15 Jul 2008
Priory Solutions today announced the release of
Research
Monitor 3, the latest version of its leading Electronic
Resource Management system.
Most large law firms subscribe to a multitude of online
databases and electronic resources. These resources consist of
electronic journals, specialist know how, business information
services, and general legal content. They are all available through
costly subscription or pay as you go models. On top of the price
tag these systems come at a cost: thousands of usernames and
passwords to manage, a huge knowledge gap about how this investment
is being used, and charges that are time consuming or impossible to
allocate to practice areas or clients.
Electronic Resource Management (ERM) systems enable firms to
deal with these challenges. Once seen purely as online cost
recovery tools, ERM systems have matured and now provide three
distinct benefits;
- controlling access to resources by centrally managing usernames
and passwords, thus enforcing license agreements and limiting cost
overruns,
- providing management reports detailing usage across the firm's
electronic resources facilitating contract negotiations and
internal training initiatives, and
- enabling cost recovery of transactional or subscription based
online services.
Research Monitor 3 provides significant new features in all
three of these areas.
Rory Kingan, Priory Solutions CTO commented on the new release;
"Some of our new features include a cost recovery discounting model
driven by search volumes and search sources. In the access control
module we've added an access portal which displays all resources
available to the current researcher, and in the usage monitoring
module we've added additional support for capturing detailed
information about research activity."
Research Monitor doesn't affect how researchers access
resources. It seamlessly logs on to resources with the logon
details for the current researcher - no more forgotten passwords
and no more password sharing! It tracks all research sessions on an
unlimited number of resources, so you know how heavily each
resource is used and by whom. It provides matter number validation
on any web page and can record matter numbers against websites that
don't collect a client code. All of these functions are
configurable by an administrator and available without any need for
vendor integration.
Said Managing Director Peter Borchers, "We are breaking new
ground in the management information provided by our tools, for
instance by allowing firms to determine the effectiveness of their
single search solutions by reporting on usage levels and patterns.
Our vision is to empower firms to make decisions from an informed
position, and to further establish Research Monitor as the accepted
solution for vendor independent electronic resource
management."
