Part II of my Unit 9 post…
As I worked my way through this week’s readings, I wrote in my journal about my desire to be in a work position where I could get hands-on experience with ERMS’s to get a better understanding of where all these acronyms and systems fit together. And then my wish came true! One of my classmates gave a fantastic hands-on demo with using the open source ERMS called ERMes, developed by a librarian at UW-Eau Claire. It was great! We first downloaded the program, then learned about the interface and how to navigate it, then actually used it on our local desktops with some dummy data prepared by the presenter.
As much as I wanted to get experience with these systems in order to better understand them, I will admit that I was skeptical of the demo and nervous about using it for fear that the ERMS would be too complicated and just confuse me more. However, it was so good to go through the motions of what exactly an ERMS entails, understand why “manual data entry” is a huge inconvenience especially at a place with as many resources as UW (I don’t mind a little manual data entry every now and then, but after only working with five databases’ information? No. Way.).
Last but not least, what I really enjoyed this week was how much of the information really started to evidence connections to other units as well as across my other courses this fall. First, the connections to other units was very apparent when I read, “Ted Koppel (2006) predicts there will be a move away from aggregators to more title selection with more truth in pricing...Additionally, there will be increased transparency for content providers on pricing, and the demise of aggregator packages...There will be pay-per-view support and tracking within ERM” (Hogather & Bloom, 2003). Whoa – didn’t we just spend an entire unit a few weeks ago discussing pricing and subscription models, and the Big Deal still ropes even more libraries into their package deals right alongside even less transparency for pricing. Also, learning about the forthcoming developments in Phase II of ERMI really motivated me that licensing will continue to become more streamlined for libraries with things like licensing expression and data dictionaries.
Speaking of data dictionaries, this week’s unit really connected to the database design (DBD, I’ll call it for short) course I am taking. I feel very fortunate to be taking DBD because not only am I spared feeling overwhelmed at the overload of lingo, but I understand the pathways and relationships between user, library, resource, and specific content. It is neat to see from the librarian end of things why data standards and types of usage data allowed for on the DBD end of things is so important. Plus, I felt pretty good reading about ERDs and knowing that not only did I know what it is but also how to make one and make it well for the highest efficiency for the purpose it was meant to have. No matter how hectic this time of the semester can get, it always seems to coincide with moments when I start realizing how different classes begin to overlap and connect - love it.
Image credit: Me! :) Happy pre-Halloween!
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