2014 Charleston Library Conference

Many electronic management systems (ERMS) cater to the collocation and manipulation of usage statistics in order to produce cost-per-use data for collection development purposes. Yet, as Algernon Moncrieff said, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” While commercial ERMS frequently tout the wonders of tracking and using COUNTER statistics to generate accurate reports that inform staff decision-making, there also exist ample opportunities to augment vendor-provided data with local data using standardized COUNTER templates.Binghamton University (State University of New York) is a major inter-library loan net lender, fulfilling upwards of 19,000 lending requests annually. However, despite the robustness of our collections, we still borrow approximately 15,000 total items per year at considerable cost. In our honest opinion, excluding our hard-earned ILL data would be the height of hypocrisy and give a false impression of the true costs of resource-sharing as well as its impact on collection management decisions. Hence, we decided to amplify the veracity of our cost-per-use numbers by uploading our inter-library loan transaction numbers and fees into our ERMS (ProQuest/ Serials Solutions 360 Resource Manager and 360 Counter).

Although this approach may not be conventional, our pilot project findings indicate that the integration of ILL data, along with ILLiad add-ons like Serials Solution Citation Linker, into the ERMS has great potential to contribute significantly to the overall efforts of our collection management team. This session will address challenges in selecting appropriate ILL data to upload and how to correlate COUNTER with ILL terminology to produce a true marriage. A brief Q & A period will follow, allowing attendees to engage in a meaningful exchange of ideas. This session will encourage participants to explore new ways of combining diverse data pools and channel the results into an effective collection management tool.