Electronic Resources Management Task Group

Minutes - February 13, 2006
1-4 p.m., ITD conference room

Present: Betty Day (ITD), Kari, Schmidt (ITD), Nathan Robertson (ML), Robin Klein (HSHSL), Joyce Tenney (UMBC), Jan Siar (CP), Nancy Fallgren (ITD)

TOPIC: Update on installation, architecture, and timeline

Following further conversation with Ex Libris, ITD has decided to change the general organization of the Verde implementation. The original plan was to have 16 instances (1 per campus) that would detail the electronic content of each library and a 17th that would include summary information for the non-USMAI libraries in Maryland Digital Library. The current plan is to have the 16 instances but each will only contain the content licensed individually. The 17th instance will hold the ERM data for all consortial licenses. It will be a single instance containing 50 libraries. All MDL schools will have "read-only access" to this instance. The change in the architecture of the installation also means that College Park and UMBC will not be the first libraries to be installed. In addition to the consortial instance, the second instance that will be set up will be Frostburg whose e-collection mirrors the consortial offerings and will be useful to push out to the other instances. Members of the Task Group unanimously endorsed the revised plan.

A number of factors are influencing the timeline for the implementation. A number of crucial functionalities needed for the consortium such as the ability to search across multiple instances and more granular role-based security will not be available until the end of March. ITD will also be purchasing a new server for Verde. Both factors mean that it will be April before real implementation begins.

General timeline for Spring 2006:

February-March:

• ITD work with Ex Libris to migrate local data as well as SFX files to Verde to populate MDL instance as well as one additional instance.
• ERM Task Group work on best practices for USMAI
• Licensing
• Database vendor codes
• Work flow/roles

April-May:

• Migrate instances on 1.1 and load SFX data to populate 16 USMAI instances.
• Plan staff forum.

Phased implementation

• Licensing
• Consortial instance -
• Individual instances -
• Links to Acquisitions

TOPIC: Review of basic license terminology

Kari distributed a packet of materials related to the licensing module of Verde. Because of the difficulty of capturing screenshots for the license screens, she created a worksheet of the license options using Excel. She also used the Ebsco license as an example to show MDL licensing practice and the Ebsco illustration.

Task group members worked through this license carefully field by field identifying best practices, fields that could have default values, and areas in which it is possible to have philosophical differences of opinion.

Among the difficult issues discussed were:

• The conflict between 1) Providing interpretations of unclear or absent license language in order to guide both staff and users. 2) Avoiding the legal risks of systematically recording potentially debatable license interpretations.
  
  The ERM TG generally feels that the benefits of providing interpretations outweighs the risk of recording those interpretations, especially since litigation between vendors and academic libraries regarding resource licenses has been extremely rare. However, each USMAI library will need to make this decision themselves when it comes to their own licenses.
  
  The ITD E-Content team, as the empowered signatory for USMAI consortial licenses, will be working with College Park legal counsel to determine the preferred practice for the consortial license encodings.
  
  
• Is an explicit acknowledgment of Fair Use rights under copyright law equivalent to an explicit assertion of the right to use the licensed content for such things as interlibrary loan and scholarly sharing? While we do regard such activities as clearly protected by copyright language and interpretation of the law that is required to reach this conclusion. Certainly a license statement that merely expresses Fair Use rights is less explicit than a statement expressly authorizing interlibrary loan. For this reason, the ERM Task Group would recommend recording a Fair Use clause as an interpreted rather than explicit permission to perform ILL.

ACTION:

• Nathan to get clarification from ERMI regarding "data protection override"
• Betty to discuss possibility of adding new field (Indemnification by Licensee" with Ex Libris. Also to see if it is possible to get two text boxes for some items when we would like to present different information to internal staff than to the public.
• All: review set of consortial licenses distributed using the Verde license worksheet as prework for next meeting.

Next meeting: February 27, 1-4, ITD Conference Room

Information Technology Division College Park, MD 20742-7011
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Content questions should be directed to Betty Day.