Electronic Resource Management in Libraries
© 2008 by Timothy D. Jewell, University of Washington Libraries
(For submission to the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences)
Abstract: The growth of reliance on electronic resources in libraries has led to the
recognition of electronic resource management as a new problem area and specialty
within librarianship and to the development of a variety of electronic resource
management systems and services that have been widely adopted by libraries. These
developments are outlined and discussed, followed by some discussion of emerging
functions and standards.
Keywords: Electronic Resources; Electronic Resource Management; ERM; ERMS; Ejournals; Integrated Library Systems; ILS; ONIX-PL; Standards; SUSHI
Electronic Resource Management (also referred to as E-resource Management, or simply
ERM) refers broadly to an evolving array of problems, tasks, processes and practices
associated with the management of electronic resources such as databases, electronic
journals and electronic books in libraries A closely related term is Electronic Resource
Management System (or ERMS), which refers to systems that support “management of
the information and workflows necessary to efficiently select, evaluate, acquire, maintain,
and provide informed access to electronic resources in accordance with their business and
license terms” (Anderson et al. 2004, p. 49). While the ERMS emerged from early eresource management efforts, developments in both are now closely tied.
Background
Libraries began making use of electronic resources – starting with bibliographic (or
indexing and abstracting) databases like ERIC and Medline through DIALOG and other
database vendors during the late 1960’s -- as the introduction of machine-readable
cataloging (MARC) and other innovations were leading to the introduction of Online
Public Access Catalogs (OPACS) and Integrated Library Systems (or the ILS). Available
databases grew rapidly in number and variety, and have been credited with
“revolutionizing” bibliographic research during the 1970’s (Hawthorne 2008, p. 5). At
that time, most access was mediated, or provided by librarians serving as intermediaries,
but during the 1980’s many became available in CD-ROM format with interfaces
designed for end-users. CD-ROM access subsequently expanded through the use of local
area networks, and some libraries began local loading of databases via tape or FTP onto
local servers. Most were offered on a subscription basis and came with licensing
agreements that formally defined terms of use – a development that has had a significant
impact on E-resource management.
During the same decade databases and a wide variety of documents began to become
available via the Internet – including a prototype electronic journal in 1982 (Hawthorne
2008, p. 9), and arguably the first ongoing electronic e-journal several years after that
(Medeiros 2006, p.56). These developments were spurred on dramatically by the advent
The author acknowledges with gratitude the comments, corrections and suggestions he received from Ivy
Anderson, Adam Chandler, Diane Grover, Norm Medeiros and Nathan Robertson.
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of the World Wide Web, which was ushered in by the appearance of the first web
browser (Mosaic) in 1992, and then the introduction of Netscape in 1994.
The web has been widely credited for its revolutionary impact; for instance, Legg notes
that “. . . it has transformed the way information is produced, stored and shared in arenas
as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research” (2007, p.
407). The implications of the Web for libraries have been immense. For example, within
a few years of its emergence, databases formerly available via CD-ROM began to
become available via the Web, and Albitz and Shelburne have noted that a pronounced
“surge” of such databases appeared in 1998 (2007, p. 17). In addition, while by 1995 only
about 115 electronic journals (or e-journals) were in existence (Hawthorne 2008, p. 9), a
recent estimate puts the total at about 12,000, or “approximately 60% of the universe of
some 20,000 active peer-reviewed journals.” (Johnson and Luther 2007, p. 1)
Rapid and continuing innovation in web-based technology, standards, and business and
publishing models and practices have made for an extremely dynamic and expanding eresources marketplace. While libraries have been providing access to bibliographic
databases for decades, provision of full text has become equally important – first through
subscriptions to “aggregator” databases that combine bibliographic information with the
text of journal and newspaper articles, and then through e-journals. Other types of
resources that have appeared include databases that make the full text of historical
materials available and searchable, electronic books (or e-books), and databases that
integrate textual materials with digital media of various kinds – including photographs,
music, and video. Significantly, the web’s rich and varied linking options have enabled
many of these resources to provide new types of functionality and be tied seamlessly to
one another.
