Electronic Resource Management: Driving Factors

Adam ChandlerInformation Technology LibrarianLibrary Technical Services

III Directors’ SymposiumBerkeley, CA, March 14, 2006

My qualifications to speak on ERM

• Created “A Web Hub for Developing Administrative Metadata for Electronic Resource Management” in 2001 with Tim Jewell (University of Washington)

• Member of DLF ERMI 1 Steering Group, 2002-2005

• Member of DLF ERMI 2 Steering Group, 2006-2007

• Co-chair of NISO Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI)

• Lead technical person on the team that implemented the III standalone ERM at Cornell in 2005

• Project leader on Cornell’s WebBridge implementation

DLF ERMI 1 Report: August 2004

Report

Appendix A: Functional Requirements

Appendix B: Workflow Diagram

Appendix C: Entity Relationship Diagram for Electronic Resource Management

Appendix D: Data Element Dictionary

Appendix E: Electronic Resources Management System Data Structure

Appendix F: XML Investigation

Vendor Support for DLF ERMI

Writing in American Libraries, about the 2004 ALA Annual conference in Orlando, Andrew Pace noted:

“If last year’s hot product was federated searching, then 2004 belongs to electronic resources management (ERM)” and of the impact of the DLF ERMI documents: “in a nearly unprecedented move, nearly every large automation vendor has used the specifications created by librarians.”

Why all the support for DLF ERMI 1?

1. The landscape is shifting, from print to electronic. Clearly articulated need from librarians: must get some control over licenses and the associated titles (ejournals primarily)

2. New market segment for vendors to sell products

3. Competition: threat that competitors would corner the new market and gain a foothold into other areas (i.e., III’s bold move pushed the market forward)

4. Digital Library Federation backing gave initiative credibility

5. Tim Jewell’s skillful leadership

DLF ERMI 2

• Enhanced data dictionary– Continue to model, provide more precision

• License expression standards– NISO / EDItEUR / DLF working on embedding license

terms within ONIX• License term “mapping” skills

– Collaborating with ARL on workshops and training materials for mapping licenses into ERM systems

• Usage data harvesting and reporting– Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative

(SUSHI) established as a NISO working group

Near-term ERM activity: professional education for license mapping

• Develop professional education for mapping lawyer-written narrative licenses into discrete “actionable” elements within ERM systems• Workshops planned for NASIG and ALA

• ARL Visiting Programs Officers – Trisha Davis (Ohio State) and Diane Grover (University of Washington)

Near-term ERM activity: XML licenses

• NISO / EDItEUR / DLF group is actively working on embedding license terms within ONIX

• Experiments will be initiated involving XML containers for licenses, as input into ERM systems -- one continuous supply chain

Near-term ERM activity: NISO SUSHI and COUNTER

• ERM systems will become the primary repository and reporting tool for consolidating COUNTER stats for ejournals and databases

• III, Ex Libris, SirsiDynix, Endeavor, and Serials Solutions are all committed to supporting the NISO SUSHI protcol in their ERM products

As an extension of the ERM module, should III consider building a rating service into the product, to compare COUNTER usage data across all III ERM installations? What if they also integrated WebBridge stats? Think of it as a III impact factor for journals and articles.

Also a near-term ERM problem: holdings synchronization

• MARC records in the catalog• License and coverage information in ERM• Coverage, linking rules in link resolver

Recommendation: ERM system and link resolver should be companion software, sitting on top of the same coverage database

Thought experiment

A possible long-term scenario for ERM• Premise 1: Trend towards global aggregation of

content for discovery and delivery

Amazon (books, cds, electronics, etc.), Google (full text and advertising), Netflix (DVDs), iTunes, Yahoo Unlimited Music, Rhapsody, Napster (music), eBay (used goods)

•Minimize the cost to the user of transitioning between resource discovery and delivery•Ride the “long tail” effect. Items find their users when content is aggregated for a large audience

A possible long-term scenario for ERM • Premise 2: Patron initiated borrowing works

“User-initiated interlibrary loan (ILL) and document delivery (DD) operations provide better service than mediated ILL/DD services. In most cases, user-initiated services have lower unit costs, higher fill rates, and faster turnaround times than mediated services”

- Mary E. Jackson, “ARL Study Confirms effectiveness of User-Initiated ILL/DD Services”

A possible long-term scenario for ERM • Premise 3: Widespread and growing dissatisfaction

with the current OPAC paradigm

“The current Library catalog is poorly designed for the tasks of finding, discovering, and selecting the growing set of resources available in our libraries. It is best at locating and obtaining a known item. For librarians and for our users, the catalog is only one option for accessing our collections. We offer a fragmented set of systems to search for published information (catalogs, A&I databases, full text journal sites, institutional repositories, etc) each with very different tools for identifying and obtaining materials. For the user, these distinctions are arbitrary.”

- Bibliographic Services Task Force, University of California Libraries, “Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California,” December 2005.

“Today, a large and growing number of students and scholars routinely bypass library catalogs in favor of other discovery tools, and the catalog represents a shrinking proportion of the universe of scholarly information. The catalog is in decline, its processes and structures are unsustainable, and change needs to be swift.”

- Karen Calhoun, “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools,” Prepared for the Library of Congress, February 2006.

search

Ranking and recommending based on intentional data: “data which reflects choices and behaviors: it captures intentions. Examples are holdings data (collection development choices), circulation data, download counts, database usage counts, resolution counts.”

– Lorcan Dempsey

•Intentional data•Circulation status•Licenses•Loan period•Fair use law•Geography•Consortia•Patron status (faculty, outstanding fines, etc.)

The long-term future of ERM goes beyond electronic resources, to managing the “delivery rules.”

Librarian selectors will be augmented with expert systems that analyze the borrowing patterns and optimize (local user centric) collections based on what patrons request from beyond their library.

Possible development paths?

WorldCat

III

• Print and electronic books

• Electronic journals• Databases• Print journals• Print indexes• Rare materials• Digital collections• Offsite storage• Images• Video recording discs

OCLC Global Data Storage

“ERM” rules governthe result set

Serials Solutions

Discussion