Serials Solutions ERM Development
Development Partner Questions (Q1 2005) updated by UIC.
Bibliographic
1. Besides full-text electronic journals, A&I, and eBooks, what are the other types of
electronic resources do you expect to track?
 databases (such as BioKnowledge);
 memberships to consortia that provide access to electronic resources
Linda Naru/Adm

We will also track full-text data resources such as SciFinder Scholar and
Beilstein/Gmelin
Deb Blecic/CD
2. Can you provide a complete list of your electronic resources to us. Does the list include
the type of resource and the subject categories to which you’ve assigned each resource?
Yes, we can provide a list -- not sure if we can do a subject list at this
time
Deb Blecic/CD
We could try to pull from our catalog bibs which would have subjects; but that’s one of
our problems, we’ve never had easy to maintain subject access:
 Our Webfeat federated search has subject access (it’s behind our firewall so I’ll
attach the subjects on page 10).
 see our hand-crafted “Subject-Area List of Selected Indexes and Databases”
http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/reference/resources/subject.shtml
 see our hand-crafted subject guides – choose second choice “subject-based
research guide” on http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/reference/services/pathfinders/ and
http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/lhs/resources/guides.shtml
 we’ve been moving toward maintaining article indexes and databases in our
MyLibrary portal – this would also enable us to generate static subject pages via our
MyLibrary portal – see http://mylibrary.lib.uic.edu/static/ for a sample.
Note: we’re using 60 subject disciplines here that match our curriculum, but we’d
be open to any subject approach that Serials Solutions is working on.
– Ellen Starkman/Deb Blecic/Annie Armstrong
3. Are there data customization elements (example: custom date ranges, URLs) currently
missing from the client center that you need for ERM?
Everything you can give us! –Custom date ranges, years of coverage, custom note files, descriptions of databases,
image icons, subject access.
Re: image icons, we currently use them on our indexes and databases list to note:
- Full-Text Available (FT)
- UIC licensed subscription resource - Login required for off-campus use (UIC)
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- Free Resource, no login required (blank, no icon)
- PDA Download Available (PDA)
- Info (Click for Information/description about the database),
We maintain the Info files on our Web site and link to them from our MyLibrary portal and
Webfeat pages (and coming soon to our Health Sciences Gateway Database list).
See http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/reference/resources/electronicresources.shtml and
http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/lhs/resources/databases.shtml
We would like image icons as well as a breakout by subject.
Ellen Starkman/Deb Blecic/Annie Armstrong
Access
4. Would you use a feature that allows you to track your library IP ranges used for access to
your electronic resources? How should this feature work to meet your needs?
Yes. ARL asks for a percentage of resources that are used in house vs outside, it would
be nice to track inside library use, campus use, remote off campus use, etc.
Ellen Starkman/Deb Blecic
5. Do you want the ability to communicate changes/additions to your IP information to your
vendors directly from the application?
Yes -- especially when we have a change in IPs -- this would be very useful.
Ellen Starkman/Deb Blecic
6. Enhancements to our current proxy support?
The current system of adding our proxy or having no proxy per resource works for us.
Annie Armstrong/Ref
7. Explain any authentication needs that you would like us to support, such as the ability for
our resource discovery tools to pass a username/password to a patron using some type
of authentication on the SerSol side.
When a vendor can’t do IP authentication, this could be a useful feature.
When a vendor can’t do IP authentication we create an html page with our username and
password in a restricted directory requiring users to authenticate if they are off-campus
and click through this page to get the password. If we could enter a username and
password in the client center/erm and have it automatically passed to a user that would
be very nice.
Ellen Starkman/Deb Blecic/Annie Armstrong
Subscription
8. What are the critical metadata elements about a resource subscription that you want to
track (other than license related)? For example, first version of subscription management
will support tracking contacts, notes, admin logins/passwords, user logins/passwords.
All mentioned above plus provider information about titles in packages.
For us, the notes section could be used for tracking payment agreements for multicampus agreements. We frequently split charges with our sister campuses (UIUC, UIS).
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We’d need at least 100 characters, eg, UIC pays 37.5 %, UIS 2.5 %, UIUC whatevever’s
left.
Linda Naru/Adm; Deb Blecic/CD
9. Should the system manage communication with your vendors directly, or is it enough that
staff can find the contact information for a vendor and click on an email link to send an
email? For example, perhaps the system should keep track of your vendor
communication by providing an input box to create and send an email so you have a
record of it.
Having a record of vendor communication for all to access is a desired feature.
