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Best Practice Toolkit: Assessing eResource Overlaps for Consortia with a Network Zone

What is it?

Consortia can manage eResources through their Network Zone. This not only helps centralize management of eResources for all member institutions, it also helps to reduce the overall bib count of the consortia.

 

Why centrally manage inventory via the Network Zone?

By activating resources in the Network Zone, consortia can turn on an electronic collection once and push it out to individual libraries. This takes some of the burden off of these libraries to have to manage parts of their electronic collections on their own. Updates to collections can be managed centrally as well.

 

Assessing Collections for NZ Activation

The best way to start with the assessment is to look at the number of collections that are duplicated in various member institutions across the consortia. The report “Duplicate electronic collections in different member institutions linked to CZ” exists in Alma Analytics and will show a list of the collections that are turned on across multiple institutions, displaying the number of bibs for each institution and the total number of institutions with the collection activated. This report should be accessed from the Network Instance of Alma.

Once the report has been accessed, it is best to start addressing overages by looking at the very large collections that are being activated by multiple institutions and/or the medium-sized collections that are being activated by a large number of institutions.

For instance, by activating this one collection in the NZ and pushing it out to these 5 institutions, this consortia can reduce their overall bib count by 585,288 items.

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Once a number of candidate collections have been identified, they can be activated in the NZ, tested at the institution level, and then removed from the individual Institution Zones.

 

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