Vendor Fail

All my plans of writing more documentation for ERMes, making small enhancements, and posting more about how I’ve been using ERMes last month were waylaid by an insurgence of necessary “Other Work” (OWs?), most notably multiple e-resource failures.

In the last month, we’ve had eleven database outages or interface/functionality problems along with four instances of off-campus access problems. Eleven and four might not be many if I could solve such issues in a few minutes or an hour, if I had a whole posse of troubleshooters at my side, or we were not paying thousands of dollars to access this content. However, I’m a lone ranger at present, some of the issues have taken days to resolve or remain unresolved, and we are certainly not getting what we paid for. In the meantime, students and faculty have assignment and research deadlines.

In my ideal little e-resource world, I wish that all e-resource vendors were customer-centered. Unfortunately, my experiences in the last month have done a mighty fine job of illustrating how this is decidedly *not* always the case.

While I am well aware that technology has hiccups and may even come down with a bug analogous to H1N1, there are significant, substantial, magnificent, plentiful, and <insert more adjectives here>, ways in which many vendors (i.e. humans) could better support their library customers.

Why? Let’s just say we pay $10,000 a year for access to one resource, and lack of customer service leads to four days of lost access. This means that $109.89 of our subscription fee was lost for access we did not get. Of course, this is not thousands of dollars, but an amount that rings loudly at renewal time when budget cuts lead to cancellations especially since $109.89 does not even begin to account for troubleshooting time or the immense frustration of faculty and students who actually need and want to use the resource instead of Google.

Based on this month’s experiences, I have a few suggestions for e-resource vendors:

1. Support thy Customer
   After multiple voice mail/e-mail messages and a multi-day e-resource outage, I am very relieved to hear from a sales representative! I am even more relieved when the vendor “researched [our] issue,” made “an adjustment” to our account and access was back in less than an hour.However, this means that the multi-day outage could have been reduced to minutes *if* I had been able to contact technical support immediately. When I asked if I could please have a direct phone number/e-mail for tech support, since I could not find one said vendor’s website I was told “Well, that’s kind of by design.”  (!) When I heard this, I heard how profoundly the vendor cares for their customers – or not. An e-resource outage is frustrating enough, but the inability to even report the problem and have it fixed within a timely manner is excruciating to colleagues, faculty, students, and me.
2. Know thy Customer
   To fix an access issue, one vendor suggested that a “cookie would have to be installed on your systems.” While this might be a viable and doable solution for some customers, it is not at all feasible for an academic campus with more than 500 lab computers that all have security settings that erase cookies upon logout, not to mention the faculty and staff computers and/or off campus access via EZ Proxy as permitted in license agreement.
3. Speak to thy Customer
   While the ability to submit a problem report via a website is a welcome convenience, it is a bridge to nowhere if a. I do not receive verification that you received the problem report and b. the vendor does not alert me when the problem is resolved. Furthermore, it is wonderful when vendors offer to alert me when a problem is fixed, but if vendors do not follow-through with this offer, I assume the problem persists.
4. Provide  for thy Customer
   While the links may not be broken for higher-paying corporate subscribers, the fact that they are broken for academic users means that future customers are seeing a dysfunctional product. Bad experiences linger long and vividly in one’s memory and could result in these future customers choosing a competing product. Also, just because a vendor added content to a database without a subscription increase does not help if functionality to access this content does not work (e.g. over 2,000 broken links) — kind of like it doesn’t help to have a GPS system in a car if the steering wheel is missing.

<pause>
While I illustrate examples of poor service and support here, let it be known that I also work with vendors that do provide support, support us well, that do understand us, and that do provide content or make great efforts to fix content errors when found. I also wish to note that some of the humans I dealt with in the above-mentioned scenarios were professional and courteous and clearly trying to be customer-centered within the constraints of a system that was not.
</pause>

We libraries could always walk away from e-resource subscriptions due to customer service failures now couldn’t we? Except that, it is not always that simple is it?

In the meantime, I am logging all such problems in ERMes so that, come renewal time, I can total days without access and deduct the cost of lost access from our invoices.

What ERMes did on Summer Vacation

Though it may appear to have been a quiet summer for ERMes due to the lack of blog posts, ERMes was busy:

• I just finished a data audit of our e-resources in which I added and migrated more data to  ERMes. In other words, I made ERMes work hard and while these activities ignited new excitement for finally having an e-resource management system, it also fostered ideas for ERMes’ future. I have a growing list of enhancements from ERMes users that I added to, and I’m overwhelmed thrilled how – after using ERMes for multiple budget cycles – having such a system forces supports evaluation of e-resource management work flow.
• The September 2009 issues of Computers in Libraries includes a follow-up to last year’s article: “ERMes: Open Source Simplicity for Your E-Resource Management.” A big thank you to my colleague, William Doering for initiating the article-writing and letting me tag along, and to Jenifer Holman, Norma J. Dowell, Anna Hulesburg, Tessa L.H. Michew, and Qinghua Xu for providing user feedback for the article!

In coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more about these summer adventures, but in the meantime, happy fall everyone!

Negotiating for e-ILL Rights

While some vendors prohibit fulfilling Interlibrary Loan requests with electronic content, others permit it as long as you print a paper copy of the article first, but then you can scan the article to fulfill the request electronically. Going from electronic to paper to electronic is rather impractical.

Here are two clauses that I’ve used to negotiate rights to fulfill interlibrary loan requests electronically, no paper needed:

1. It is understood that Licensee may wish to use [database name] for the purpose of fulfilling Interlibrary Loan requests. Licensee may use articles from [database] for Interlibrary Loan in accordance with the Copyright Act of the U.S. Transmission of printed or electronic articles through post or fax, or secure, self-deleting electronic transmission, such as Ariel or its equivalent, may be used in Interlibrary Loan.
2. The Licensee’s library staff may supply to an authorized user of another library (whether by post, fax or secure transmission, using Ariel or its equivalent, whereby the electronic file is deleted immediately after printing), for the purposes of research or private study, a copy of an electronic original of an individual document.

I did not write these clauses from scratch, but instead stitched them together from existing licenses and the second example includes elements repeatedly retrieved via Google.

I’ve worked with some vendors who will not budge on their existing, unfriendly ILL clauses, others counter-offer with e-ILL friendly language of their own, and some just say “okay!”

Instructions> ERMes v. 2009.05

Basic instructions for ERMes v. 2009.05 are now available on the ERMes website. As with most documents, I could keep writing for a long time; however, I also think that it is in the best interest of ERMes users for me to post what we have and consider the instructions – like ERMes – a work in progress.

I plan to continue adding text, illustrations, and short video demos as I am able. I know that Norma is also working to include a video demonstration to support her instructions for creating COUNTER reports in ERMes.

Please feel free to…

• Let me know what additional documentation you want/need; so, that I can prioritize by demand.
• Download the MS Word version of the instructions, add to or edit them, and then send your revisions to me so that I can incorporate them into the ‘master’ version.

Thanks!

When the Price is Wrong

Perhaps it is because my time as an e-resources librarian is fairly short or maybe I just need to get out more, but I’ve been surprised by the number of times I’ve heard about the lack of price negotiations for e-resources.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am hardly an expert at license or price negotiations. However, I do believe that negotiations can be beneficial. Three years ago, I was able to negotiate renewal prices for three different databases so that we saved nearly $6,000 compared to what vendors initially quoted for these renewals. (I realize that this amount’s significance varies significantly depending on the size of your institution and budget.)

Yes, it took time, yes it was frustrating, but in the end, due to flat budgets, that $6,000 allowed us to keep some of the smaller databases and cancel less the following fiscal years. Incidentally, I negotiated with only three vendors, since, as a department of one, I do not have the time/staff to negotiate all subscriptions. Typically, negotiations are started because a price is extremely high, the renewal rate is high, or there are other reasons to argue for a lower price or better licensing terms.

Tactics that have worked for me in the past, but are probably not new to many of you, nor are they guaranteed.

• Negotiate hard for a new subscription since a lower initial cost means that future percent increases are added to a lower amount.
• In addition, when signing a license agreement for a new subscription, adding a clause to lock the annual percent increase of the next 3-5 years can help too.
• When only students in a specific discipline use a database, find out how many students are in that discipline and argue for a lower price based on this figure instead of the school’s entire FTE, especially if the vendor does not offer lower prices for fewer simultaneous users. It is unreasonable to pay the full FTE price for a product that only a select portion of the student population uses.
• Again for discipline specific databases, counter that by making the database available to students now, they are more likely to purchase a subscription at higher rates when they are out in the workforce.
• Instead of asking the vendor to come up with a reduced rate, counter with a percent increase of your own. While the vendor’s final offer will usually be a little higher, it is usually less than the original quote.
• Conduct negotiations via e-mail, and during a negotiation, send your reasons in several short emails over the course of a week rather than all at once in one long e-mail.
• Develop negotiation phrases that you can copy and paste to save time.
• Use the average percent increases for your library’s subscriptions. Vendors often say that their 5-8% increases is “industry standard.” However, our average percent increase is usually lower than this. Yes, there are outliers on both ends, but by telling a vendor that your library’s average percent increase for all e-resources is X% instead of 8%, you can sometimes reduce your renewal rate.
• Plead flat budgets, have patience, and start well before the renewal date!
• Consortiums can be a great help.
• Cite competing vendors’ favorable terms, price freezes, low percent increases, etc.
• If you have concerns about a particular license agreement, post your concerns on your blog, Twitter, FriendFeed, or a listserv to see out how others have dealt with the concern(s). If nothing else, your shout-out will alert other libraries of unfavorable terms.
• Be prepared to walk away. In one experience, it took about a year and half license terms to changes, but it was definitely worth the wait. While it is rare that you can actually walk away from some products without repercussions of some kind, the more libraries are willing to walk away from unfavorable terms, the more likely the vendor will make changes.

