George Machovec Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries September 2007 How Do ERMs Improve the User Experience?

The Problem Libraries are spending increasing amounts on electronic resources Patrons and librarians are unable to find many of these resources (many not cataloged) We have purchased access to many full-text resources…we just don’t know what & where! Full-text within aggregations are especially difficult to find

How do you define your ERMS? Just subscriptions management? The broader definition? Subscriptions management Link resolution A-Z services Content analysis

Who Are We? Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries A non-profit consortium of 12 libraries founded in c3 History of innovation CARL ILS (sold in 1995) – now TLC UnCover (sold in 1995) – now Ingenta

Who Are We? Member of ICOLC We do standard consortial stuff with a twist Database licensing, shared collection development Data hosting Software development (e.g. Gold Rush, Prospector, Fedora Digital Repository, The Charleston Advisor) Operates over 20 servers

What Do Patrons Want? “I just want everything I want, when I want it” – my nephew when he was 5 years old Are your users any different?

What Do Patrons Want? Patrons don’t care about you’re the details of your services unless they are not working For the most part our ERMS should be invisible like plumbing….but it better work Patrons don’t care about how much you pay or who is the vendor For the most part patrons don’t care about the “terms and conditions” of products and services

Trends The “hot” solution a couple of years ago was metasearch/federated solutions. The new hot trend is for libraries overlay suites of key resources with search and discovery tools

Trends Search and discovery tools include commercial and open source soutions such as: Open source: Lucene, SOLR, VuFind, etc. Commercial: Aquabrowser, Endeca, Encore, Primo, etc Hosted: OCLC WorldCat Local What are you putting under your big umbrella?

Trends Why the “big umbrella” Super fast response time (like Google) Great control over look and feel including tag clouds, graphical representation, better screen layout, etc. Wonderful faceting and limiting options Better integration with link resolvers, local resources Bring to the forefront important but lesser used resources

Trends Big umbrella examples Univ of Chicago is putting AquaBrowser over its catalog, EAD documents and SFX holdings Ungava, National Research Council of Canada is using Lucene, Carrot2, etc to index its catalog, its own publication and 1.7 million articles in biomedicine Univ of Washington, WorldCat Local includes local catalog, regional union catalog, OCLC holdings, ArticleFirst Your ERM needs to be a part of such efforts

Trends Extraction of holdings to share with other services Google Scholar OCLC eSerials program (can take metadata extracted from your ERMS in GS format)

Gold Rush Offers Initially developed by consortium in 2001 and offered to libraries outside of consortium in 2003 Subscriptions Management Link Resolution (OpenURL) Public Searching interface (A-Z list) Content Analysis

Where does GR fit in the marketplace? ERM marketplace as a continuum of choices Locally developed Open Source products (e.g. CUFTS from Simon Fraser for link resolution, content comparison) Non-profit – Gold Rush (Colorado Alliance) Commercial (e.g. Serials Solutions, ILS vendors, etc)

Observations We were so early in marketplace for the ERM component most of our libraries didn’t know what to do with it

Knowledge Base Gold Rush currently has >1500 title lists Primary publishers Aggregators Indexing & abstracting services Gold Rush contains many Open Access (free) journals available as title lists

Building & Maintenance Constant updating of title lists We supplement title lists from aggregators and publishers with subject headings and alternate titles You can upload, modify, add or delete title lists or individual titles at any time Can load local serials holdings

Libraries Selected libraries now using Gold Rush include: Several Colorado Alliance member libraries Several medical libraries in Oklahoma and Texas University of New Mexico (UNM), Santa Fe Institute, College of Santa Fe Brigham Young University (main and law) University of Alaska Chicago Public Library Fort Collins Public Library Pacific Lutheran University and others

Knowledge Base Select title lists from central knowledge base Upload new content if desired Add, modify and delete title lists or content within lists as needed Gold Rush Central Knowledge Base (Denver) Chicago Public Library University of New Mexico University of OK Health Sciences Staff

Technical Details Operates on suite of Linux Servers Industry standard MySQL, Perl and ColdFusion Current database >1,500 databases, aggregators, publishers ASP solution. Servers in Denver.

Key Challenges for small organization Create a great deal of local control Ability to upload/download your own title lists Ability to create or update lists on a one-by-one basis Ability to customize link resolver Ability to customize A-Z Simple Web forms in a structured XML gateway to make the service anything you want for better integration with other web services

Cool Features Subscriptions Management Starts with core template of fields Allows libraries to add, remove and rename fields and what goes in each tab (section). Unlimited for all practical purposes One click export of all subscription records into Excel

Cool Features Content comparisons Compare two databases Compare suites of databases Detailed use statistics

Soon to Be Released Enhancement Incident tracker The ability to report problems for any service A public messaging capability for users in the public interface Will be available from holdings, subscriptions and via a direct URL for reference desk notification to your staff Reports for open and closed incidents

Partnership We view Gold Rush as a collaboration among participating libraries We want to work with you to make the project better and to met your needs as well as those of others

Information Full documentation available Within the Gold Rush Staff Toolbox At the Gold Rush informational Website at goldrush-l listserv Software updates Title list updates System maintenance and other general info

More Information Contact Information: (303) (phone) (303) (fax) Staff toolbox web report forms

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