"ERMI 2" Status Report, as of May 16th, 2007 The final report of the DLF's Electronic Resources Management Initiative ("ERMI") was completed in August 2004 and has been instrumental in spurring development of ERM systems and services - but in the opinions of its authors, it left some important "loose ends." To tie up those loose ends, a second phase to the project - called "ERMI 2" - has been underway with DLF sponsorship since November 2005 (see http:www.diglib.org/standards/dlf-erm05.htm). Work on all facets of ERMI 2 is now nearing completion, and release of a revised set of deliverables and final report is planned for this summer. What follows is a brief status report on the most important components of the project. * E- Resource Usage Statistics. The most significant deliverable for this segment of ERMI 2 was to be development of "a protocol for automated delivery of COUNTER-compliant vendor usage data to ERM systems, and a demonstration of its use in practice." Envisioned as a way to dramatically reduce the time spent by library staff in gathering and reporting usage data, this idea has been warmly embraced by the library community, and the protocol itself has been developed and publicized as SUSHI (for "Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative"). Sponsored and supported by NISO (see http://www.niso.org/committees/SUSHI/SUSHI_comm.html), and co-chaired by ERMI 2 steering group member Adam Chandler and EBSCO's Oliver Pesch. SUSHI is well on its way to becoming an official standard, since it is now in the "draft standard for trial use" phase of development, with a comment deadline of May 20th. SUSHI has been tested successfully and continues to get a lot of attention, since its potential for reducing library staff time spend gathering statistics appears now to be well established. For example, at a recent ICOLC meeting in Montreal, Kathy Perry of the VIVA consortium described a pilot project in which use of SUSHI reduced the time to process the reports for one vendor from 10 hours to 15 minutes. The adoption of SUSHI by content providers will be critical to its success, and may be accelerated if a recommendation to include SUSHI as a requirement for COUNTER compliance is accepted for the next release of the COUNTER Code of Practice -- due out in early 2008. COUNTER is also working to revamp the consortium reports in the next release as well. These reports will be available only in XML (directly or through SUSHI) and will allow a consortium to retrieve detailed usage information for each member in a single message. * License expression. Dozens of the 300+ data elements included in the ERMI Data Dictionary published as part of the original project report dealt with "terms of use" from licenses. However, these data elements and proposed values had yet to be tested widely by libraries. Accordingly ERMI 2 aimed to foster uptake and testing of the "ERMI approach" to the description and sharing of license information ("license mapping"), while working with NISO, EDItEUR and other appropriate publisher, vendor, and library groups to take a more rigorous and systematic approach to reviewing the suitability of the ERMI license element set as a basis for standardized description and communication of e-resource license provisions and related licensing metadata. * Training in License Term Mapping. A pilot license mapping workshop was cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and the DLF and conducted in June 2005, and the ERMI 2 plan called for further development of the pilot course materials and provision of additional training opportunities. Trisha Davis (Ohio State University) and Diane Grover (University of Washington) were both named ARL Visiting Program Officers to undertake this work, and they began their one-year appointments in January 2006. Since then, 4 well-attended 3-4 hour workshops have been presented to upwards of 160 people (at NASIG, ALA Annual and the Charleston Conference in 2006, and ALA midwinter in 2007), the instructional materials have been refined, and valuable experience and attendee feedback gained with each offering. That feedback is being used to inform additional license expression work described below; common and consistent feedback themes were that interpreting even relatively simple and "library-friendly" licenses can be quite difficult and complex, that there is a real need for simplicity in expressing the important terms of use, and that there is an ongoing need for training both in licensing skills and mapping. * License Expression Data Standards. Prior to and independent of the development of the ERMI data dictionary, work toward a more detailed and differently structured licensing data dictionary had been undertaken under EDItEUR sponsorship, in conjunction with ONIX. Discussions of possible areas and strategies for collaboration across the two projects started to take place during the initial phase of ERMI, which helped pave the way toward formation of the NISO License Expression Working Group, co-chaired by ERMI steering group member Nathan Robertson and Alicia Wise from the Publishers Licensing Society. (see http://www.niso.org/committees/License_Expression/LicenseEx_comm.html). By December a draft mapping of the ERMI license terms to the ONIX set (now referred to as the ONIX Publications License, or "ONIX-PL") was produced with partial support from the DLF, and discussed in detail at meetings in Boston in late December attended by representatives from ERMI, NISO, ILS vendors, ONIX, and others. The mapping is currently in process of being finalized, but a few important issues have been identified. The metadata crosswalk will be imperfect. It will be possible to map only a selection of concepts from ONIX-PL to ERMI. Furthermore, during the ONIX-PL to ERMI mapping process, certain values will be converted to notes. Any return mapping from ERMI to ONIX-PL will leave these concepts in note form. Specificity and granularity is therefore lost in the mapping process. In addition, the ONIX-PL approach allows for substantially more detailed license expression than many libraries need or want. Although ONIX-PL cannot be used to apply DRM technologies, many librarians continue to be concerned that the creation of detailed rights encodings will facilitate the application of automated restrictions in the future. Moreover, there is a continuing question from libraries about the cost in time and effort of developing detailed expressions of individual licenses when libraries do not need or want that level of detail. Lastly, while it might be desirable for libraries and publishers or vendors to exchange versions of licenses during a negotiation process, ERMs would have to be substantially re-tooled to support that from the libraries side. And as these developments have been taking place, NISO's Shared E-Resource Understanding initiative ("SERU": http://www.niso.org/committees/SERU/index.html), which aims to offer an alternative to current reliance on negotiated licenses, has gathered momentum. While it is too early to tell what effect SERU might have on license expression and mapping, reducing the number of licenses to be analyzed and mapped, and promoting simpler agreements would both be welcomed by many librarians. * Interoperability. An earlier ERMI 2 status report noted that ". . . the final area of focus for the project is interoperability between ERM systems and other ILS modules, which is problematic for those libraries in "mixed" environments where an ERM has been acquired from one vendor and it must be made to work with and complement another vendor's ILS - particularly an acquisition module." Last summer a small group under the leadership of Norm Medeiros (Haverford College and the Tri-College Consortium near Philadelphia) began examining this problem, and produced a draft white paper that was released for comment in January. The white paper is now undergoing revision, and when complete in June will include use cases and a list of data elements perceived as "core" to interoperability, provide comments supporting the need for standard "resource" identifiers, and discuss some emerging issues concerning cost per use calculations and their interpretation. An important goal of all ERMI 2 work clearly has been the development and wide adoption of standards for the project's areas of interest: delivery of electronic usage statistics, license expression, and ERMI/Acquisitions module interoperability. The initiative's final report will offer suggestions for further progress toward that goal. Tim Jewell, ERMI 2 Project Coordinator Director, Information Resources, Collections and Scholarly Communication University of Washington Libraries, Box 352900 Seattle, WA 98195-2900 phone: 206-543-3890 fax: 206-685-8727 [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>