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Digital Library Federation Seattle, Washington November 4-6, 2002

The DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative is a new DLF-sponsored project that will develop common specifications and tools for managing the license agreements, related administrative information, and internal processes associated with collections of licensed electronic resources.

This new DLF project is a continuation of the ongoing work led by Tim Jewell at the University of Washington. A small group of interested librarians has joined Tim and together they are working on the problems associated with managing licensed resources in libraries. The DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative steering group is comprised of the following individuals: Ivy Anderson (Harvard), Adam Chandler (Cornell University), Sharon Farb (UCLA), Tim Jewell (University of Washingon), Kimberly Parker (Yale); Angelo Riggio (UCLA), and Nathan Robertson (Johns Hopkins). Adam Chandler is still managing the Web Hub (http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/elicensestudy/) where more detailed information may be found.

Background: The steering group began to hold discussions to plan for the DLF/NISO "pre-standardization" workshop held last May just prior to the DLF Forum. During the workshop, presentations were made on the functions and data elements deemed most fundamental to three key areas for managing e-resources: description (Nathan Robertson), licensing (Sharon Farb), and what we are calling administration, access, and support (Ivy Anderson). Nathan also contributed an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) aimed at describing the logical relationships among the functions and elements.Since then, the group has held several conference calls to discuss the goals of the initiative and refine the ERD and lists of elements.

DLF 2002 Fall Forum: The steering group met at a pre-DLF forum discussion for several hours on Monday, November 4. The results of the meeting and the ongoing follow-up work will be posted to the Web Hub as a "working document" before the end of the year. A summary of the initiative, more deliverables and the project objectives are listed on the DLF Web site (http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlf-erm02.htm).

The following afternoon (Tuesday, November 5) Tim Jewell led a DLF "Birds of a Feather" session on the topic. He distributed copies of the initiative summary and described and discussed the project's goals and expected outcomes. The members of the working group were introduced, and a brief history and status report on the project were provided. Some of the questions discussed in the "Birds of a Feather" appear below:

Tim Jewell will be a speaker at the ALCTS pre-conference symposium on managing e-resources Jan. 24th at ALA Midwinter, and an open discussion meeting of interested parties will again be held (the same day, from 7:30-9:30 in the Wyndham Philadelphia Ballroom).

Comments and Q & A:

Q: Can you provide some examples of the functionality envisioned?

A: We hope to address the problem of recording and displaying key license terms, such as ILL and course pack permissions. Part of the solution to that is providing a means for tying together specific journals, and the "packages" that they belong to. That will allow associating both license terms and administrative details with particular journals, without having to duplicate that data. In addition to license information, we would like to support the activities and workflows involved in the acquisition and administration of electronic resources -- all of the 'life cycle' activities that happen in the course of selecting, acquiring, and providing access to online materials, including the issue of "who has the ball" as resources move through the acquisition process and, at the other end, the information and functions needed for renewal and retention decisions (e.g. performance monitoring, statistics, and renewal tickler functions). Comment: Scott Cantor (from the Shibboleth project) noted his group's interest in being able to accurately describe usage rights associated with specific resources and user groups in a standardized way. The Shibboleth project has already done extensive work in this area that the DLF initiative may want to review.

Q: How realistic is it to expect standards to be established for this area?

A: We need to treat that as an open question. At this point, it looks as though standards in some areas (such as description) are more likely to emerge in the near term than in others (such as administration and access). Standards for licensing terms seem to be widely desirable, and would support an "OCLC shared cataloging" approach to registering and communicating license terms. However, license terms and interpretations still vary widely, which makes this part of the standards question more difficult.

Q: Is your work intended to support the development of vendor-based systems, or locally-developed systems?

A: If we are successful, the data elements and schema modeled in our work should be useful in either a third-party or local development context, as well facilitating transportability of data from one type of system to another.

Diane Grover gave a status report on the University of Washington's partnership with Innovative Interfaces (III) to develop an Electronic Resources Management module. The UW has been working with III since May, developing scenarios, field definitions, and functional specifications. Diane reported that the DLF working lists of fields and definitions were critical to the module development. The module is now in an early prototype version and several new development partners have been added, including Ohio State University, Washington State University, Glasgow University and University of Western Australia.

Near future: As it works, the group is planning to widen its range of contacts to the vendor community and other libraries. For example, there is active discussion of organizing a "reactor panel" to respond to element lists and other draft documents that the group expects to make available soon. In addition, Nathan Robertson will represent the working group on the NISO/Editeur Joint Working Party on the exchange of serials information, (http://www.niso.org/news/SerialsExchange.html) -- which will be discussing and developing ideas presented by Ed Jones in his White paper report to NISO on this topic (http://www.niso.org/standards/resources/SerialsWP.html). In addition, Tim will be a speaker at the ALCTS pre-conference symposium on managing e-resources Jan. 24th at ALA Midwinter, and an open discussion meeting of interested parties will again be held (the same day, from 7:30-9:30 in the Wyndham Philadelphia Ballroom). The working group also had a worthwhile discussion at this conference with Oliver Pesch (EBSCO), and hopes to expand its knowledge and awareness of related developments such as Shibboleth and Digital Rights Management by making contact with key people.