Making Good on the Promise of ERM: A Standards and Best Practices Discussion Paper

This publication is the outcome of the NISO Electronic Resource Management (ERM) Data Standards and Best Practices Project, a successor to the Digital Library Federation’s Electronic Resources Management Initiative (ERMI). The project’s primary goals were to perform a “gap analysis” of standards and best practices and make recommendations on the future of the ERMI Data Dictionary. The standards review and findings focused on five categories: link resolvers and knowledge bases; the work, manifestations, and access points; cost and usage-related data; license terms; and data exchange using institutional identifiers.A more extensive review of fourteen of the most relevant standards was done and the data elements for each were mapped to the elements defined in the ERMI report. Also included is an evaluation of how ERM systems could improve their workflow support—a shortcoming in most existing systems—and a detailed workflow best practices bibliography along with a list of illustrative workflow diagrams.