As these changes have been taking place, libraries have needed to think seriously about
the wide-ranging implications of the digital era for library collections and related
practice. For example, as early as 1993, as Branin noted in his welcoming remarks for the
Advanced Collection Management and Development Institute held in Chicago that
focused on the growing reliance on information in electronic formats:
“The balance is shifting away from print to electronic information, and we must
make some difficult, painful reallocations of acquisitions and personnel funding
and redesigns of collection management operations to match this changing
balance.” (Branin 1994, p. xv)
While discussions at that time tended to focus on the integration of electronic resources
into broader patterns of collection development and management, predictions of rapid
growth and fundamental change were being widely made; as indicated by shifts in
libraries’ spending patterns, these have largely been borne out since then. For example,
the Association of Research Libraries reported that expenditures for electronic resources
among research libraries rose from 3.6% to 25% over the ten year period ending with the
2002-2003 academic year (Kennedy 2008, p. 351). Within another three years they had
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increased to 43% (ARL 2008, p. 5) and seem to be rapidly closing in on the symbolically
important figure of 50%.
New Tasks and the Evolution of E-Resource Management
The new possibilities and issues associated with electronic resources have made their
acquisition and implementation increasingly complex, which has raised ongoing staffing
and workflow issues. As Geller (2006) has recently put it, where selection of print
resources has traditionally been up to a subject selector who would determine how an
item would fit with a library’s or collection’s subject, format, language and chronological
criteria, “. . . the electronic resource, at the selection stage, must meet a set of criteria in
addition to those we set up for print, and while it is still in the selection stage, this
decision involves expertise and input from library staff members beyond the subjectselector group.”
There are many examples of such criteria. For example, it must be determined whether
there are any technical impediments to implementing and supporting a given resource
within a library’s or university’s network or computing environment, and if its user
interface is effective and well-designed. Other factors likely to require broader
assessment have to do with a purchase or subscription as a business transaction. Perhaps
most significantly, as Duranceau has expressed it, “libraries now exist in a licensed
world” (2000a, p. 53). Licenses are of concern to most libraries because they may
determine who may use a given resource, what use may be made of its contents, and what
the consequences of unauthorized use might be – including possible legal or financial
penalties. As electronic resources have come to be licensed instead of sold in the
traditional manner, libraries have invested substantial and increasing amounts of time and
energy to reading, understanding, negotiating, tracking and complying with such license
terms (Soete and Davis 1999; Davis et al. 2008; Duranceau 2000a; Duranceau 2000b).
This is especially true with respect to e-journals, which have tended to be offered in
packages with complex terms pertaining to continuing financial commitments,
cancellation limits, and ongoing access rights.
The substantial amounts of money that may be involved in a particular purchase have
also led to significant changes in roles that library consortia play. As many have begun
serving as brokers for their members in their dealings with vendors and publishers, they
have enabled libraries to make better use of available funds or negotiate more
successfully for other terms (Allen and Hirshon 1998). While this has generally been the
case, a library may face choices and policy issues regarding whether to belong to
consortia, which ones best address their concerns, what level of participation in its
activities would be appropriate and cost-effective, who should represent the library in a
consortium’s activities, and how to communicate developments to library administration
and staff. There may also be complex decisions to make regarding choice of vendor. For
example, while many libraries rely on one or more serials vendors to help expedite and
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rationalize ordering, payment and delivery for print and electronic serials, some large
publishers have sought to deal directly with libraries.
Decisions regarding how best to present electronic resources to users must also be made.
Many library catalog systems require manual processing to add or edit holdings
information within the catalog. The frequent addition and deletion of content within
electronic resources, especially aggregator databases and e-journal packages, make
manual maintenance of that information problematic. In addition, many users desire only
material available in full text electronic form; since catalog records might not precisely
identify whether a resource contains electronic full text or specific holdings information,
traditional library OPACs began to be seen as ill-equipped to serve as finding aids for
their contents (Britten et al. 2000; Crum 2008). As a result, many libraries now represent
the contents of such databases in their OPACs, in separate subject- or “A to Z” lists on
their web pages, or a combination of these approaches.
