SCELC Vendor Day 2007: About Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries' Gold Rush

Gold Rush is an electronic serials management service developed by the non-profit Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries to help libraries manage subscriptions to electronic resources and provide improved public access for their electronic journals and databases. It includes four major features: openURL link resolution, a public search interface (A-Z list), subscriptions management and content comparison.

Gold Rush is unique in the marketplace for a number of reasons: it has been developed by a non-profit consortium, it is the lowest priced product on the market for it's given areas of functionality, it has some unique features not available elsewhere, it is highly customizable and is coming out with a new Web 2.0 XML gateway that will allow libraries to incorporate the system into their Websites in new unique ways.

The non-profit Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries was founded in 1974 to provide research libraries in Colorado and Wyoming with cooperative purchasing, special projects, consulting and systems management. Several of its projects (such as Gold Rush) are now used by libraries around the United States.

ALLIANCE DIGITAL REPOSITORY PROJECT

The mission of the Alliance Digital Repository (ADR), launched in fall 2006, is to provide services for the preservation of and access to digital assets inherent to the research, information, and education missions of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries member institutions. After an extensive evaluation, the consortium selected FEDORA as its development platform and has hired a project manager and programmer. This program will provide an overview of the project, the value in doing a project collectively, and look at some of the management and technical challenges in such a venture. Once the initial phases of the project are completed in about a year, other like minded libraries will be invited to participate on a cost sharing basis.

The purposes of the ADR are to:

• Provide access to digital content by students, faculty, staff, patrons, researchers, and customers of Alliance institutions, as well as to the world
• Host hardware and software infrastructure that supports digital repository services and functionalities for Alliance institutions and affiliated partners
• Store digital assets created and collected by Alliance libraries, universities, and communities

The vision of the ADR is to serve as a standards-based repository and infrastructure supporting a diverse set of applications, services, and discovery tools that offer long-term management, secure storage, preservation solutions, and - when possible - open access to digital assets of enduring value, as determined by the Alliance institutions.

Examples of possible ADR applications include:

• A university's institutional repository of actively created or contributed, openly available scholarly work, including but not limited to pre-prints, post-prints, ETDs, raw datasets, publications, and instructional tools.
• A library's special collections, archival materials, and other unique materials in digital form, with interactive discovery and review tools along with methods for viewers to obtain versions for personal and commercial use.
• An institution's secure, managed repository of records and documents, including publications, policies, operational documents (minutes, contracts, employment records, etc.)