George Machovec Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries http://grweb.coalliance.org 303-759-3399 george@coalliance.org S

1. How Do ERMs Improve the User Experience? George Machovec Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries http://grweb.coalliance.org 303-759-3399 george@coalliance.org September 2007

2. 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

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

4. Who Are We? • Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries • A non-profit consortium of 12 libraries founded in 1974. 501c3 • History of innovation • CARL ILS (sold in 1995) – now TLC • UnCover (sold in 1995) – now Ingenta

5. 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

6. 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?

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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?

10. 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

11. 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

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

13. 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

14. 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)

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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

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

20. 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.

21. 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

22. 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

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

32. 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 • Email notification to your staff • Reports for open and closed incidents

33. 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

34. Information • Full documentation available • Within the Gold Rush Staff Toolbox • At the Gold Rush informational Website at http://grweb.coalliance.org • goldrush-l listserv • Software updates • Title list updates • System maintenance and other general info

35. More Information Contact Information: • (303) 759-3399 (phone) • (303) 759-3363 (fax) • goldrush@coalliance.org • Staff toolbox web report forms

36. GR LinkerClassic Look

37. GR LinkerCustom Look

38. GR LinkerCustom Look

39. GR LinkerSample

40. GR LinkerSample