The development of linking technologies and standards like the OpenURL and digital
object identifier (DOI) have also enabled libraries to provide extensive links among
bibliographic databases, full text sources, and course management systems (Boston and
Gedeon 2008, pp. 235-236). In addition, proxy servers have made it practical to offer
authorized users remote (or off-campus) access to e-resources (Rodriguez and Zhang
2008, p. 250+), and it has become possible and increasingly popular for libraries to offer
federated or metasearch services that search multiple databases simultaneously (Koppel
2008b, p. 299-300; Fons 2008, p. 372)
This plethora of new considerations and tasks led to the appearance and use of terms like
“electronic resource management” and “electronic collection management” in the mid-tolate 1990’s and to the appointment of librarians as electronic resources librarians or
coordinators. Although the importance of collaboration across library units has long been
recognized, electronic resource management and coordinator positions initially tended to
focus on considerations traditionally most closely associated with reference and
information service units – such as the evaluation of user interfaces and provision of user
instruction and support (Stolt 1996, p. 27; Fisher 2003, p. 7). Consistent with that is
Albitz’ 2002 finding from her analysis of electronic resource librarian job postings that at
that time most reported through public services lines, although “. . . ER librarians are
found in many different departments, [and] may be required to perform almost any task a
librarian might perform in an academic library . . .” (2002, p. 597).
A number of libraries instead created such positions within their technical services units
in recognition of the proliferation of tasks that seem best handled within them. For
example, Iowa State University’s library created a position within the technical services
division in 1996 with the goal of ensuring “. . . that issues arising from the increasing
numbers of electronic titles are handled effectively and with some kind of efficiency”
(Gerhard 1998, p. 283). In a subsequent survey of ERM staffing needs, Duranceau and
Hepfer focused on “. . . how libraries are staffing for activities involving the acquisition
and maintenance of e-resources and access to them (i.e. the behind-the-scenes
activities).” (2002, p. 316) They queried respondents on a dozen such functional areas
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and concluded that reallocation of staff to cover them was lagging substantially behind
the growth of expenditures and associated work. As a consequence, the most common
current pattern in E-resource coordinator positions appears to be as Albitz and Shelburne
have recently described it:
“Instruction and reference work related to online titles has reverted back to public
service librarians, which allows ER librarians to concentrate on the licensing and
management of the increasing numbers of digital resources. Many current
incumbents are also responsible for the management of new technologies related
to electronic information resources, e.g., link-resolvers and federated search
products.” (2007, pp. 26-7)
While such positions have become common, it has also seemed clear that many tasks for
which they may be responsible have been distributed across library organizations, and
that the kind of team approach advocated by Stolt is important. For example, Duranceau
and Hepfer suggested in response to the distribution of tasks across library units reported
by their staffing survey respondents that a distributed model may be best,
“. . . as it allows all of the staff to work with the resources that are becoming the
most significant and predominant in libraries today. The key to making a
distributed system work would seem to be creating a team approach to pull
together distributed functions rather than relying on the kind of fragmented
system with many players and no well-developed communication channels that
can emerge organically in response to the pressure of new tasks related to eresources.” (2002, pp. 317-318).
The extent to which effort may need to be coordinated has been outlined by Geller in a
table listing 21 new tasks across four functional groupings: selection; acquisition; access
and cataloging; and administration. For each task, a new “partnership” was indicated,
which might include library information technology operations, subscription agents,
consortia, publishers, or other organizations or units (2006, p. 12) depending on the task.
This obvious need for communication and coordination across the library when managing
electronic resources – and collaborative approaches generally – has been approached in
different ways and has continued to be a substantial concern of many libraries and a
theme found in numerous articles and books since then (for example, see Conger 2004).
