Used to be (at FPOW) I would spend 20-25 hours a month manually gathering database usage data and manually updating this huge spreadsheet with all kinds of fancy cross-links to summary sheets which took me a good three years to build and which I continually tweaked.
Well, a job change a few years ago basically killed that beautiful spreadsheet (different databases, forgot what I did where to make it work right, no time to even glance toward database stats, and other huge little stuff) and I’d been wanting an easy way to skip most of the manual stuff. Enter SUSHI & COUNTER standards.
After being asked for a recommendation on an ERMS a year (or more) ago those 20-25 hours a month seemed like waay too much hassle. I explored a bunch of options, never wrote up the process, and in the end we went with Serialssolutions 360 Resource Manager and 360 Counter products as an ERMS and Assessment combination. (long story short, it meshed well with the rest of our stable of SerialsSolutions products – we don’t do 360 MARC Records since we use the 360 Core A-Z list for all periodicals access)
Time passed, other priorities reared their ugly heads. More on the story in the next post…
I encourage people to get a handle on their eResources however you may, I had a spreadsheet which did everything except sliced bread. Now I have a hosted ERMS which I … well I’m getting ahead of myself.
/end backgrounder
Aaron the Librarian 