Techniques for Electronic Resource Management Project

Jill Emery, Collection Development Librarian at Portland State University, and Graham Stone, Information Resources Manager at the University of Huddersfield, have created a blog called TERMS: Techniques for ER Management that will look at the various stages in the life cycle of electronic resources.

From the initial post:

"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 (...)"

"Over the next 3 months TERMS will look at each of the stages in the e-resources cycle ...

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."

[Source: LISNews]