While many libraries have formed e-resource committees, developed selection policies
and strategic plans, and tried to formalize procedures to help organize the work (Jewell
2001, pp. 10-16), the keystone role of the E-resource coordinator has particular
significance. Consequently the importance of social and political skills to the success of
E-resource coordinators within their libraries and within the consortia to which their
libraries may belong has been frequently noted (for example, Clement 2007; Downes and
Rao 2007; Engel and Robbins 2008). Similarly, the importance of being able to
accurately and openly identify, discuss and renegotiate or flexibly reassign staff
responsibilities has also been explored recently by several authors (for example, Afifi
2008; Feather 2007; Kulp 2005; Poe et al. 2008). Overall, however, Carpenter captures
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the feeling of many that “Compared to the staff resources dedicated to managing the print
material acquisition and management process, the e-resource HR investments seem
modest.” (2007, p. 79)
Early ERMS Development and the DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative
As libraries experimented with designating electronic resource coordinators and
organizing committees to improve communication and help rationalize the work of eresource acquisition and related tasks, many began to find their existing ILS incapable of
supporting the management of large amounts of new and specialized information. A
common response was to develop a variety of internal documents and spreadsheets, but
several began to develop local systems designed to help do so. For example, ERLIC (for
Electronic Resources Licensing and Information Center) was developed at the
Pennsylvania State University Libraries beginning in 1999 to help track the status of eresource orders (Stanley et al. 2000, p. 364; Alan et al. 2003; Geller 2006, p. 15), and a
more comprehensive system called Vera (for Virtual Electronic Resource Access) that
also began to deal with license tracking and compliance was developed at MIT soon after
that (Duranceau 2000a and 2000b; Hennig 2002, p. 227). These and other systems shared
many common goals (such as generating lists of resources and presenting information
about license restrictions), but had unique functions and properties, were built on
different platforms, and used different sets of data and working definitions.
Standards have been widely recognized for some time as fundamental to the success and
widespread adoption of electronic resources (see Weigel 2006, p. 78, for example), and
as these systems began to appear and be described at conferences and in the professional
literature, discussions of commonalities, ideal systems and possible standards began to
take place. Such discussions began to coalesce through the introduction in 2001 by
Chandler and Jewell of a “Web Hub for Developing Administrative Metadata for
Electronic Resource Management,” Jewell’s publication that year of an inventory and
comparison of 13 such systems as part of a larger study for the Digital Library Federation
(Jewell 2001, pp. 25-27), and the offering in May 2002 by Jewell, Chandler and several
other colleagues of a pre-standardization workshop under the sponsorship of the DLF and
the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).
Over the course of the following two years the steering group that organized this
workshop proposed and then established the Electronic Resource Management Initiative
(“ERMI”) under DLF auspices in October 2002, and researched and published what has
come to be known as the “ERMI Report” in 2004 (Jewell et al. 2004). Since the Initiative
and resulting report have been widely regarded as pivotal influences on the subsequent
development of ERMS and have served as an informal standard (for example, see Boss
2006, p. 135; Kennedy 2008, p. 344; Koppel 2008b, p. 297; Pace 2004), they will be
examined in some detail. For purposes of this article, the ERMI Report and the systems
and services built to its specifications will be treated as constituting a first phase of fullscale ERM development
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The members of the steering group had developed a “proposed entity relationship
diagram (ERD) and several lists of data elements” (Jewell et al. 2004, p. 28) for the NISO
workshop, and these documents formed the basis for much of the ERMI project, which as
described by Geller (2006, p. 14) had the following goals:
 to record the functionality necessary for the management of large collections
of electronic resources;
 to identify the data elements necessary for this task and define them;
 to create [an] experimental XML schema and associated document type
definitions (DTDs) that could be used to support moving data among systems,
could display that data, and that could be tested locally; and
 to identify and encourage a set of best practices, guidelines, and standards for
data interchange related to electronic resource management.
The ERMI project made use of and referred to the substantial body of work already
accomplished via local development of some 20 library-based ERM initiatives listed in
the report (p. 5), including MIT’s Vera, UCLA’s ERDb, and Johns Hopkins University
Library’s Hermes system. For example, the report highlighted and promoted 5 design
principles incorporated into the UCLA system (including the ability to “accommodate
growth,” the need to design for “one database but many views,” and to “avoid
unnecessary duplication” of data; p. 6).
