To Boldly Go: E-Reserves from Home-Grown to Standalone to CMS

Abstract

The University of West Georgia created its own, very clunky e-reserves system in the early 2000s, then moved to Docutek when it became affordable through a University System-sponsored consortial agreement in 2005. Although we had been planning to sign a contract with Ares in 2013, we made the decision to free ourselves completely from a hosted, turnkey system, and join the growing ranks of academic libraries which have chosen to utilize their campus Content Management System (in our case, Desire2Learn), as a platform for accessing e-reserves. We are trying to take advantage of this period of change (which faculty often resist) as an opportunity to introduce the campus to the Georgia Board of Regents' Affordable Learning Georgia initiative, striving to encourage faculty, as they become accustomed to uploading links or documents to D2L, to utilize resources we already own through our licensed databases and other open source materials which are increasingly available. During this session, we will share our experiences working through this transition, which began in Summer 2014.