Electronic Resource Management in Libraries

Author: C. Sean Burns
Date, version 1: 2024-08-23
Email: sean.burns@uky.edu
Website: cseanburns.net
GitHub: @cseanburns

Introduction

This book was written for my Electronic Resource Management (ERM) course, which I teach in my library science program. The book and course's goals are to provide students with the knowledge and skills needed to become electronic resource librarians. The course and this book should also be helpful to those who will work in adjacent areas of librarianship. Broadly, the work should be appealing to anyone who wants to acquire a fundamental understanding of how librarians manage their electronic resources.

Electronic resources include the systems, platforms, and works that are provided through the web. This includes academic databases, ebooks, discovery systems, and the technologies that connect these systems. It turns out that providing these systems and access to what they offer is complicated work. We study these complexities through four modules, and each module has a dedicated section in this work. The modules cover:

  • the role of the electronic resource librarian;
  • the technologies and standards used for this type of job;
  • the stewardship of electronic resources through a study of workflows, markets, licensing, and collection development; and
  • what providing these systems means for patrons.

This book is not a comprehensive study of ERM. However, it introduces students to the main areas and should be read along with the readings linked to in each chapter. The linked readings are updated annually.

About This Book

This book is a live document. The content is updated each time I teach the course, which is generally the fall semester. Updates will address changes in the field and to edit for clarity.

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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.