June 13, 2006

Andrew,

As I communicated to you on June 1, Lessie, Jody, Dorothy, and
I recommend the link resolver from Serials Solutions.

We came to our recommendation after reviewing who were the major players in the
market, asking for feedback from users, and by restricting our focus to 4
vendors and looking at each of their products.

The four vendors were EBSCO, Endeavor, ExLibris, and Serials Solutions.

The bottom line is that the products from EBSCO, Endeavor, and ExLibris were
not sufficiently innovative, different, or exciting to move us from our
predisposition to go with Article Linker from Serials Solutions.

Also, we believe that since the products were so architecturally similar, the
evaluation points rested to a significant extent on the reputation of the
vendor and other aspects of the product and service that may be invisible
to our patrons.


The reasons we were all predisposed to go with Article Linker are:

1. Article Linker has the cleanest user interface of the products we looked at.
In particular, no annoying boxes in the display (like those in SFX)
and no clunky drop-down lists (like those in EBSCO's product).

2. We have a good working relationship with the company. We know who to
call and who to follow up with to get things done.

3. We are familiar with the workflow in their admin interface. We also
like their admin interface and find it easy to use and navigate.

4. They are already doing our A-Z list, which uses the same knowledge base
that will be used for their link resolver. This means that the transition
will be better than seamless - actually, there will be no transition.
The lack of transition saves us in setup time.

5. There is almost no learning curve involved in the setup, which also
saves us in setup time.

6. Staying with the current vendor exploits our familiarity with the system
by making any troubleshooting quicker, thus benefiting users.

7. If it does not have the _most_ customizable user interface of the four
products, Article Linker does at least have a _very_ customizable user
interface - another benefit for our users.

8. Cost was not an issue. SFX from ExLibris was the most expensive, and EBSCO's
product was the least expensive (though Endeavor said that they would match
the lowest price, I believe.)



Some points on the other products...

We limited ourselves to the four vendors that we looked at largely
based on their market position. One that we left out was 1Cate from
Openly Informatics, which was recently acquired by OCLC. Jim saw some slides
by their founder and was impressed with their product, though not with
the size of their company.



EBSCO

Their user interface appeared a bit clunky at first, though we thought that
maybe the clunkiness was due to our lack of familiarity with how things
worked and were supposed to work. We noted, though, that if we had those
initial misgivings, so, too, would users likely have them. Also, Dorothy
deals a lot with EBSCO admin interfaces for their other services. She finds
them awkward to use, and she didn't like their admin interface for the
resolver. Jody, Lessie, and Dorothy had doubts about how well EBSCO could
do a link resolver, given that such a product is not in their mainstream
product line.

On the plus side, their admin module did have ways of customizing features
to different levels (e.g., journal, aggregator, or all).

Migration, setup, and maintenance would have been an issue, though.



ExLibris

SFX is the market leader, and offered at least two interesting features:
First, a "catalog-pre-search" feature that would search our catalog before
sending users to the results page, thus being able to tell them when
they arrived on that page whether or not the library had the item in print.
Second, a way to download brief records from the knowledge base into
the catalog that was not a paid-for MARC-record service.

Their results page seemed not very customizable, though their admin module
seemed adequate.

Their training overhead, though, might have been prohibitive. There appeared
to be a LOT of work to be done just to migrate our data.


Endeavor

Their admin module offered some interesting reports and we were told that
we could submit requests for custom reports. They also offered the same
"catalog-pre-search" feature as ExLibris did.

Again, setup and training would have been an issue.



Jim, Jody, Lessie, and Dorothy.