SwetsWise eSource Manager

In recent weeks, Netherlands-based subscriptions service SwetsWise has announced two new projects, one a product for navigating publisher licensing agreements, and the other a crowd-sourcing wiki endeavor to collect customer-driven feedback on best practices. The new product, called eSource Manager, is being touted as an efficiency enhancing tool for e-resource librarians. It offers standard subscription management features such as a unified administration interface and a reports generator for usage statistics but also claims to be the “first product to deliver a prepopulated database of standard publisher license conditions which can be easily searched, viewed, and customized to reflect the customer's specific license agreements.”

“We noticed that many of the existing electronic resource management solutions were, in essence, empty shells requiring huge efforts from libraries to populate,” said Thomas Snyder, Swets's chief commercial officer. Integrating with the SwetsWise Subscriptions product, the new service includes features for navigating complicated and diverse subscription licenses, like tracking license signatures and the ability to “[a]ttach subscriptions to a specific license for both Swets and non-Swets managed titles,” according to the company.

In an effort to leverage the sum of knowledge held by its international customer base, SwetsWise also announced the launch of SwetsWise Community. Based on the collaborative wiki model of content contribution and editing, the Community page is being offered as a space for customers “to share best practices for the usage of SwetsWise functionalities.”

Swets has already enhanced the community pages with information “including user manuals, tutorials, and how-to guides,” the company said. But it also hopes that the Community will provide “customers with the opportunity to share their experiences and learn from colleagues how to use different functionality in ways that may not have occurred to them, or us, previously,” said Snyder. The wiki is available at community.swetswise.com, where current customers can log in and begin editing topics with their existing SwetsWise ID. Talkback forums and other features are expected in future revisions.