Abstract
Managing the myriad details involved in the provision of electronic resources is a challenging task. The Florida Center for Library Automation began using Drupal, an open source content management system to help with this process. This session introduced Drupal, explained its advantages, and demonstrated how it could be used to easily organize data about electronic resources and create displays that will be useful to the intended audience.
Amanda Yesilbas led this session in which she described how she used Drupal, an open source content management system, to meet the challenges of collecting and managing data on e-resources for the Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA). A good deal of her presentation was going to focus on using Drupal, so she began the session by asking the audience about their familiarity with it. She then briefly described the Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA), which is a consortium to provide automation services for Florida's publicly funded universities. These services include support for their shared Aleph Integrated Library System (ILS), licensing of electronic resources, and providing a repository and support for digital collections. At present FCLA negotiates and licenses resources on behalf of eleven state universities and handles some limited services for members of Independent Colleges and Universities of Florida (ICUF). Legislation has been proposed to combine state university and community college centers into one entity, which will make managing their e-resources even more complex.
After moving into the role of e-resource librarian from a previous role managing serials support for Ex Libris' Aleph ILS for FCLA, Yesilbas focused her attention on organizing various files related to licensing electronic resources. Like many libraries, this information was held in many different locations, often outdated, and not in a useful format. She needed to be able to respond to her campuses when they had questions about license terms because they did not have copies of licenses or any way to access the necessary information online. She also realized that it would be good to limit who could see what information, such as the terms for interlibrary loan.
FCLA had tried to implement an electronic resource management (ERM) system, but they were not able to create one to meet their needs. Ironically, it was too big and too small all at the same time, possibly because they tried to track too many elements. Drupal is very flexible, easy to use, has detailed permissions, is completely customizable, and makes the data fully searchable. Another advantage of its being open source is that there is a large support community where users can go for help. Yesilbas also explained data can be entered once, then parsed out to display in a number of ways, such as a calendar, a list, a chart, or a Web page. She had used Drupal to create an updated website for FCLA so Yesilbas felt comfortable and confident she could create a tool that would serve her purposes very well.
Yesilbas cautioned the audience that they would need to make a significant time investment (relative to the number of resources and complexity of the items to be tracked) to plan and implement their initial design and do the initial data entry. There is a tremendous amount of data to track, including license terms, passwords, title lists, vendor contacts, statistics, special instructions, renewal dates, and price, as well as the complicated relationships that might exist when one company receives payment but another hosts the content. Various aspects of the workflow might be important for some libraries to track, such as status of license negotiations. She advised the audience members to think carefully about what data they really need to track and then try to group that information into reasonable units. Other tools, such as the ILS, have structures that might help groupings, such as vendor records. Spending some time thinking through choices will pay off later when trying to express complex relationships.
FCLA uses three content types to manage their e-resources and for which Yesilbas created input forms: vendor, license, and statistics. License fields were populated by hand, but it might be possible to find a way to load information from spreadsheets into the database. She did not mind doing all the work herself because it was a great opportunity to clean up existing data. After making decisions about what data to track, the presenter considered how to set viewing and editing permissions, and how to determine which bits of information are used from the system and in what ways. Again Yesilbas recommended grouping people into reasonable roles, such as license creator or statistics viewers and then assigning those permissions and associating the roles with users.
Once the database is populated, users will be able to create meaningful displays. If charts or lists of titles, or license tracking calendars are required, Drupal offers plenty of flexibility to help users create useful views to help share all that information that has been so carefully collected. Yesilbas reviewed some key, basic concepts of using Drupal including content types related to record design and fields, views that are queries made in a user interface, a node that is a piece of content (such as a row of a spreadsheet) and a module that is an add-on that offers new functionality. The presenter noted that some of these modules are actually necessary to make the system work for her purposes, like the views and content construction kit, which permits users to add new fields. She also recommended taking advantage of the resources in the Drupal user community, as well as the DRUPAL4LIB online discussion list.Footnote 1 More information is available from the Drupal website.Footnote 2 Yesilbas also suggested these additional resources, including Acquia Network, which provides free distribution of the Drupal social publishing system, Lullabot who describe themselves as “Drupal experts” and provide training, and Drupal Gardens, which is a service for easily creating social websites using Drupal 7.Footnote 3, Footnote 4, Footnote 5
Now that she has some experience adding licenses, Yesilbus next plans to make the site more attractive, develop better tracking tools, try incorporating data from spreadsheets into the Drupal records, add more primary documents such as scanned invoices and renewal lists, and promote the availability of this simple, yet powerful tool to the FCLA members. Her dream is to find a way to automate the collection of usage statistics.
The presenter showed both a test and live version of the FCLA license database as she went over the various steps in her process. In response to a question from the audience about how much time she had spent on the Drupal license project, she replied that it took her a few hours to set up the form, and one day to code and update license data for ten licenses. Yesilbas had no prior Drupal experience before she started to revamp the FCLA website and she thought it was fairly easy to learn. The presenter has not yet been able to link out from the library catalog to the public license view. In conclusion, Yesilbas recommended using Drupal for any institution that finds an ERM system either out of reach or too intense to meet their needs and budget. She found it to be easy to use and believes that it has definitely made her job easier.
Notes
1. Drupal listserv, [email protected] (accessed December 1, 2011).
2. Drupal site, http://drupal.org (accessed July 7, 2011).
3. Acquia Network, http://network.acquia.com/downloads/7.x (accessed July 7, 2011).
4. Lullabot, http://lullabot.com (accessed July 7, 2011).
5. Drupal Gardens, http://www.drupalgardens.com/ (accessed July 7, 2011).