Electronic Resource Management Standardization-Still A Mixed Bag

Abstract

Phone: 301-654-2512; Fax: 410-685-5278) www.niso.org D uring the American Library Association Conference in Washington, D.C. in June, I spoke on a panel with Oliver Pesch from EBSCO and Bob McQuillan from Innovative Interfaces Inc. about The Three " S " s of Elec-tronic Resource Management (ERM): Standards, Systems, and Subscriptions. The meeting attracted more than 150 attendees and was one sign of the challenges faced by librarians who manage e-resources. Each year, the percentage of acquisi-tions budgets directed towards digital resources is increasing by several percentage points and has done so for most of the past decade. The majority of libraries currently dedicate more than 50% of their acquisitions budgets to digital content. A few librarians have even indicated that they are likely to move to an acquisition strategy of 100% digital in the coming years, one of many indicators of the growing importance of e-resources to both librar-ians and patrons. Relatively new systems have been developed to store and curate the information necessary to order, process, and monitor electronic products, and a variety of standards and best practice projects addressing ERM have evolved. However, manag-ing these resources continues to be problematic for a variety of reasons. In part, this is due to the complexity of digital products and the way they are packaged for sale. The rapid pace of transition away from print and toward electronic resources has not been matched in many libraries with an equivalent transition of the human resources and skill sets nec-essary to effectively manage these products. Also, the development, deployment, and population of management systems naturally lags behind changes in practice given their costs and complexity, both on the vendor and library sides. However, the majority of attendees to the ALA session (granted a very un-scientific study, although similar research supports this) had either implemented or planned to implement an ERM system. What is it about digital resources that make them more complicated to manage than their print counterparts? While the item management lifecycle for a print product is linear and moves from selection through ordering to receipt, cata-loging, circulation, and eventually de-acquisition, the lifecycle for digital resources is quite different.