IUG 2007 – Quick start to ERM

Ted Fons, III Senior Product Manager and Caitlin Spears, III Library Training Consultant

ERM is a central place to store information about electronic resources and exposes that information to staff and library users. Quick start to ERM is a collection of things to help libraries to get started with ERM once they’ve installed it. There’s a training guide, records to install, updates to the fields on older implementations.

Quick start is a service that can be purchased from III for older installations. http://csdirect.iii.com/documentation/training/#qs is the address for the Quick Start Guide that goes with the Quick Start service. Note that this is a password protected link that will only be available to III customers with a username and password.

Caitlin’s part of the presentation included a very useful timeline for implementation and then she went back and reviewed the steps in detail. One of the most useful parts of this is the fact that they can take our existing data (in an Access database, an Excel spreadsheet, or existing bibliographic records for instance) and upload it into ERM.

There are really only two required fields for resource records: the resource name and the resource ID. There are no required fields for license records. There are two required fields for contacts records: contact code and contact name. Resource records also provide the capability of sending an email reminder of things like a renewal date or other important date to the maintenance of the resource.

Coverage data can be imported via CASE, vendor provided files, external knowledge bases (e.g. SFX…see session M5 for more info about a script that allows importing coverage data from the SFX knowledge base), or library maintained fields. Load is enabled by the resource ID in the coverage field. If a matching record in the libraries’ system is not matched in the load data, a brief bib with holdings data is created. Matching is based on the “i” index (ISSN field). There is also the capability of editing the coverage information that comes in with the load.

Caitlin included some examples in her presentation, for instance a resource search in the Cornell University Libraries site, a journal search from the University of Arizona Library site and the Yale Law Library.

ERM can also provide an “A-to-Z” list of electronic resources. Some more examples are Bowling Green State University and Georgetown Law Library. The A-to-Z list of resources is searchable by title and by subject (some of which come out of the box and which are customizable).

Additional Quick Start immediate capabilities:
-user level resource “terms of use” and resource advisories
-reminder emails
-staff level license and resource information
-integration with WebBridge, III’s open URL link resolver
-the ability to import usage data using SUSHI
-title overlap reports

Finally, they provided a link to a document authored by Mark Strang at Bowling Green State University that includes a pictorial guide to ERM records, wwwoptions, and some html files which is available at
http://innovativeusers.org/cgi-bin/clearinghouse/view.pl?id=123.