Serials Solutions Releases ERMS

Knowledge base key to date-level analysis and maintenance

By Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 11/1/2005

Serials Solutions October 4 announced the debut of its E-Resources Management System (ERMS) in 20 libraries, including Grand Valley State, University of Southern California, Claremont McKenna libraries in California and Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN. Jane Burke, the company’s general manager, said ERMS leverages Serials Solutions knowledge base by combining it with analytical tools. “It eliminates the need for loading and maintaining base e-resource metadata, while enabling a broad spectrum of benefits that are impossible in a system that lacks a knowledge base,” said Burke. Mike Showalter, the company’s group product manager, told LJ that the knowledge base provides several features, including tools with overlap analysis and stats benchmarking, neither of which can be correctly enabled without a knowledge base.

“You can’t perform overlap analysis without having access to all of the resources, not just those to which you subscribe, because otherwise you can’t do a preacquisition 'what if' scenario,” Showalter said. “On the data quality and accuracy, the knowledge base is tying directly to an authoritative record for each journal [according to] serials records, so we’ve got a system that’s based around the known universe of serials, including the ISSNs and uniform titles, which means we can deliver accurate information in contrast to somebody trying to deliver information from publishers, which often is incorrect.”

Showalter added that the overlap analysis is not just on the title level. “Coverage varies based on dates, so we drilled down to the coverage date level to tell you whether you have partial overlap and where that is or if you have full overlap or if it’s a unique title.”

Steve McCracken, VP in charge of product management, marketing, and business development, told LJ that another factor of the knowledge base is the maintenance aspect. “These tools are supposed to save you time, money, and energy, but if you have to load in all this data and every time you want to use a resource you have to load the resource and the title list, you have to ask yourself how much effort is this saving. It’s saving energy but adding a new layer of work you didn’t have before. By having the global knowledge base, the data is already there; it’s a single mouse click, and there it is.”

While the product is recently out of beta and into general release, Serials Solutions already is working on improvements for the next incarnation. “We have a development plan that takes us out over the next several months of adding on to it,” said Showalter. “The first thing we’re going to do is build in a cost of resource maintenance feature. We expect to have it down in early January.” This will allow librarians to keep track of their costs of the resources and the transactions of the resources as well. “You want to keep track of the costs over time so you can combine that with your usage data so you can calculate cost per click.” McCracken added that the company is really focusing on the analytical tools to help analyze the collection, not just storing the data. “We’re trying to take it to the next step and build tools that enable you to analyze that data and transform it into useful decision-making.”

Deborah Fetch, director of Austin Peay’s library services, told LJ that the library decided to go with Serials Solutions because of its track record: “We were using several of its other products and liked the [integration] and the price was right. We’ve also had good experience with the company, too, in terms of customer service.” Fetch said ERMS is “working quite well.” Austin Peay is using ERMS to handle its collection of roughly 14,000 e-journals and about 122 databases.” Fetch said exasperatedly that the library was in dire need of help with managing its electronic resources, so ERMS offered welcomed relief: “We were trying to do this on our own with an Excel spreadsheet, and it long ago got away from us. We absolutely needed something.”