(fax) 919-515-7292