Linda Naru/Adm
It would be useful if vendors were encouraged to post changes to their holdings such as
added or removed titles somewhere on the site so that librarians who maintain holdings
information in Serials Solutions could make necessary updates. Furthermore, email
notification of these changes to designated contact people who update the client center
at our institution would be helpful.
Annie Armstrong/Reference
Licensing
10. Explain your needs related to managing the relationship between print and electronic
versions of a title and how this system should enable management of that relationship.

Licenses go through the university Purchasing office, so we need a way to track
when we send them, where in the review process the paperwork is.

We need easy access to terms of use for ILL
Linda Naru/Adm
11. Would you expect to be able to import current licensing data into this system? If so, can
you provide detailed information about the format & entity relationships? Would it be
satisfactory if the system could only provide support for partial importing with additional
data entry required by hand?
Yes, we can scan in or copy electronic versions of license agreements. Additional data
entry is OK, especially if the format summarizes important aspects of the agreement in a
convenient (chart?) format, e.g., access beyond campus, ILL, document delivery
privileges.
Linda Naru/Adm
12. Are you interested in the ability to have consortia license aggreements handled at the
consortia level? Describe how you think that feature might have to work to meet your
needs.
Yes; access to license by all consortia members, controlled by consortia
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Offices.
Linda Naru/Adm
13. Provide some examples of licensing arrangements for resources that you think are
particularly complex.
We have a problem with overlapping IP numbers and multiple sites with interesting
agreements. For example, with Highwire, we need to negotiate with each journal
provider as Highwire won’t give us a blanket exemption to their licensing agreement.
We need to have two sets of IPs registered for Journal packages that are consortial with
CIC because of IP problems with another university, one set for what UIUC has also and
one set for what UIC alone has.
In a CIC agreement, 90% are the same titles for both campuses, but 10% are not.
For example, we need to register the IPs for our Library of the Health Sciences at Urbana
for what the big UIUC Urbana doesn’t have. This can be very tricky when combined with
print requirements for electronic resources -- for example with the American Institute of
Physics, we might not have registered LHSU IPs because the big UIUC Urbana
subscribed – but If UIUC does not have the print of one title that UIC has, in order to get
electronic access for LHS Ubrana we have a problem that we need to resolve and record.
We need to track where we are required to keep paper subscriptions, for example:
-
with Elsevier, we only need one paper an any 3 campuses;
-
for Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, we need to keep 4 paper
subscriptions on UIC (Highwire);
-
Deb Blecic/CD
14. What are some current data elements you track about a license that to you are
particularly important for this system to support?
See #13 – We want to track if another campus has a resource – we track UIUC because
of IP problem. We need to track where we’re required to keep subscriptions.
Re: IPs, depending on the resource and agreement, we register any combination of:
IPS for UIC-Chicago/Rockford/Peoria:
128.248.*.* 131.193.*.* 64.107.204.* 64.107.205.* 64.107.206.* 64.107.207.*
65.79.120.* 65.79.121.* 65.79.122.* 65.79.123.*
IPs for UIC-Urbana (only when UIUC is not included):
128.174.87.* 128.174.9.66-94
domain: uic.edu
IPs for UIS:
192.102.230.* 209.174.129.* 209.174.159.* 216.124.244.* 216.124.245.* 216.124.246.* 216.124.247.*
IPs for Big UIUC:
141.142. *.* 128.174.*.* 130.126.*.*
Ellen Starkman/Systems
Acquisitions
15. Describe your current acquisitions workflow.
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Description of our current acquisitions workflow and the roles within the workflow follows For electronic products (abbreviated workflow):
1. Bibliographers select a product, request information from vendor or website, including
draft license agreement. Initiates entry in DOLLeR.
2. Library Administration reviews license agreement, negotiates if necessary, and may
send to University Legal Counsel for review. Enters some fiscal information into separate
spreadsheet. Updates DOLLeR when completed
3. Systems staff review technical requirements; add resource to Ezproxy. Updates
DOLLeR when completed
4. If not a consortial agreement with other state institutions:
a. Invoice is sent to Acquisitions for payment
b. If there is not an existing purchase order, a bibliographic record is created for
the product by the Catalog Department, who updates DOLLeR with bib record number.
c. Acquisitions creates a purchase order record in Voyager, our ILS. This PO
identifies the location for the e-product (Main or LHS), the fund code on which the invoice
is paid, the vendor name (occasionally a vendor record must be created in Voyager if it is
a new vendor).
d. Acquisitions creates an invoice record linked to the purchase order. In this
record is included the invoice number and date, the amount to be paid, the fund to be
used, dates of coverage of the invoice, and any special notes regarding the license.