A “life cycle-based overview” of tasks based on analysis done for development of the
Johns Hopkins system (Cyzyk and Robertson 2003) was also presented, as were screen
shots from sample ERMS that illustrated such functions as alphabetical and subject
displays of resources, different approaches to summarizing and displaying key license
terms, and ways to communicate the status of a resource within the acquisitions or
troubleshooting processes. For the duration of the project there was close consultation
with librarian and vendor stakeholders through separate advisory panels consisting of
knowledgeable, interested representatives (p. 30-31.), which has been credited with
promoting consensus and buy-in on the part of participants and other interested parties
concerning what libraries needed (Emery 2005, Hogarth and Bloom 2008, p. 344).
The ERD and lists of data elements developed for the DLF/NISO conference were
reviewed and refined during the project, and presented as three documents: a revised and
expanded data dictionary listing more than 300 data elements in alphabetical order
(Appendix D; Riggio et al., pp. 82-119), a revision of the ERD (Appendix C; Robertson
et al. 2004; pp. 69-81), and a database structure document that tied the two together and
organized the data elements into “entities” and groups within the entities (Appendix E;
Parker et al., pp. 120-222). To clarify how the data elements and values might be used, a
statement of 47 functional requirements for such broad categories as resource discovery,
bibliographic access and access management, the selection and evaluation process, eresource administration and management, and business functions was also developed
(Appendix A; Anderson et al., pp. 49-61).
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In addition, the E-resource management tasks reflected in the Johns Hopkins HERMES
system were analyzed in detail, and several flowcharts were developed as a result
(Appendix B; Parker et al. 2004). The most general of these contrasted the steps in the
relatively well-understood print acquisition world to those in the more complex one
typical of the electronic resources environment. Thus, a relatively simple acquisition
process for print became three parallel processes for e-resources that might involve
different people: licensing negotiation, technical evaluation, and business negotiation.
Further, where print resources require such relatively clear-cut tasks as receipt and
physical processing, retention, circulation, and preservation, electronic resources were
seen to require highly variable and customized implementation, maintenance and ongoing
review processes.
The ERD and data structure documents reflect the importance of “one to many”
relationships generally -- and the “inheritance” of shared information. For example,
journals that constitute a package and are licensed together share (and inherit) the same
license terms that apply to the package itself, as well as contact and troubleshooting
information. Consequently an ERMS should be capable of representing package- or
“resource-level” information at the more granular title level. The ERMI Report also
provided an extensive and detailed approach to summarizing licensing information: data
elements like Scholarly Sharing or Interlibrary Loan Electronic typically found in
licenses that were defined in the data dictionary were grouped with one another into a
“Terms Defined Entity,” and a set of values to describe license terms was provided.
These values included “Permitted” and “Prohibited,” and could be further qualified by
whether permissions or prohibitions were explicit or interpreted.
A final section of the report detailed results of an “XML investigation” that focused on
options for the exchange of license information (Appendix F: Chandler et al. 2004).
Since it appeared that some available rights expression languages might be adaptable for
use in summarizing license terms for data sharing, a brief description of some of them
was provided. However, perceived shortcomings of these approaches led to
recommendation of a “native ERMI” approach based on the ERMI data dictionary and
related documents. Significantly, while the detailed data dictionary attempted to cover
nearly all important license terms that a library might encounter, the XML investigation
focused on a more limited subset of the ERMI “terms defined” data elements and values
(p. 230).
The Introduction and Adoption of Commercial ERM Systems and Services
The ERMI project’s vendor advisory panel consisted of 12 representatives from
companies and nonprofit organizations that were actively developing or considering
development of ERM systems or services. The earliest of these offerings was Gold Rush
from the Colorado Alliance, which was available by 2001 (Stockton and Machovec 2001)
and subsequently enhanced (Meagher 2004). By 2005, most of the organizations
represented on the panel and a couple of additional ones had introduced or announced
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plans to develop an ERMS of some kind based on the ERMI documents, which had come
to be regarded as an authoritative and comprehensive but informal standard.
