Friday 15 April 2011

Updating the workflows for the SCONUL project

After joining the SCONUL project, we needed to look at our workflows again, and adapt them so that they could be used by any institution, not just Salford. The main difficulty with this was finding a balance, producing detailed workflows that were still generic, and could be used anywhere. We had found from the visits to other institutions, that details such as who manages funds, what criteria are used for renewals, etc can vary quite a bit. However the process of identifying a resource, purchasing, maintaining, renewing and cancelling is basically the same everywhere, and we tried to reflect this in the updated workflows. The first step was to expand the 'maintenance' section of the workflow into individual steps for change of title, change of platform etc. This made it much clearer and easier to understand what happens in each situation. Next, we created 3 sets of workflows for E-journals, Databases and E-books. After some discussion it was decided that E-books were out of scope, so we abandoned those workflows and concentrated on the journals and databases. We merged these, as many processes are the same or similar for both kinds of resource. We now have one big document, detailing all the workflows. Where the process is slightly different for Journals and databases, we have shown 2 worklows (eg. 1A and 1B); where the process is the same regardless of format, we have just one workflow (eg. stage 2 Ordering); there are also a few stages that will only apply to journals (eg. stage 8 Addition of E-access) We also included reference to checklists at certain stages, eg. change of publisher, renewals etc. These indicate points to consider at each stage, such as post-cancellation access or changes to licence etc. They are not intended to always be checked at a certain point in the workflow; they are designed to complement the workflow and be used at the same time. The workflow document can be found here: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0Bxug72ZifwRlZjY2ODJiZDktMGU3Zi00ZTEzLTgxMDktZjEyZTk0N2UwMGY0&hl=en&authkey=CMLh3bQE

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