Moving from ERes to PROWL at the end of the academic year

Summary: The library will discontinue its ERes service for electronic reserves at the end of this academic year.  This change will simplify use of electronic course reserves for students, and save the college the annual cost of ERes.  For more information on this change see the rationale at the end of this message.

What faculty need to know:

• PROWL is supported by Academic Technology Services. ATS staff will set up a PROWL site for each of your classes.
• The library will continue to support the loading of electronic reserves—but all future courses will be managed on PROWL instead of ERes.  As now, faculty may work with the Library Reserves Coordinator (Marianne Aldrich) to load their materials, load the materials themselves, or designate another agent to manage their course page.
• Over the summer, ATS and library staff will work to move all materials that are currently loaded on ERes to a CC server and make them available to load onto PROWL.
• Librarians and ATS staff members will have administrative access to PROWL academic courses, and will be able to help students find readings.

What faculty need to do:

• Nothing now, we'll handle the transfer. We may contact you with questions about your pages.
• By next fall, let your Academic Technology Specialist know which materials should be loaded onto PROWL.

Background and rationale

A task force of librarians and technology specialists looked at the pros and cons inherent in offering two different services to support electronic reserves.  They recommended that we move to using PROWL as our single service for the following reasons:

• Students are often confused about how to access their course readings. Are they on ERes; are they in PROWL; are they on a professor's own webpage or a department page? This will eliminate one option.
• The library pays an annual maintenance fee for ERes. PROWL is based on open source (MOODLE) software, and managed on local CC servers. In this time of fiscal constraints it makes sense to eliminate redundant services.
• Faculty do not have to use any other PROWL options for their course. PROWL can be used as a tool to manage, host and provide access to readings.  If you are interested in learning about other PROWL features, your Academic Technology Specialist will be happy to work with you!

This recommendation was reviewed by the Information Technology and Library Board at their Block 5 meeting.

Please feel free to address any concerns or questions to your liaison librarian or academic technology specialist.

Comments

[Japanese words]

switching to an open source program makes a lot of sense. I hope it works out well. In most cases open source software is usually updated more often and therefor more stable.