By 2005 a number of articles aimed at helping libraries understand their many options
had appeared (see for example, Duranceau 2004, Duranceau 2005, Collins 2005, and
Meyer 2005). Although the environment has since evolved, and systems and services are
no longer quite so neatly categorized, it is useful to divide them into the two rough
groupings suggested by Duranceau in her two articles just cited: those offered by ILS
Vendors (i.e. those offering integrated systems), and those by what she described as
“Serials Vendors and related.”
According to Duranceau, the first ERMS offered by an ILS vendor was the one produced
by Innovative Interfaces, which was available in early beta test by summer 2003 and
went into general release in spring 2004 (Fons and Grover 2004, p. 111). Other early
announcements were from Ex Libris, which publicized their plan to release their Verde
product by the end of 2004; Endeavor, which planned to release its Meridian product in
early 2005, and VTLS, whose Verify product was chosen as the focus of a development
partnership by the Tri-College Consortium under a 3-year contract starting in early 2005
(Medeiros 2007, p. 65). Other ILS vendors that identified themselves as planning ERM
product releases in 2005 were Dynix and SIRSI.
Duranceau broke down her Serials Vendors and related group into three subcategories;
she described the first as consisting of “those who tend to be identified as Serial
Vendors,” and included Harrassowitz (for its HERMIS product) and SWETS (which
offers a range of services under its SwetsWise brand). The second consisted of “those
who tend to be identified as electronic/serial data vendors or providers of e-journal
management systems” of which Serials Solutions is the sole example. The Serials
Solutions product currently goes under the name of “360 Resource Manager,” and is one
of a family of services of related services offered by the company. The last grouping
consists of “those who are a hybrid of the two or whose partnerships make them a hybrid
of the two,” and included EBSCO and TDNet.
A number of company consolidations, realignments and an industry shakeout have taken
place since these early announcements. For example, in June 2005 it was announced that
SIRSI and Dynix would become a single company, and the resulting organization formed
a strategic partnership with Serials Solutions for ERM development and marketing. The
Tri-College Consortium discontinued its Verify development partnership with VTLS in
autumn 2006, and the VTLS website does not currently list the product among its current
offerings. Finally, Ex Libris and parent company Francisco Partners acquired Endeavor
(and its Meridian product) in early 2007, and announced later in the year that Meridian
would be phased out (Breeding 2007, p. 42).
While it is difficult to get a precise reading on the extent of uptake and adoption of
commercial ERMS-type systems and services by libraries, there is evidence that it has
been fairly extensive. For example, sales and installations of ERMS from Innovative
Interfaces, Ex Libris, and Serials Solutions appear to have been fairly strong, with a
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survey through the end of 2007 estimating an installed base of 576 systems from these
three providers (Breeding 2008, p. 37). ERM services offered by serials vendors are a
more recent development, and most have only recently been released or will be within the
next year or so (see Collins 2008, pp. 269-271). Consequently their rate of adoption by
libraries is difficult to predict, but it is clear that libraries are or soon will be able to
choose from among a range of systems and services that vary in extent and
comprehensiveness, and appeal to different segments of the market.
As commercial ERM systems and services have become available, libraries have begun
to migrate to them from their local systems (for accounts of successful migration to the
Innovative Interfaces ERM product see Fons and Grover 2004; Tull 2005; Tull et al.
2005; Chisman 2006). However, there is evidence that adoption of such systems may be
problematic, with Carpenter reporting indications from a two-day NISO-sponsored
conference in September 2007 that “only about 400 institutions have functioning systems
in development or production nationwide,” and that “. . . to effectively populate, manage,
and use these systems a significant time investment and significant shifts in
organizational culture are required, steps that many institutions have yet to make.”
(Carpenter 2007, p. 79) While the shift away from local development has been
pronounced, some libraries whose ERMS helped define and popularize the application
and concept have continued to maintain and develop them. For example, UCLA’s ErDB
and North Carolina State University’s E-matrix are still in use (for descriptions of Ematrix see Raschke et al. 2004 and Meyer et al. 2006).
