January 30, 2004

TO:         ERMS Planning Meeting Program Committee

                Sharon Farb (UCLA)
                Tony Harvell (UCSD)
                Lorelei Tanji, Local Arrangements Liaison (UCI)
                Steve Toub (CDL)
                Stefanie Wittenbach, convener (UCR)

FROM:    John W. Tanno
                Chair, SOPAG

RE:	    Appointment and Charge 

Thank you very much for your willingness to serve as the Program Committee for the Electronic Resources Management System (ERMS) Planning Meeting.  Over the past several years there have been numerous discussions in a variety of forums and contexts about the need for a shared decision tool to aid the UC Libraries in collaborative collection development.  Such cooperation could result in an ever expanding universe of intellectual resources made accessible to faculty, students, and staff through shared services and collections.  More recently, the CDL made an initial effort to identify and organize the desirable features and needs for such a shared decision tool and began an environmental scan of electronic resources management systems (ERMS) currently available in the marketplace.   In so doing, the CDL staff learned that electronic resources management systems had the potential to provide additional capabilities that would benefit the CDL and the UC Libraries and their initiatives for shared services and collections.

After a broad discussion of ERMSs at its January 23rd conference call, SOPAG came to the realization that: 1) there is not a common understanding of what a ERMS is; 2) there was not yet a commercial system that would address the workflow issues and consortial needs of the UC Libraries; 3) UC must either influence the evolving ERMS or develop systems itself; and 4) a planning process is needed to reach consensus regarding the requirements, the priority for their development, and the next steps to be taken for pursuing an ERMS for the UC Libraries.  Therefore, SOPAG has decided to develop a two-day planning meeting with no more than four people from each campus library and the CDL.  The representatives will represent a broad spectrum of expertise in technical services, public services, technology, and systems.  The meeting should include briefings and vendor demonstrations of existing ERMS so that the participants could gain a common vocabulary and understanding of the current state of the art.  The expected outcomes of the meeting are: 

1.	Statements of common needs and priorities from the acquisitions/processing perspective, the public services perspective, and the technical perspective.

2.	Identification of common and shared collection development decision making needs.

3.	Consensus on which of these needs are the top priorities for UC Libraries to address.

	4.   Recommended next steps to make quick, concrete progress on the priority needs.

The meeting will be held at UC Irvine, March 11-12, 2004.  Lorelei Tanji has agreed to make the local arrangements for the meeting.  The program committee is charged to develop the agenda for the meeting and submit a draft prior to SOPAG’s February 27th conference call.  The recommendations resulting from the two-day meeting will be reviewed at SOPAG’s March 19th meeting and SOPAG would make its report to the University Librarians prior to their April meeting.

Stefanie Wittenbach will be in touch with you shortly to begin your committee’s work.  Please let me know if SOPAG can be of any assistance to you as your work gets underway.  Thanks again for taking on this task with such a short timeline.