2008

Electronic Resources IG Meeting, Friday 1/11/08 7:30 pm

The IG meeting on Friday night attracted an impressive group of information professionals, with standing room available only. Zoe Stewart-Marshall, an ERMIG Chair and Clara Ruttenberg, an ERMIG Vice Chair started the meeting with Electronic Resources IG mission statement and goals

http://www.ala.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/erm/index.cfm

Zoe announced that Vice Chair position, responsible for organizing managed discussions, will be open. Those interested are invited to apply. Also, any suggestions for topics to be covered at
ALA annual are welcomed.

The first presenter, Ted Fons from Innovative Interfaces, Inc gave a brief overview of the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) and a positive update that the standard was approved by NISO. He indicated differences between SUSHI and COUNTER. COUNTER is good on how to report the statistics on a smaller scale. SUSHI allows query for usage data through web services and saves time for staff. It took 18-20 months for the idea to be implemented. Last October the standard was finalized and approved for use, it is now standard Z39-93. Project EUCLID, Highwire Press, Gale all implemented SUSHI Server online. As of right now, content providers are at some stage of implementing SUHSI server. Mr. Fons jokingly suggested thanking your content providers for getting on board. There are several SUSHI versions, now we just need one efficient model. Read more about SUSHI: http://www.niso.org/committees/SUSHI/SUSHI_comm.html and http://www.niso.org/standards/resources/Z39-93-2007.pdf

Oliver Pesch from EBSCO gave an update on the new COUNTER schema upcoming release 3 since the previous was rather limited. This is no longer unknown technology. There are issues in implementation. On the server side it is issue of creating new user interface, backing up data, etc. It’s up to the client and the server to decide what reports to ask for, as long as the server and client agree.

Ed Riding from SirsiDynix gave a brief update and overview on the Cost of Resource Exchange (CORE) standard. It will allow pulling ILS-stored acquisition data into ERM system. He mentioned that the question of which data elements from ILS to bring into ERM system was queried by a group of librarians last year. Their white paper can be found on the DLF website: http://www.diglib.org/standards/ERMI_Interop_Report_20080108.pdf. At the same time SIRSI was discussing the same question with Serials Solutions. There were about 20-25 commonly requested data elements. Ed Riding’s group contacted NISO with proposal to create a standard protocol for exchange, using SUSHI and OpenURL as models. ERMS will store items with the same elements as ILS acquisition module: purchase order number, invoice number, fund code, vendor ID, etc. Whatever is used as markup language is to be determined by the group.
Next presenter, Brian Green from EDItEUR, was talking about developing standards for license communication: ONIX for Licensing Terms. It is a new ONIX standard for expressing and communicating licence terms between systems using a standard XML schema. With the explosion of digital resources libraries sign numerous licences with terms of agreement varying from institution to institution. The paper format is difficult for the users to consult on how to comply with licence terms. The answer is a machine readable license, and that’s when ONIX Publications Licence format (ONIX-PL) comes in. It is a structured XML statement of all terms and conditions which is sent to the library’s ERM system. The ERM system looks after user authentication and links the actionable licence terms to the relevant resources. When users access a resource, they are then informed about permitted uses. JISC and Wiley were one of the first to map the licence to ONIX-PL format. SCELC, Springer and Serials Solutions are also working on implementing ONIX-PL format.Some libraries want to receive ready mapped machine readable licenses, some prefer to map their own terms. ONIX-Pl is not intended to replace paper license, at least not yet.  Read more: http://www.editeur.org/onix_licensing.html and http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_pals2/synthesis/standards/olt.aspx

Last speaker, Kathy Klemperer from Library and Information Systems Consulting gave an update on recently published materials on ONIX for Serials formats and documentation. A content item description message was added in the latest release. It is used to transmit information describing individual content items (usually articles) within a release. Another message added is a content item extended description, which is used to transmit detailed information about individual content items (usually articles) in a release. New release supports the provision of table-of-contents alerts, notification of single-article releases, and distribution of article-level information suitable for populating abstracting and indexing databases. Ms. Klemperer finished her presentation with a statement that those messages benefit everyone: they help to keep holdings up to date and help with claiming.

All messages are available at: http://www.editeur.org/onixserials/ONIX_SRN09.html