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