Helping consortia grow
ConsortiaManager is the story about partnership and collaboration between library consortia and ConsortiaManager's founders, who entered a work partnership to solve a business challenge.
In the beginning of 2014, the founders-to-be, Nels Rune Jensen and Tejs Grevstad, had both worked together for more than 10 years in the information industry and the library consortium, Danish Digital Library (DDL), was about to reorganize. Putting new people in place to handle the agreements with publishers, the consortia quickly discovered that most of the needed information was impossible or difficult to get to in a structured format. Instead of creating yet another spreadsheet to keep track of their resources, they decided to explore the opportunity of licensing software to manage the entire acquisition cycle.
However, research showed that library consortia mostly had come up with their own solutions for managing workflows. The solutions ranged across everything from Post-It notes, Excel spreadsheets over homemade databases to generic project management tools. However, no system could handle all the needs of library consortia. Their conclusion was clear: they needed a tool to streamline the workflow process for all the tasks that went into their acquisition cycle.
Consortia on 5 continents
37 countries
2500 member institutions
35000 subscriptions
However, having limited knowledge about software development and the acquisition process from the middleman perspective, they contacted Tejs and Nels to use their knowledge and experience from previous positions with both publishers and subscription agents to build the system. Nels and Tejs agreed to help design and build the software for DDL. The project started out with a goal of storing information, but quickly grew into streamlining the information flow between publishers, consortia and its members subsequently developing into a decision-making support tool for both the consortia and its members. 6 months after the work had started the first beta-version was launched in November 2014 and all the renewals of the Danish Digital Library were processed through the system.
ConsortiaManager have always looked at each consortia as a potential partner, who can help us improve our software by bringing their specific needs to us. Since the launch, more consortia have adopted ConsortiaManager and have had their specific needs programmed into the software.