e. Acquisitions enters payment information into University’s accounting system
(Banner) which causes a check to be printed for the vendor.
f. Acquisitions updates DOLLeR with purchase order number if not already there,
indicates payment has been made, and notifies bibliographers and others that the
payment has been posted
5. If a consortial agreement is involved with another state institution:
a. Library Business Office transfers funds from UIC account to the other
university’s account using Banner.
b. After the transfer is completed, Business Office sends invoice to Acquisitions
for payment to be posted in Voyager.
c. If there is not an existing purchase order, a bibliographic record is created for
the product by the Catalog Department. Updates DOLLeR with bib record number.
d. Acquisitions creates a purchase order record in Voyager, our ILS. This PO
identifies the location for the e-product (Main or LHS), the fund code on which the invoice
is paid, the vendor name (occasionally a vendor record must be created in Voyager if it is
a new vendor).
e. Acquisitions creates an invoice record linked to the purchase order. In this
record is included the invoice number and date, the amount to be paid, the fund to be
used, dates of coverage of the invoice, and any special notes regarding the license.
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f. Acquisitions updates DOLLeR with purchase order number if not already there,
indicates payment has been made, and notifies bibliographers and others that the
payment has been posted.
Alex Bloss/Acqusisitions
g. Bibliographers notify librarians who maintain e-journal and e-resources list to
add new items to appropriate lists (e-journal list, alphabetical list of electronic resources,
subject-area list of electronic resources). Webfeat and MyLibrary are not currently
“required” additions in this process, but the ERM could potentially designate which
subject areas of Webfeat and MyLibrary to add each new resource to.
Annie Armstrong/Reference
16. Define the roles within the workflow
See above answer for #15
17. Would you modify that workflow to fit the system’s workflow, or do you require ability to
completely customize the system to fit your needs?
I would be willing to modify up to a point, but the Voyager and Banner requirements are
outside of my ability to change.
Alex Bloss/Acquisitions
18. What would be your expectation of how the system will help you manage that workflow?
I envision a checklist type of format in which certain tasks would be performed and then
handed off electronically to another person in the process. This could happen by means
of an automatic email addressed to other people in the processing chain that is sent
(perhaps including a free text message capability) when the task is checked off. This
would permit the manager of the process to be able to review the status of each license
or subscription and would make communication easy among all of the players.
Alex Bloss/Acquisitions
19. Should the system focus on supporting communication by email among staff without
regard to keeping track of that email, or do you want the system to manage an archive of
communication about your resources?
Email communication among staff is very important in an ERM. For my use particularly,
there is not a need for archiving email messages, but I can see when communicating with
the vendor or customer support that an email trail would be very useful.
Alex Bloss/Acquisitions
Yes, I agree that an email trail or extended notes section would be good.
Ellen Starkman/Systems
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Ideally, there would be links from databases and e-journals within the Client Center to the
email communication and history of actions regarding the particular resource (including
license agreements).
Annie Armstrong/Reference
20. Is it enough that system help you manage the workflow up to the point of the actual
ordering/budgeting/invoicing process enabled by your LMS, or is it a requirement that the
system interact directly with the LMS in some way? For example, once a decision was
made to purchase a product, would it be enough for the system to send an email to the
appropriate staff person to actually order the resource and manage the
payment/acquisition steps, or would you expect/want the system to inform the LMS?
It is a requirement for the system to link with our LMS (Voyager) so that I could move
back and forth between the two. A seamless interface between my LMS and the ERM
would be most important. It would be useful, for example, to click on an embedded
purchase order number in the ERM and have it take me to the Voyager PO, or to create a
purchase order in Voyager from information embedded in the ERM. Duplicate entry is a
concern of mine, and doing a process once instead of twice is important. And I do need
to use Voyager and not rely solely on the ERM for fund management, as payments for
these products are only a part of the total budget which is controlled by the LMS. Also,
there are notes about the payment (for example, paid on a credit card) that go into the
Voyager payment record that I don’t record in DOLLeR, but might be useful for people
using the ERM to know.
Another requirement will be to have the bibliographic record for a product available
before the acquisition process is started. Our LMS purchase orders must be linked to a
bib record before an invoice can be paid. Also, having such a record for review by the
selectors at the beginning of the selection process may give them further information
about the product, related products, previous manifestations, etc.
