Listening to the the Library 2.0 Gang show this month, you would probably have to agree they may well have.

I’m joined by gang regulars Marshall Breeding, of Library Technology Guides & Vanderbilt University, and Oren Beit-Arie, Ex Libris CTO, to pick over the current state of Electronic Resource Management in academic libraries.  Tools to help manage any service, which often consumes over half a library’s resource budget and vast amounts of backroom time, getting a surprising lack of take-up is symptomatic of something not being quite right.

Electronic Resource Management has evolved alongside Integrated Library Systems over the last decade, reaching a point today where many would agree it is a bit of a mess.  Where does the blame lie?  Is it with the world of electronic publishing with it’s very messy business models, terms, delivery platforms and standards compliance (or lack of)?  Is it with the libraries where the approach has been at the wrong level of granularity – approaching eJournal content at the level of the Journal itself as against the article which more often than not the target of a user’s discovery exercise?  This being aggravated by the approach of trying to catalogue the electronic in the same way as the physical – an article in an issue, of a volume, of a journal, on a virtual shelf.   Or is it with the ERM system builders who may need to look closely at the design of some of those systems as they may be helping to cause some of that mess?

Blame is probably too strong a word, but the state we find ourselves in is definitely a shared responsibility of all three groups.  So where do we go from here to get to a more efficient more relevant ERM environment – will it be evolution or revolution?

Check out this month’s Gang to hear their thoughts on this.