What price negotiation strategies have worked for you?

Trials & Tribulations

Since October 2004, we’ve run 47 e-resource trials at UW-L, and I’m usually rather conservative when it comes to setting up trials because of the time it takes to set up and promote them and because it has been an active trial if I receive feedback from *one* person outside the library. When setting up trials, I hope to hear from faculty and students if they would like/use the resource, but what I often hear is a wonderful symphony of very quiet crickets. Additionally, our budget cannot handle additional resources and it seems cruel to play “now you have it, now you don’t” with e-resources.

However, I wonder how to manage the trials that we do set-up. I use a blog to distribute and record trial information; each post is tagged “trial” for easy retrieval. I also have an e-mail folder cleverly called “Trials” to keep track of vendor contact information and correspondence for said trials. Now that we have ERMes, I am pondering the implications of inputting trial information.

This may seem like a very trivial question, but while having trial data in ERMes would be useful, it would mean the slow accumulation data in ERMes that I am going to refer to for a brief period. While I could add and remove the data, I also need a record of past trials for infrequent but necessary reference.

As Anna noted, noted, she and I have had some great e-mail correspondence about these questions that infiltrate and complicate our efforts to manage e-resources effectively.

Right now, when I add a database to ERMes I put “Active,” “Canceled” or “Ceased to Exist” as the status. However, “Trial” would work here too.

How do you manage trials information?

Thanks from Minnesota

I’d like to thank William, Galadriel, Norma, and Jen, for sharing their wonderful work with the larger library community. I’m the e-resources librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, and we’ve been looking for an affordable ERM solution and were very excited to read about this ERM in William and Galadriel’s Computers in Libraries article in September 2008. We downloaded the ERM earlier this spring and have begun entering (and using) vendor data and admin website access data. I’ve had wonderful e-mail discussions with Galadriel about the joys and challenges of e-resources management, and about the structure of ERMes (thanks for adding our suggestion of allowing multiple subjects/departments for a resource!). I look forward to continuing these discussions on the blog. We decided to wait for this new version and instructions before adding more data, and look forward to entering all of our databases and using the newly-improved ERMes to its full potential!

Anna Hulseberg

Welcome from Bill Doering

As the co-originator of ERMes, I wanted to introduce myself to the blog.  I have worked at UW-La Crosse for about 15 years.  I started as a systems librarians which has morphed to include cataloging, all forms of technology and digital initiatives.  I started with Access about 10 years ago when we migrated to Endeavor as our library catalog.  I write Access queries on what seems a daily basis in order to get data out of our system.  I have also used Access to solve other challenges I’ve encountered at my job and personal life.  Yet, I’ve barely tapped the surface of what Access can do.  Several years ago, I put a student on porting some of our most used Access reports to PHP.  That was a huge success.  PHP means that we don’t have to install ODBC drivers, which means that faculty and students can run queries against our library catalog in real time without bothering me.  Yet, I digress.  My taining on Access is somewhat dated now that 2007 has come out.  Does anyone know of good classes to learn what’s new, without starting from ground zero? 

UW-L started developing an ERM because we needed a short term solution to a problem – several people needed access to our e-resources and everything was scattered.  I put together something fairly quickly to solve the problem and thought others might benefit from a database which provided some basic organization.  It’s taken off quickly and code has been greatly inproved during ERMes first year of existence.  I’ve given no less than 3 presentations and written one journal article on what is now ERMes and after one year 14 libraries are using it ERMes in production with numerous other institutions waiting for what is now release 2009_05.

I will be updating the instructions and then taking a new round of enhancements.  I haven’t decided what those will be.  So, if you have ideas, please post those to the blog.

William Doering

New Release > ERMes v. 2009.05

I’m very excited to share the good news that the latest release of ERMes (v. 2009.05) is now available!

Here is what William Doering has to say about this new and greatly improved version:

I apologize for not getting out a new release of ERMes (yes we now have a name) earlier.  But you won’t be disappointed.  This release is a total rewrite of the ERM which includes improved logic, a new interface, and includes new functionality available in Access 2007 (yes, you now have to use Access 2007 to use ERMes).

This release also includes COUNTER functionality and additional ASP code and instructions for creating an A-Z list of databases just in case your Metalib or Libdata instance goes down which it did for us.

This release would not have been possible without the assistance of Norma Dowell from Iowa State University and Jen Holman from UW-L who provided substantial code.  I guess this makes ERMes open source.  If you want to contribute code, please let me know before you start, as we need to coordinate sole access to the Access database code so multiple people aren’t changes things which would need to get reconciled and may in fact conflict.

I will get new instructions to ERMes web site shortly.

Check out the ERMes web site for the new download and migration tips.

Say Cheese ERMes

So what does ERMes look like?

Here are a few screen captures from the upcoming release.

ERMes' switchboard; the first thing you see.

Example screen for a resource.

Another example of a resource info screen.

Example problem log entry for tracking e-resource access, content, and other errors.

Reports