For several years it has been thought that local ERM development might dovetail with the
movement toward developing open source library systems, and Johns Hopkins’
HERMES system was made available as an open source product. However, development
work at Hopkins was discontinued a few years ago and no other libraries appear to have
made use of it. While the scope and complexity of ERMS have led some to view
prospects for viable and ongoing open source development as limited (Hogarth and
Bloom 2008), it has recently been reported that Simon Fraser University is actively
developing an open source ERMS called CUFTS for the Council of Prairie and Pacific
Universities in Canada (Collins 2008). It consequently seems possible that open source
ERMS development may prove successful.
Emerging ERM Functions and Standards
The ERMI Report provided a detailed “reference model” on which most vendors have
based the design of the systems and services that they offer libraries. However, the
Report was released in 2004, and there have been a number of subsequent developments
with significant implications for ERMS and related standards. Some of these have been
taken up and influenced by “ERMI 2” (a continuation of the original ERMI project
undertaken by a successor group with slightly different membership), while others have
developed independently of it, and it seems likely that additional development will lead
to ongoing redefinitions of both ERM and ERMS.
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An important problem addressed by the ERMI Report was license description and
expression: how to summarize the contents of licenses for tracking and compliance.
While there is evidence that licenses have been evolving toward a simpler and less
problematic pattern that is more in keeping with licensing principles espoused by some
influential library organizations (Davis and Feather 2008), and a significant new initiative
called SERU (for Shared Electronic Resource Understanding; Hahn 2007) may further
this trend, libraries still must deal with the problems and issues that they currently pose.
As noted earlier, the ERMI Report provided a list of typical license terms and
recommended use of six values to describe most of them, but this approach had not been
tested in practice. To do so and to help libraries begin to summarize their licenses, ERMI
2 included the development and presentation of workshops on “license mapping”
(sometimes also called encoding): the process of extracting license information for use
within an ERMS (Davis and Grover 2008; for further discussion of license mapping
issues see Ruth 2008). Among the findings from this project were that such mapping or
encoding is difficult to do, partly because of the significant role that interpretation must
play in it. There was common agreement among workshop participants that simpler
approaches could and should be developed, if possible.
A different but complementary approach to license expression called ONIX-PL (ONIX
for Publications Licenses) has been developed by EDItEUR with assistance from the
DLF, NISO, JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee in the U.K.) and the
Publisher’s Licensing Society in the U.K. (Robertson 2007, p. 7; see also Green 2005).
One of several ONIX communication formats, Robertson describes ONIX-PL as
“intended to be able to encode and express any term that might appear in a license,” and
to accommodate a “richer and more precise codification of license contents” than the
ERMI approach. As part of the ONIX-PL development project, a mapping of relevant
ERMI terms to translate an ERMI-encoded license to the ONIX-PL format was produced;
however, it is not possible to translate an ONIX-PL-encoded license to the ERMI format.
ERMI encoding schemes exist in many ERM systems today; as previously indicated,
however, many librarians would prefer a simpler approach. ONIX-PL is currently
undergoing initial development and pilot testing, as both it and the ERMI approach are
likely to do as experience grows and community needs become more defined.
The intake, processing and utilization of usage data is another area that has seen rapid and
significant development. While usage data have been available from many publishers for
a decade or more, different vendors and publishers often provided statistics that were
defined and reported in different ways, which made comparing the data difficult or
impossible. Over a period of several years various organizations such as the JSTOR user
group and ICOLC (the International Coalition of Library Consortia) began to propose
guidelines for such data (Hults 2008. p. 31). By 2002, interest in standardized usage
metrics had led to the formation of Project COUNTER, a self-sustaining industry effort
that defines such metrics and enforces their adoption and consistent application through a
required audit process. COUNTER presented a major breakthrough that has been of
significant and continuing value to libraries.
