George MachovecColorado Alliance of Research Libraries

http://grweb.coalliance.org303-759-3399

george@coalliance.org September 2007

How Do ERMs Improve the User Experience?

The ProblemLibraries 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 1974. 501c3

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

TrendsThe “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

TrendsSearch 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?

TrendsWhy 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 optionsBetter integration with link resolvers, local resourcesBring to the forefront important but lesser used resources

TrendsBig 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

TrendsExtraction of holdings to share with other services

Google Scholar

OCLC eSerials program (can take metadata extracted from your ERMS in GS format)

Gold Rush OffersInitially 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 developedOpen 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)

ObservationsWe 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 listsPrimary 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

LibrariesSelected 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 BaseSelect 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 PublicLibrary

University ofNew Mexico

University of OKHealth 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 controlAbility to upload/download your own title listsAbility to create or update lists on a one-by-one basisAbility to customize link resolverAbility 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 ManagementStarts 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 comparisonsCompare two databases

Compare suites of databases

Detailed use statistics

Soon to Be Released Enhancement

Incident trackerThe 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

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 availableWithin 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

More Information

Contact Information:(303) 759-3399 (phone)

(303) 759-3363 (fax)

goldrush@coalliance.org

Staff toolbox web report forms

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