Some figures!
In order to decide on the workflows we need to adopt in future, we are busy populating both KB+ and Serial Solution’s 360 Resource Manager with licenses. We are putting about 50% in each to see which is the most effiecient (more about that in a future blog post!). In the meantime we thought it would be useful to try and quantify the work as “one of the most time consuming parts of an ERM implementation is analyzing of licenses and inputting them into the relevant fields of an ERM in order for them to meaningful to librarians and patrons”. (1)
Indeed, “a risk of ERMS implementations, more talked about than written about… …was that the costs (in added work) to maintain a new system would outweigh the value of the added functionality.”(2)
In total we have access to and guide students towards 645 different e-resources, these include: subscriptions such as Early English Books Online; negotiated journal packages such as ScienceDirect; free resources such as 19th century British pamphlets; individual journal titles with an e-access element; and links to other miscellaneous resources.
Out of these 645 resources, 483 (75%) are available through Serial Solutions, of these 483 we only have licences for 175 (36%) of the resources.
Of the 162 resources that are not available through Serial Solutions we have licences for 66 (40%).
Therefore we only have around 37% of the available licences.
Although this appears as though we have only a small percentage of the licences we should have, in a number of instances licences are not available for the resource. Some are free resources that are available to all via the internet, others are resources from small companies which although require a subscription they don’t have a licence, and there are some which are open access resources which do not necessarily have a licence agreement. This is something we need to consider in future, we could for example, approach publishers/vendors to accept the SERU guidelines (3).
[1] Jill Emery and Graham Stone, “TERMS (Techniques in Electronic Resource Management),” Library technology Reports forthcoming April 2013.
[2]. Nat Gustafson-Sundell, “Think Locally: A Prudent Approach to Electronic Resource Management Systems,” Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship 23, no.2 (2011), 126-141. dx.doi.org/10.1080/1941126X.2011.576955.
[3]. NISO, “SERU Guidelines,” www.niso.org/workrooms/seru (accessed 6 November 2012).