Electronic Resource Management in Libraries: Research and Practice

This edited collection contains 21 informative chapters on every practical aspect of Electronic Resource Management (ERM): licensing, workflow, copyright, access management, standards, technologies, statistics, negotiation, professional roles. The articles all focus on generic issues and generally have a futures section. They genuinely provide a summary of the topic, they are not merely case studies of local experience. There are many checklists and templates that could be useful to practitioners. For a student of the area there are essays on all the major challenges of ERM and a substantial bibliography. There are also several nice cameo research pieces, such as the chapters based on a content analysis of job descriptions and the systematic analysis of licence terms, although the subtitle of the book really exaggerates the element of research in relation to practice in the contents. These qualities are enough to recommend the book as a comprehensive review of ERM.

There are, nevertheless, some notable gaps in the book. The first chapter, which describes the history of ERM seems to me a bit too descriptive. It would have been very useful to identify more fully the forces at work that will shape the field into the future. The chapter on strategy, though useful in itself, does not really offer anything very strategic. Overall, although the coverage of directly relevant topics is deep, there is a lack of perspective in looking broadly at the relationship between ERM and digitisation, repositories etc. Furthermore, the book takes a primarily library perspective (with a few chapters also written by systems suppliers); we hear little of the publishers' viewpoint. For a profession that emphasises their centrality, this book contains astonishingly little about users: what they might want or need. It is also very much a reflection on American experience. All the authors are from the United States, bar one Canadian. Passing reference is made in a few places to European developments, such as Athens; the Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK is mentioned only a couple of times in the bibliography. On a practical level, given the legislative differences, this does reduce the value of the book a little, although in essence the issues probably would not be any different if the chapters had been written in the UK or in Europe.

Yet it seems to me that these gaps – a lack of perspective beyond ERM to wider systems and structures that will always shape the field, the lack of curiosity about users and the disconnection from European work – should be seen less as a simple failure of the editors and authors, and more as a feature of the field of practice of ERM. ERM looks like a silo‐ed set of professional practices which focus on constructing a discovery infrastructure and where the user's voice is largely sidelined. Professions are organised nationally and, although the commercial systems in use and the essential challenges are the same worldwide, there is not much day‐to‐day information sharing beyond national borders. The book works well if one accepts these limits.

The book is available in electronic form, which is fortunate because the printed version is monstrously heavy. There are no screenshots and overall the book is a bit visually boring, but again this may be a feature of the field as it is so concerned with infrastructure and texts.

As well as an initial and expanded table of contents the editors' introduction contains a summary of each chapter. This might be considered to be too many tables of contents. The index, in contrast, is really very weak.