The 2CUL E-Resources Team recommends that we not renew the Resource Manager Consortial Edition (CE) product with ProQuest/Serials Solutions (renewal cost: $20,000 split between Cornell and Columbia). The Consortial Edition is inadequate for 2CUL workflow sharing. Indeed, in some cases, the product does not even function as promised. The few functions that we still can take advantage of do not justify the $20,000 cost to renew when our current subscription ends in February. We feel that we can make considerably better progress operating together in the separate instances of Resource Manager, than we can with the CE layer.
This decision will also open up an opportunity to move to the Intota platform for our e-resource management, if we feel that gives us improved workflow options. We feel that Resource Manager is still a good place for us to be collaborating, and that the other ProQuest/Serials Solutions products are useful to that end. As it currently stands, the CE system is not a viable piece of the overall puzzle for us. CE is more of a top down consortia tool than shared workflow tool.
Recommend:
- Cancel CE at both Cornell and Columbia
- Potentially explore e-resource management on the ProQuest Intota platform. This is likely to replace the Client Center in the coming years, but does not currently have consortial functionality. Getting involved sooner could give 2CUL influence over consortial functionality development. We would propose trial access to the system at no cost to 2CUL.
Renewal date - February 1, 2015
Communicate cancellation with ProQuest by December 10, 2014
CE functional status review
CE has not been as particularly fruitful thus far due to bugs and generally not meeting our expectations for functionality. We considered each of the four shareable data categories:
Databases - Our intent was to be able to manage some of our common ejournal, ebook, and database collections via CE, reducing duplicate effort across 2CUL.
- Reality: Inherited resources have no flexibility on the local level for even slight variation in titles or status. All resources inherited from CE appear as "From Consortium" instead of the actual resource status. This requires considerable additional clicking and searching to simply see the status before making any changes.
Contacts - Our intent was to store all Contacts at the CE level, then connect them to appropriate providers and databases at either the CE or local level, depending on the situation. This would have reduced double entry of data and would have provided a one stop location for identifying contacts when troubleshooting or maintaining resources for each other.
- Reality: Unfortunately, a software bug makes this not function as desired or designed. We have an outstanding ticket for this issue, but do not expect a timely resolution.
Licenses - Our intent was to enter all e-resource licenses at the CE level, then use those as templates in the local RM systems in order to make necessary institutional customization. We expected to be able to save effort by entering 90% of the license data once for both institutions. This seems to function as desired, but this one function is not enough to justify the cost for CE.
Notes - We have not yet identified any 2CUL need for common notes and do not feel that this functionality warrants the additional cost of CE.