Dear Colleagues

On Tuesday, June 5^th Gold Rush will be releasing a major update to its “Subscriptions” module.  This latest update of Gold Rush’s electronic resource management system (ERMS) will be the first of several major enhancements planned for this year.

The June 2007 release will allow libraries to have broad control over many aspects of the module.  During the initial cutover, the existing 87 fields will be retained in their original order and with your original content.  So nothing needs to be done until you are ready.

1. You will be able to add and label new fields as you wish.  These fields can be placed in a section of your choice and given the label you want.  The type of field can be determined such as small text box, large text box, pull-down menu or a simple Y/N pull down menu.
2. Existing fields can be suppressed, moved to a new section or relabeled.
3. Section tabs can be relabeled and reordered.
4. You will be able to add new sections (tabs) or re-purpose existing sections and populate them with the fields of your choice
5. A new improved “browse” feature will allow libraries to quickly sort subscription records by key elements in either ascending or descending order.  Of course an advanced search will remain as well as the ability to export all subscriptions into an Excel spreadsheet.

During the beta testing period of this new release several new ideas were suggested which will be added as incremental improvements during the fall. 

Other planned substantial enhancements for early fall include an “Incident Tracker” which will allow you to monitor Web service outages to determine contract compliance and notify users of outages via the Gold Rush A-Z or link resolver interfaces.  An XML gateway is also in development which will allow users to submit an XML query and retrieve back an XML bit stream to which you can apply your own templates and style sheets.

George