Innovating e-serials at NYU

New York University is using Electronic Resource Management software from Innovative Interfaces to help evaluate, acquire and maintain its electronic resources. NYU found that it needed such a solution because of the immense size of its collection: more than 25,000 e-journals from publishers, nearly 16,000 additional ones aggregated in commercial databases, 407 reference databases, and numerous products covering electronic books and primary source material.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that the campus includes six libraries. Among them, the main library and two medical libraries jointly buy electronic resources in the sciences and wanted a way to coordinate the shared subscription payments.

"Selection, purchasing, workflow and evaluation of our subscriptions will be improved with Electronic Resource Management," says Angela Carreno, the collections coordinator at NYU. "Like many libraries, we used a combination of stop-gap measures with our e-serials."

A spreadsheet was used for vendor contact information, IP management and shared information on how various campus libraries paid for resources. There were also spreadsheets for specific vendors as well as paper files. Because several library departments handled different areas of e-serial management, the information was not always synchronized or up-to-date.

"Now we have a central place for this information that is more durable than what we had in the past," Carreno says. "Library staff needing the status of a subscription can now get real-time information from the software." Staff can also track performance of subscription products by documenting technical problems that will help in troubleshooting access issues with the vendor or publisher.

According to Innovative, NYU will take advantage of the newest release of the software, which includes such enhancements as the ability to implement a consortial environment and to report on overlaps in titles between information packages.