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TERMS: Techniques for electronic resource management

Two decades after the advent of electronic journals and databases, librarians are still grappling with ways to best manage these resources in conjunction with their print resources. In addition, economic pressures at most institutions of higher learning are resulting in librarians having to justify each dollar spent on collections and resource management. Furthermore, ebooks are becoming yet another stream of purchasing and management with the added complexity of patron driven acquisitions. All this results in the need to codify the management of electronic resource management more than ever.
 
“Our job over the next five to ten years is to provide a way to access these valuable resources in an intuitive, easy to use one-stop shop, and not to be afraid of running continual beta test where new services and functions can be added when necessary. To do this we need flexible, interoperable resource-discovery systems based on open source software. In addition, we must keep evaluating users’ needs and reach out by adapting our systems to fit their requirements, rather than expecting them to come to us; indeed our very future depends on it.” (1)
 
In the past, we have been able to afford ‘nice to have’ resources and renew our electronic resources without real evaluation of their worth. In times of budgetary constraints and staffing reductions we are now working our electronic resources harder than ever in order to extract maximum value for money from them. We must now look closely at all of our electronic resources at all steps of the e-resource life cycle (2).
 
There has been a lot of discussion about the implementation of ERM systems in recent years (3), however, use of these systems is still far from ubiquitous and many academic libraries have yet to implement or even purchase a system. Despite early expectations Collins and Grogg see the current crop of ERM systems as ‘less like a silver bullet and more that a round of buckshot’ (4).
 
A growing area of recent research has been around workflow management. Collins and Grogg (4) found that over 1/3 of academic libraries in their survey put workflow management at the top of their prioritization list. This area has also been highlighted as a gap by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) ERM Data Standards and Best Practices Review (5). In the UK, two projects, the SCONUL shared ERM requirements project (6) and the Managing Electronic Resource Issues (MERI) project at the University of Salford (7), have looked in depth at workflows.
Both the University of Huddersfield and the Portland State University will be sharing their workflows as part of TERMS, and we encourage others who would be willing to share your own workflows to contact us at the email addresses given below.
 
Over the next 3 months TERMS will look at each of the stages in the e-resources cycle on our blog:
 
http://6terms.tumblr.com

1 Investigating New Content for purchase/addition

2. Acquire New Content

3. Implement

4. Evaluation and Ongoing Access

5. Annual Review

6. Cancellation and replacement

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Doug Rickard, Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, 2008

The drum machine arrived in popular music in the late 1970’s. By 1983, only a few years later, after 50,000 years of live human drumming, mainstream audiences had fully embraced this sound in hits like “Rockit.” Just as remarkable, Herbie Hancock was able to pioneer both acoustic jazz and a song created with electronic drums.

A similar shift is happening in photography. Looking at projects based on Google Maps Street View (GSV), particularly large photographs in physical galleries, makes me wonder: Is Street View a camera? Or a repository of source images? Or both?

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I’ve been working on and off for many months on a video to explain Mozilla to the uninitiated. The home for the video is now on the Get Involved page of the mozilla.org site, and I’m excited that it will be part of a process for getting people excited about pitching in at Mozilla. You can watch it below: mega hats off to Rainer Cvillink, Mozilla’s in-house video wizard, for all the great camera work, and to Jenn Strom for editing and motion grapnics.