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I'm involved in the GOKb project, and also a related project in the UK called 'KB+' which is a national service providing a knowledgebase and the ability to manage subscriptions/licences.
As Adam said - GOKb is definitely more of a service, although the software could be run by anyone it isn't designed with ERM functionality in mind - but to be able to be a GOKb is a community managed knowledgebase - and so far much of the work has been to build a set of tools for bringing in data from publishers and content providers, and to store and manage that data. In the not too distant future GOKb will provide data via APIs for use in downstream systems.

Two specific downstream systems GOKb is going to be working with are the Kuali OLE system (https://www.kuali.org/ole) and the KB+ system mentioned above. KB+ started with very similar ideas to GOKb in terms of building a community managed knowledgebase, but with the UK HE community specifically in mind. However it is clear that collaborating with GOKb will have significant benefits and help the community focus its effort in a single knowledgebase, and so it is expected that eventually KB+ will consume data from GOKb, and the community will contribute to the data managed in GOKb.

However KB+ also provides more ERM style functionality available to UK Universities. Each institution can setup its own subscriptions and licenses, drawing on the shared knowledgebase information which is managed centrally by a team at Jisc Collections (who negotiate licenses for much of the content in the UK, among other things). I think the KB+ software could work as a standalone ERMs in terms of functionality, but its strength is as a multi-institution system with a shared knowledgebase. We are releasing v3.3 next week which brings integration with various discussion forum software - hoping we can put community discussion and collaboration at the heart of the product

Development on both KB+ and GOKb is being done by a UK software house called Knowledge Integration, and while licenses for the respective code bases have not yet been implemented, both should be released under an open licence in the future. However the code is already on Github if anyone is interested
http://github.com/k-int/KBPlus/
https://github.com/k-int/gokb-phase1

In both cases they are web apps written in Groovy. GOKb has the added complication/interest of also having a Open (was Google) Refine extension as this is the tool chose for loading messing e-journal data into the system

Sorry to go on, hope the above is of some interest

Owen

Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: [log in to unmask]
Telephone: 0121 288 6936

On 20 Sep 2013, at 16:26, Karl Holten <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> A couple of months ago our organization began looking at new ERM solutions / link resolvers, so I thought I'd share my thoughts based on my research of the topic. Unfortunately, I think this is one area where open source offerings are a bit thin. Many offerings look promising at first but are no longer under development. I'd be careful about adopting something that's no longer supported. Out of all the options that are no longer developed, I thought the CUFTS/GODOT combo was the most promising. Out of the options that seem to still be under development, there were two options that stood out: CORAL and GOKb. Neither includes a link resolver, so they weren't good for our needs. CORAL has the advantage of being out on the market right now. GOKb is backed by some pretty big institutions and looks more sophisticated, but other than some slideshows there's not a lot to look at to actually evaluate it at the moment. 
> 
> Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that nothing out there right now matches the proprietary software, especially in terms of link resolvers and in terms of a knowledge base. If I were forced to go open source I'd say the GOKb and CORAL look the most promising. Hope that helps narrow things down at least a little bit.
> 
> Regards,
> Karl Holten
> Systems Integration Specialist
> SWITCH Consortium
> 6801 North Yates Road
> Milwaukee, WI 53217
> http://topcat.switchinc.org/ 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Riesner, Giles W.
> Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2013 5:33 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Open Source ERM
> 
> Thank you, Peter.  I took a quick look at the list and found ERMes there as well as a few others.
> Not everything under this category really fits what I'm looking for (e.g. Calibre). I'll look a little deeper.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> Giles W. Riesner, Jr., Lead Library Technician, Library Technology Community College of Baltimore County
> 800 S. Rolling Road  Baltimore, MD 21228
> [log in to unmask]   1-443-840-2736
> 
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Peter Murray [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2013 4:44 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Open Source ERM
> 
> I don't know about ERMes specifically, but wanted to point out that FOSS4Lib has 12 packages of various sorts in the "Electronic Resource Management" category:
> 
>  https://foss4lib.org/package-type/electronic-resource-management
> 
> 
> Peter
> 
> 
> On Sep 19, 2013, at 2:46 PM, "Riesner, Giles W." <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> One of our Librarians saw  an article about ERMes, an open source ERM  
>> from the University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse
>> 
>> (http://murphylibrary.uwlax.edu/erm/) ,  and was asking about the possibility of our  using it.
>> 
>> If you're using it and wouldn't mind us picking your brain a little bit on it, please contact me off list .
>> 
>> That said, if you have experience with any other open source ERM 
>> systems and wouldn't mind sharing some information
>> 
>> about them, I'm happy to hear about them as well.
>> 
>> Thanks.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Giles W. Riesner, Jr., Lead Library Technician, Library Technology 
>> Community College of Baltimore County
>> 800 S. Rolling Road  Baltimore, MD 21228
>> [log in to unmask]   1-443-840-2736
> 
> --
> Peter Murray
> Assistant Director, Technology Services Development LYRASIS [log in to unmask]
> +1 678-235-2955
> 800.999.8558 x2955