The Select & Acquire module encompasses Financial, Selection, Acquisitions, Receiving, Payment/Invoicing, Licensing, and Electronic Resource Management (ERM), a component that support operational processes for demand-driven acquisitions of library resources. The module manages pre-order and selection of all types of order requests for library materials, and upholds the complete purchasing, receiving and payment operations of ordered library materials. Select & Acquire components will also provide workflow design and functionality to encompass print and electronic serials, subscriptions, interval check-in, and productivity reports.

Financial and budgeting structures within the system will allow flexibility for library materials to be purchased outright, leased, or licensed. OLE offers fully automated EDI features for direct data exchange with vendors. In the 3.0 release, the ERM component will support the lifecycle of electronic resources and packages including licensing, purchasing, and daily administration. The Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb), a community-managed knowledge base of subscribed resources, will be tightly integrated with OLE for ingesting and maintaining acquired electronic books and serials.

In the OLE environment, all acquisitions transactions require fund structures, financial processing, and accurate maintenance of the OLE General Ledger. OLE has adapted Kuali Financial System (KFS) for Budget Adjustment documents, and continues to modify various Fiscal Year End e-documents to manage budgets. OLE uses the adapted KFS Pre-Disbursement Processor (PDP) to export encumbrances, expenses/invoices, credits, and prepayment requests/disbursement vouchers, which can then be batch exported to university financial systems. In a future release, OLE will be developing an import/incoming financial integration tool that allows the library to receive updates from the university financial office.

Financial Features:

OLE Selection supports procuring decisions that library collection managers, patrons or acquisitions staff make through acquisitions workflows. In OLE, select functions are often considered Pre-orders, wherein Requisitions become placeholders for future acquisitions review. Requisitions are managed through action lists, and the Order Holding Queue.

Selection Features:

The Acquisitions module or purchasing functions encompass all related encumbrance, expense, ordering, receiving, and payment for titles in a variety of formats. Depending on the format, the acquisition of an item may have an associated license/registry that the system is equipped to manage and document as described in OLE Electronic Resource Management Overview- License Requests documentation. Brief bibliographic records are created or edited/linked in the system and an order is created for acquisition. The order is received and paid for upon receipt from the supplier.

The Acquisitions module is used to order, receive and process payments for library materials. Invoices and Credit Memos are sent to the Pre-Disbursement Processing Module (PDP) for disbursement. It includes several e-documents to help libraries manage its acquisitions and accounting processes. OLE users may initiate Requisition e-documents (“Pre-Orders”) to suggest titles for ordering. Fully approved Requisition e-documents are then processed through workflows and become Purchase Orders. Under certain conditions (specified by your library’s business rules in OLE), fully approved Requisitions may become Purchase Orders automatically without any additional processing.

OLE has added an Order Type attribute that provides rules for Purchase Orders, Receiving, and Payments. These order types affect how PO or POA line items are managed, whether Line Item Receiving or new Action-Interval/Serial Receiving are required, and how the order types interact with the Payment Request - especially if advance deposits made.

OLE Receiving supports the receiving and cataloging of ordered library materials, as the first step to making library materials available for circulation, following the completion of all required cataloging activities. OLE allows receiving of a quantity and/or parts on line items, as well as offers the ability to report unordered line items, damaged items, or return items. In addition, OLE accepts record annotations such as receiving note(s), and special handling directives.

Receiving Features:

Although OLE processes vendor invoices as payment requests, the new OLE Invoice document was created to accommodate many-to-one purchase orders to payment requests. This e-document populates payment requests for staff. OLE will also processes any negative amounts or credits as separate credit memos. Payments (“paid”) display on purchase order line items. Prorating on Invoices and Payment Requests allows users to take a $500 Shipping & Handling charge (or other types)  and optionally assign accounting lines to it (KFS behavior), or prorate it across line items: manually, by quantity, or by dollar amounts. OLE will accommodate advance payments to vendors (deposit accounts), and allow a variety of batch jobs, to ensure accurate information to university financial office. Related document links display on purchase orders and payment requests, linking them, plus Receiving and Requisitions.

Payment/Invoicing Features:

OLE created extensive specifications for the licensing process. Licensing is a variable step in the electronic acquisitions process. Some resources do not require a license at all and can be used within the guidelines of copyright law, while others require extensive negotiation of business and licensing terms. In lieu of a negotiated license, some vendors use standard Shared Electronic Resource Understanding (SERU) agreements to bypass complicated licensing processes. The goal of the licensing specifications is for a license editor that is flexible enough to encode the rights for a variety of scenarios making them easy to query, rather than recording the terms only for fully negotiated licenses. License Request e-documents, used to manage negotiations, are available in OLE.

Licensing Process in OLE:

Electronic Resource Management covers all aspects of managing titles that are delivered or provided in electronic form. These materials might consist of e-books, e-journals, images, music, video, etc. Many of these resources are continuing serials while others, such as e-books, are one-time purchases. Managing electronic resources is highly complex because they are purchased and billed in many different ways – an institution may be purchasing a single journal title, an aggregated database with 5,000 titles that change throughout the year, or a journal package that contains 500 individual titles as well as several bundles with several titles each. In addition to purchasing workflows comparable to print counterparts, acquiring electronic resources may involve one (or more) trial periods for evaluation and generally requires complex negotiation of license and business terms. The workflow for making electronic resources accessible to patrons is difficult to manage because there is no physical item being tracked through a cataloging process. Electronic resources also require ongoing monitoring and management over their lifecycle to ensure continuous access in addition to workflows for disabling access to a resource no longer being licensed. While much work will still need to occur in future releases, OLE has taken some initial steps with an E-Resource Record in the 1.0 release, much more development will occur in the 3.0 release.