سیستم مدیریت منابع الکترونیکی ابتکاری : توسعه ی مشارکتی

From the spring of 2002 to early 2004, Innovative Interfaces, Inc. worked with several libraries in a development partnership to create an electronic resource management (ERM) system. The new ERM system is designed to track licensing and purchasing information about electronic resources, define relationships among aggregators, publishers, or vendors and the resources they provide, and to selectively display information in the Web OPAC for public services staff and patrons. Management of electronic resources has many facets and challenges for libraries and vendors. Numerous conference presentations and journal articles describe the myriad problems from managing aggregator holdings to displaying license terms of use to patrons. In response to the new challenges, librarians and vendors alike have created both partial and comprehensive approaches to solving the problems. In a recent article in Serials Review, Dalene Hawthorne summarizes the e-acquisitions process and points out the opportunities that accompany the challenges. Hawthorne notes that “opportunities abound for vendors of integrated systems, subscription vendors, and other information businesses to become more involved in the management of electronic resources.”[1] She also states that “opportunities exist for librarians and others in related areas to become involved in managing access to, and metadata about, e-resources locally and to participate in standards or systems development (italics added for emphasis).”[2] What opportunities are presented when a vendor and a group of its customers partner to develop an integrated module to support electronic resources management? What challenges arise in such a project? This article reports on the development partnership between Innovative Interfaces, Inc. (Innovative) and several of its customer libraries from spring 2002 to early 2004 to create an electronic resource management (ERM) system.

Innovative incorporated a number of new features into the ERM module. These features were grounded in the input provided by Innovative's development partners including workshops, scenario, and requirements documents. The workshops and scenario documents made it clear that representing the umbrella “electronic resource” was the most fundamental challenge to the architecture of the system. The “electronic resource,” particularly in its aggregation and full-text database manifestation, resembled the membership problem that libraries have struggled with for many years; however, it was more complex since relationships to licenses, payments, contacts, and in some cases thousands of aggregated titles needed to be addressed. Innovative solved this problem by enhancing its architecture to include new structures to describe the umbrella “electronic resource” and relate it to the appropriate license(s), payments, holdings, and contacts. Other requirements provided by the development partners directed Innovative to develop features such as automatic e-mail notification for critical resource management events like license expiration and renewal, new fixed and variable field structures, field level passwording, public display of rights and responsibilities, public display of “system down” messages, and several others. Throughout this part of the process, focus remained on satisfying the needs of the acquisition and supporting workflow described in the scenario and requirements documents provided by the development partners.