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ALCTS-Sponsored Meeting on E-resource
Management Metadata at ALA, June 14, 2002

Notes compiled by Adam Chandler

 

1. Welcome and Introductions:

- About 80 people present, about 10-15 or whom were also at the ALA midwinter meeting

Over 80 people attended the meeting. In this picture, Nate Robertson is providing an overview of the ER diagram he created to model the complexities of e-license management.

- About 50 people present at the NISO/DLF meeting, with a wide range of institutions represented (mostly academic libraries, but also vendors such as Endeavor, Ex Libris, Ebsco, etc.).

- Goal: We are trying to summarize what is happening at various institutions. In addition, we are trying are pushing standards for functional needs and elements.

2. Informal Verbal Reports

- Big news: Tim Jewell and his colleagues at the University of Washington are involved in early talks with Innovative Interfaces, Inc. to design and build a module for managing licensed electronic resources. Some of the objectives of the project are to: (1) attach license information to title level records; (2) tie together aggregator titles; (3) inform user when a title is unavailable. The III system they are building will probably be a stand alone module, one that may be used by non-III libraries.

- Christa Easton reported that Stanford is migrating from their Artesia Teams system to a locally developed Access database.

- The Colorado Alliance "Gold Rush" project (http://goldrush.coalliance.org/> is moving forward in its use and development. - Nathan Robertson at Johns Hopkins offered an update on the HERMES project. HERMES is currently undergoing some functional reconsideration and debugging. HERMES uses Cold Fusion and SQL server, but the code is module and could be ported at a later time. They are shooting for a fall release.

- Penn State is working on ERLIC2 (formerly called "Lib Lion"). The 14,000 records in the system are moving from MS Access to a Cold Fusion/Oracle implementation. An interesting feature of the system is an online "billboard" which gathers together important alerts, such as new trials or access problems, for staff and users.

- Norm Medeiros of Haverford College, a member of the Tri College Consortium (Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford Library), described work he is involved with to build a system in FileMaker. To start, they are breaking the work into two pieces. Piece one is focused on serials and acquisitions; piece two is for reference staff. Their first implementation contains 2500 records.

- Emory University Library had several representatives present in the audience. They are using MS SQL server with an Access front-end for staff and a .asp front-end for the public. The system is a continuation of work started with then their health sciences library. It contains 1400 records. - Kimberly Parker from the Yale University Library described work they are doing to move metadata for 1700 Chinese language journals into their e-license management system. Kim said they've already proven during testing that it will work!

3. High Level Summary of the April NISO/DLF Workshop

Tim Jewell thanked Pricilla Caplan of the Florida Center for Library Automation for and Pat Harris of NISO for their help in putting together the NISO/DLF workshop, and their guidance in thinking through the various options possible for a e-license metadata standards. There is a strong level of support for putting together a process to push forward standards in this area. For details on the workshop, see:

4. Strategy for Developing Functional Specifications and Promoting Relevant Standards

- Nate Robertson mentioned the possible relevance of the International Standard Text Code (ISTC) standard. One of the next steps is to determine if the ISTC can be used in our e-license systems.

- Tim thinks it will be much more efficient if we can develop standards for sharing license agreements; we will no longer need to start from scratch each time we negotiate a new license with a vendor. This would also benefit consortia.

- Ivy Anderson, Harvard University, quickly talked through an overview of a group of functional areas and elements for access and support, approaching the problem from a "life cycle" perspective. One of the challenges is "localization." How do we create a standard that can be customized to accommodate local practices and needs? Another challenge is centralization vs. decentralization. How much of the management of the data should be centralized? The guiding mantra at Harvard (like at UCLA) is "one database, many views." Systems ought to be able to log problem histories for resources.

Tim is working on a proposal to the Digital Library Federation to support the effort to create standards for e-license management. The proposal is to lead the effort to create the following deliverables:

a. A report on the state of the art of e-license management systems. This report would include descriptions of a handful of outstanding systems (e.g., ERLIC2, HERMES).

b. A document describing the functional specifications for e-license metadata management. This document would be updated periodically as new versions (e.g, version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0).

c. A draft, experimental, XML scheme. Possible additional pieces include use cases (or scenarios) for specific workflows and a survey of other metadata standards -- such as ONIX.