The shift to electronic - managing e-resources in Alma

Roger Brisson, Boston University
[live-blog IGeLU Conference 2013, Berlin - please forgive typos etc.]

There are different kinds of e-resources: e-journals, e-books, databases, mixed packages etc. There are also different types of orderning e-material. We were very early adopters of Alma and at that time, Alma was still undergoing lots of developments. This gave us an opportunity to shape Alma. Over the past year, we've seen new functionalities every month, which has helped to refine workflows. The first thing we wanted to do when going live was to stabilise. We were also looking at how to automate things based on our core values. The library system used influences the reality of services we provide and with our old system designed for print, we were creating work arounds which were becoming unsustainable. When we started working with Alma it was really good to see how everything could be integrated together.I also monitored tasks that we were duplicating and seeing how this could be improved.With the discovery system, we can do things with our data.

As libraries, we need to re-define ourselves and we have to be more efficient with the management of e-resources. We must also change the way we do our cataloguing and share more. Our old system was too flat, not dynamic enough. Because of the print-based design, there was no flexibility and nothing more we could add. We now have more or less the same numer of electronic resources as print and it is likely that next year our e-books will be larger. We use 90% of our budget on e-.

Alma can enrich our records and make our discovery system better. E.g. there is a special box for 856 links in Primo and we are using this more and more. As early adopters, we've been setting up automatic workflows in Alma. We use existing standards (RDA and MARC) to optomise the new environment that we're working in and cutting down things we don't need anymore. An e-book for example doesn't have any physicality. So we work visually to understand what is happening and how to design a system that works. Is an electronic copy a variant? What is it?  With an e-book there are additional things, article links, videos, table of content etc.

Examples linked to resources for a new MOOCS that we are setting up: Cataloguing an e-book is not that easy. We have a pdf file and an ebook reader. The numbering of pages is not the same. How do you describe this? We scrutinise these kind of questions. Or if you have a subscription, a closed package that you make available on the net. The package has 96 resources, it's a subscription, it's very dynamic because new e-books are added all the time. Managing a dynamic package is much more challenging than a static one. Or we have an e-book database. It's designed to be read and used in the database. We won't treat this in the same way as an academic paper. Traditionally we would have pre-selected books to our readers but now we are exposing lots of books that the user has to choose from. We are expecting a lot of Alma to manage this new type of model.

In terms of uniform resoucre management and automation we want to take advantage of the central knowledge base in Primo. SFX has been mostly ingested in the central KB. We have to have a means of pulling out data out of Primo and at the same time, new books are pushed in. There needs to be a trusted interaction between the publisher/vendor and Ex Libris so that when I activate a subscription, it's reliable because I can't check 96 books every month. The confidence has to be built. That's taken care of by the CKB. We initially had an issue because the data wasn't reliable, the records weren't good enough and we've worked to change that. We are loading vendor records that we trust every month. We're not quite where we would like to be yet. Those are mostly bib records, we have separate records for acquisitions, licenses etc.We can work at a package level, either doing a simple import or an OAI.

If we consider the bib record in the institution zone, we have a record in the community zone, which is the discovery record = work (FRBR). When we have an e-version, it is par of the electronic inventory = portfolio. The manifestation should be in the inventory so based on the FRBR model, we should first see a unique record. In terms of the logic of Alma, it would make a lot of sense because at the moment a bib record contains a lot of things that are not relevant. We should really clean this up. Alma shows clearly what records come from the community zone. Activating one should include all related records in the protfolio. When migrating to Alma, part of the process is changing print records and using the P2E cleaner helps. A lot of cleaning was still required afterwards. Having all of your inventory in one system allows you to think of efficiencies, such as having only one record for both print and electronic and having all of the data together.

Q: How do you manage condition of use at e-book level?
A: You set up your licensing information, because Alma's functionality is vendor-centric and it's through the vendor record that we set up the licences etc. Depending if it's single or multiple-usage, we can manage that through the portfolios. The actual usage is controlled by the plataform itself. If the licences are separate, you may want to have different records and have them all to display differently in Primo. This might be confusing to users but those are 3 copies of a book and we want all 3 links to be viewable and active.

ExL A: when there is a tilte available through different vendors, you can specify which ones you want to show by setting up "preferences". In terms of management, we are developping overlap analysis so you will know in advance what duplications you have in your system between packages.