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 are resulting in librarians having to justify all
expenditure 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.

There has been a lot of discussion about the implementation of ERM
systems in recent years, however, use of these systems is still far
from ubiquitous and many academic libraries have yet to implement or
even purchase a system.

Recent research around workflow management has shown that over 1/3 of
academic libraries 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.

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

We will add a new TERM every 2 weeks and invite you to review and
comment on each of them. If you have any suggestions and tips from
your workplace, please feel free to add your experiences. In this way
we hope to crowd source TERMS through open peer commentary with a view
to providing a first definitive draft in early 2012. However, we plan
to keep the TERMS blog going after this date so that TERMS will become
a reference point to those who are new to e-resource management and
for those who may want to implement its recommendations of best
practice.

You can follow us on twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/6terms or join
the Facebook group: TERMS

Jill Emery: jemery@pdx.edu
Graham Stone:  G.Stone@hud.ac.uk