...
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 15, 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. Let’s discuss where we are with it and where to go from here. The four areas that are possible to share data via CE areWe 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. This compounds our concerns about the overall slowness of the Client Center (see below)
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.
...
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.
Summary of functionality and issues:
Not really a "shared workflow" tool. Really a top down consortia tool.
Recommend: Cancel CE, explore Intota platform for e-resource management, get involved in Intota consortial functionality implementation planning. Ideally at a zero additional cost .
_____
Pros of ditching CE:
- Intota becomes an option
- Potential savings in time/effort can be found without CE
Slowness of Client Center itself is an issue. CE compounds this as there ends up being more clicking.Massive slowness at Columbia is a separate, but high priority issue. See support issue #: