Apologies about the blog being a bit slow as of late. My hopeful volunteering has hit a snag with people at the possible place of volunteering being extremely busy and us having a hard time synching schedules. However, in exciting news, I will be transitioning this blog from discussing my experience learning ERM in a class to my experience learning ERM as a newbie librarian. I just was hired at a new position in which I will be working extensively with trying to better integrate ERM into all aspects of the technical library workflow through an open source project called Kuali. As such, I look forward to sharing my thoughts, my failures, and my almost successes!
What is Kuali you ask? Good question, says I. Allow me to explain as much as I can (from my reading and discussion with soon to be new work place). Kuali OLE is an open source Integrated Library Management System for academic libraries that is trying to more fully incorporate the acquisitions, management, and metadata needs of Electronic Resources (unlike many traditional ILMS, which are strongly focused towards traditional print resources). It is built upon a series of modules that are basically processes that can affect different entities (collections, individual resources, persons). I will be working with the first two of these workflow modules: Select and Acquire entity. These two represent the earliest parts of an entities life with the library: the mark for purchase or at at least interest and initial ingest into the system, as well as rights, licensing and other purchase information once the object has been decided on and added into the library's holdings. Other modules include the Deliver module, which tracks the request of an item by a patron, and what use restrictions or notices should go along with this request. It then supplies the resource to the patron or computer which the patron is using. Describe is about the addition and display of the appropriate metadata for each type of entity, and finally Manage is what it sounds like, management of the entire process from there on out:usage, repair, technical troubles, updates, etc. Its pretty ambitious to try and encapsulate all types of materials used at an academic library, and I am thrilled to be a part of it. Goals for now are learning all I can about it, test driving it, oh, and maybe actually trying to finally really, for serious this time, learn some basic programming.
Anyway, I hope to keep you all up to date on this new part of my life which will technically start in July, but for which I will be preparing for long before then. And if any of you have tried to use Kuali OLE before, or work with it, let me know what you think about it. I believe that it is highly ambitious, especially in terms of time line to completion (necessary in order to complete before grand funding goes bye), but worthwhile endeavor.
