Digital Production & Integration Program (DPIP)
Project 03 : Electronic Reserves Prototype

Meeting summary 3/28/2006

Jen confirmed our journal licenses (except for one) make it possible to directly link to an article from an ereserves system with no extra cost. Sandy reported the lone exception did work out an agreement for use in ereserves with a customer.

Katie gave a summary of the pilot project done in 1999/2000 in the Library. Students had issues with the time it took to print documents and the quality of the documents – these issues might have been caused by the available technology in 1999/2000. Feedback said they did prefer printed course packs to ereserves, but did prefer ereserves to coming to the Library for the article.

We briefly discussed the summary provided on the Divinity Pilot project and the workflow document provided by Medical.

George provided an overview of 4 ereserve systems – two open source and two vendor products and provided documentation on features.

Audrey gave a summary of how reserves work in Orbis currently. She believes Voyager has many of the features of ereserves systems already.

We then discussed next steps and potential for a pilot project. After reviewing various options we decided we should recommend a prototype of an ereserves service using content already available digitally for SSL, Divinity (who both volunteered) and, if possible, Art for the fall term.

Medical will also prototype a digitization service and will track the issues related to it. Their results will help guide a discussion on implementation a digitization service and the associated copyright costs. A second pilot project might include expanded service for digitization.

We will use these pilot projects to develop workflows using SFX as the means to link to the article and Orbis as the location of the reserve lists. We will also prototype delivery of reserve information to course management systems via RSS feeds from Orbis. We will track the number of requests processed and track the number of requests not fulfilled, as we aren’t digitizing items in the prototype. We will perform assessment using an assessment tool developed for this project.

Next steps:

-Kalee will talk to Judy Spak about RSS integration into Blackboard.

-Katie will investigate direct linking to an article from SFX.

-Audrey will review workflow and functionality of ereserves in Orbis and report back.

-Katie will develop an assessment tool to use for the pilot.

-Sandy and Suzanne will identify 5 faculty from SSL and Divinity who will be approached about participation in the project.

-Karen will touch base with the Art Library about participation.

We will meet again in early April.