It would also be very useful to have the bibliographic record linked to the ERM to facilitate
searching, corrections to holdings records, and the like. Searching a product’s name can
be difficult, as there are many variations in how a product is described. There are often
discrepancies or differences between the bibliographic record (which lists many variant
titles), the vendor’s name for their package or product, what appears on the electronic
product, and on the invoice sent to us. Often, the form on the name of the invoice is
abbreviated beyond recognition, and this may vary from year to year.
Though not critical, a link to the University’s Banner accounting system, in which checks
or fund transfers could be monitored, would be useful. (This is probably not very
achievable due to the structure of Banner, but it would be nice. Many other academic
institutions use Banner.)
Alex Bloss/Acquisitions
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Resource Analysis
21. How should overlap analysis be enhanced to better meet your needs? and
22. What are your current statistical analysis requirements?




price per resource, especially for those in packages
historical prices per resource
use per resource (historical and current)
records of joint purchases, especially with on-campus departments and consortia
Linda Naru/Adm
23. Would you prefer to manage your stats off line at your own site, or within the Serials
Solutions ERM application? Or both?
We would be interested in trying the stats management with Serials Solutions to see if it
would meet our needs.
Deb Blecic/CD
24. Do you want the ability to archive your vendor usage stats files on SerSol server?
Yes, but we would also like to be able to download the archive to local storage as a
backup
Deb Blecic/CD)
25. Current development plans call for building a tool that aggregates your vendor stats into a
single archive in order to enhance your reporting capability. What types of reports would
you expect/want to get from such a feature? Example: subject analysis based on
database/title subjects.
We would like all four ICOLC elements to be collected if they are available from vendors,
and also other elements such as PDA downloads, etc if available.
We would like to be notified if vendors change the way they count use, for example
if they switch from standard to Counter-compliant statistics.
Deb Blecic/CD
Resource Discovery Tools
26. The Serials Solutions ERM will directly intergrate with our own resource discovery tools,
such as the E-Journal Portal, Article Linker and MARC records. Do you have a need for it
to integrate with another vendor’s tools? Which one and how would you expect the
system to integrate with it?
It would be helpful if we could integrate the ERM with Webfeat, and MyLibrary. At the
point of adding a database to the ERM, it could be assigned subject-areas, and added
accordingly (perhaps automatically) to Webfeat and MyLibrary. Or, it could send a note to
a specific person telling them to add it. Ideally, the ERM could track usage of resources
from within either of these systems – or allow raw statistics from these to be imported to
the ERM.
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Annie Armstrong/Reference
27. Do you want the system to support an internal resource discovery tool, such as a library
web site or internal A-Z list? What are the requirements for such support?
Yes!
We would like the system to support searchable A-Z, and subject lists for electronic
resources on our library Web page. Users could access databases by searching for them
by title and keyword, or by using a subject drop-down menu (much like the current
functionality of the e-journal portal). This means that each resource in the ERM would
have multiple subject designations, in addition to being flagged as “full-text,” or
“general/multidisciplinary” in certain cases. These subject categorizations would facilitate
the process of adding resources to appropriate areas in other resources as well (Webfeat
and My Library). For an example of this functionality, see the “Find Databases” page
developed by the Cornell University Library:
http://encompass.library.cornell.edu:20028/logicrouter/index.html
A subject drop-down menu would be a helpful addition to such a page. This list of subject
categories would include general databases and newspaper databases in addition to
specific disciplines.
Annie Armstrong/Reference
Peer Communication
28. Would it be valuable to you for you to have the ability to communicate directly with other
client libraries within this system? For example, your staff might create a review of a
resource used during the evaluation period. Would you want the ability to share that
review with other libraries? Would you use such a feature? If so, describe your ideal
system in which you would be able to communicate with other librarians outside of your
own institution.
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Subjects on Webfeat interface (answer to question 2)
(note: we’re undergoing some changes here; if you’d like access, we can give you a
password to get through our proxy, please let estarkma@uic.edu know)
All Resources
Arts & Humanities
--Architecture
--Art & Design
--Communication
--English
--Film & Photography
--Foreign Languages
--History
--Literature
--Philosophy
--Theater
Health Sciences
--Health Administration
--Medicine
--Nursing
--Pharmacy
--Public Health
Multidisciplinary Resouces
-- Conference Proceedings
--Dissertations
--Internet Resources
--Reference Resources
Science & Technology
--Biology
--Chemistry
--Engineering
--Environment
--Geology
--Math
--Physics
Social & Behavioral Sciences
--Anthropology
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--Business
--Criminal Justice
--Education
--Ethnic Studies
--Gender Studies
--History
--Political Science
--Psychology
--Social Work
--Sociology
Undergraduate Core
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