What does it take to manage electronic resources effectively? When faced with a myriad of detailed tasks required for e-resource management, how do you set your priorities and choose what to do first?
When e-resources first arrived, managing these volatile and expensive additions to your collection was probably manual and definitely time consuming. Then homegrown (often multiple!) software solutions and ERM systems became popular options to handle the increasing volume of e-resources. Now it’s time to apply knowledge from current practices and years of experience and re-envision how to manage e-resources.
New systems promise improvements that libraries should be prepared to take advantage of, but in the meantime there are short-term strategies that can help libraries get their ERM affairs in order and achieve greater success. Learn what works, what doesn’t work, and benefit from lessons learned over a decade of struggling to get on top of it all.
The session will start with a data and literature review of the current state of e-resource management. Results of recent library projects examining workflows in the interest of efficiency and better services for patrons will be shared by presenters with deep experience with implementation of e-resource management systems.
Attendees should be prepared to share their stories, articulate their challenges and describe their current solutions. This discussion will be synthesized by the group to discover what information is most critical to organize and store centrally for immediate efficiencies, the unresolved pain points that require re-envisioning systems, and how to best prepare for the future.
Finally, through examining examples of existing workflows and their value streams, the group will determine if specific workflow steps are adding value for patrons or just taking time.