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Nevertheless, libraries have had to gather data through inefficient manual practices and
develop their own methods for organizing and presenting them for use, and these
problems have led to two closely-related developments. The first of these is the
organization and marketing of usage data consolidation services and products, such as
Scholarly Stats (from serials vendor SWETS) and Journal Use Reports (from Thomson
Reuters). The second development is SUSHI (the Standardized Usage Statistics
Harvesting Initiative), an XML- and Web Services-based approach to automating the
intake of usage data (Pesch 2007; Chandler and Jewell 2006). Affiliated with ERMI 2
and involving participants from a variety of organizations, SUSHI has become an official
NISO standard (Z39.93-2007) and will be a requirement for organizations wishing to be
certified as COUNTER compliant under its next Code of Practice, to go into effect in
2009. An example of how the two developments can relate to one another is provided by
an option offered by Scholarly Stats: conversion of usage data gathered by the company
to SUSHI format for automated transmission to a library’s ERMS, which may enable
calculation of cost per use figures when associated with local expenditure data.
Such analyses may be difficult when a library uses an acquisitions system (where
expenditure figures typically reside) from one vendor, and an ERMS (where usage data
may be stored) from another – or, alternatively, relies on a serials vendor for the
expenditure data and wishes to combine this information with usage data maintained in
an ERMS or elsewhere. This problem led to the writing of a white paper on the topic as
part of ERMI 2 (Medeiros et al. 2008); it encouraged vendors to work together to resolve
this and other, related interoperability issues, and subsequently led to the formation of the
NISO “CORE” (for Cost of Resources Exchange) working group, which has been
charged with developing appropriate data standards to support this kind of
interoperability.
It is difficult to predict the outcome of these developments related to usage data, but it
seems likely that the SUSHI protocol will be adopted increasingly by publishers and
other information providers in the short term – thus providing a simpler process of usage
data harvesting for libraries. Generally speaking, however, increasingly sophisticated
tools for libraries to analyze usage and other kinds of data from a variety of sources also
seem likely to become available (Fons and Jewell 2006, p. 159-161; Fons 2008, p. 36770).
There have been additional developments that might also be viewed – like the foregoing - as part of a process of near-term consolidation and extension of the ERMS idea. For
example, most ERMS have been designed with the individual library in mind, but as was
pointed out earlier, libraries increasingly operate within a consortial environment, and
these organizations may have their own ERM requirements (Medeiros 2006, 2007; Fons
2008, p. 370-1). These considerations have led to local development of consortial ERMS
(like “WISDOM” from the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium; see
Keswick 2008), development of commercially-available products (like Serials Solutions’
Consortia Manager), and to adoption of a consortium reporting requirement for the
forthcoming COUNTER Code of Practice.
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Longer-term projections are more difficult to make, largely due to the dynamic nature of
the E-resources marketplace – including changes to the environment that may emerge
from the Open Access movement (Bailey 2007). Another factor that may play a very
significant role in the development of ERMS is the apparent trend away from reliance on
a single, all-encompassing Integrated Library System and toward the development and
use of more specialized products and services like those focused on usage data gathering
and reporting. Warner (2006) has argued, for instance, for a reversal of the current allencompassing and integrating role of the ILS (or “ILMS”, as she refers to it), noting that
“It is time to move from the model in which the ILMS tries to do everything to a
model in which the ILMS is one of several components used to provide total
management control; into what might be better referred to as a resource
management environment (RME)” (p. 41).
Similarly, Koppel (2008a) already sees the ILS as in the process of “disintegration” (p.
377), and suggests that
“. . . the ERM, combined with the disintegration of the traditional ILS and the
reshaping of the library around discovery and delivery, will evolve into the RM
(that is, generalized resource manager) or perhaps the URM (the universal
resource manager). The ‘electronic’ focus of ERM will stop being a delineator of
library function and become an adjective – one of many categories in the greater
world of resource management.” (pp. 381-2).
In his estimation, such a scenario is likely to require that libraries and vendors focus on
the rapid development of a variety of new and specialized standards, interoperability
issues, and optimal flow, use, and re-use of a wide variety of data.
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Selected Web Resources:
COUNTER (http://www.projectcounter.org/)
SUSHI (http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi/)
ONIX for Serials (http://www.editeur.org/onixserials.html)
ONIX-PL (http://www.editeur.org/onix_licensing.html)
SERU (http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/RP-7-2008.pdf)
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