Background on DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative

On 22 November 2000, Karen Calhoun, Director, Central Technical Services, Cornell University Libraries, posted a message to her colleagues within the ALCTS Technical Services Directors of Large Research Libraries group. Her message said:

Dear colleagues,

As part of Cornell's CORC project, the CORC team began to describe a set of administrative metadata fields that could potentially be useful to collection development and acquisitions staff working with licensed networked resources. In general these administrative metadata fields would capture information like selector IDs, fund codes, number of simultaneous users, licensing details, evaluative notes, troubleshooting information, etc., etc. Currently a Cornell library staff member, Adam Chandler, is preparing a research proposal for further defining what a database of e-resource administrative metadata might contain, if and how the information might be linked to bibliographic and holdings data, and design and implementation issues related to building and maintaining such a database.

I'm aware that some of your libraries have made advances this area of inquiry, and I'm guessing that some of you already have working databases of this type. If you have, would you please respond to me with a one or two-sentence description of what your library has done and the name/email address of a person that Adam might contact for further information? Your help would be most appreciated. Happy Thanksgiving to all, and thanks in advance for any advice you can provide. --Karen

Tim Jewell at the University of Washington responded to Karen's message. Tim and I started a correspondence and quickly discovered that we were engaged in very similar initiatives. We have combined our efforts. This page is our common research log on the Web.

- Adam Chandler, 1/12/2001