Benefits for Library Directors
You’re concerned about the budget impact of your critical online resources. They may have already overtaken your print collection acquisitions budget. You’re concerned about overall service quality. You’re equally concerned with enabling your personnel to improve efficiency.
The more e-resources you have and the bigger or more complex your campus/organization, the more you’ll gain (and save) through our Callisto service.
Some of the benefits you’ll see:
- Ensure site-wide access: Callisto will discover the pockets across your institution where IP address range authorizations are incomplete. These represent areas where your legitimate users are prohibited access unintentionally or even paying per-view, not realizing you’ve already subscribed for them. As time goes on, networks grow and move and content providers make new mistakes as well. Callisto will keep running every day, making sure your whole organization continues to get the access you’ve paid for.
- Discover unknown subscriptions: Surprising as it is, librarians and departments sometimes purchase access to e-content and then forget to tell everyone about it. This happens most when online access to a journal gets bundled with a print subscription. But it also happens if a non-library campus department buys access. Or a selector buys something new and doesn’t notify IT or Cataloging. Regardless of how it happens, it means institutional money going down the drain — users don’t benefit from the content that’s not linked in your catalog, link resolver, metasearch systems, etc. Callisto finds these unknown subscriptions and highlights them for you.
- Site-wide access gone amok: Callisto even detects and reports cases when some OTHER campus is getting accidental access to YOUR subscription or vice-versa. It’s been very surprising to discover how frequently this happens. This situation is especially important if your subscription is limited by number of users.
- Employee Efficiency: Everything you can do to make your employees more efficient stretches your personnel budget into the future. The benefits to other audiences linked from this page will give you some examples how.
- Reduced support burden: The philosophy of design behind Callisto is to reduce the amount of labor required by libraries. Despite their benefits, most “library automation” systems are anything but automated and end up consuming huge budgets and many people full-time. You’ll find Sharp Moon systems provide benefits without large investments of labor.
- Callisto will record when your e-resource providers websites go down or are unreachable via the Internet. You’ll be able to view problems for each provider historically. You’ll have data to help negotiate discounts or justify changing providers later on for the problematic ones.
- All of the benefits together mean higher productivity and satisfaction for library users and employees.