Getting back on TERMS (Version 2.0)

After a couple of years break, we have decided that the TERMS project needs a re-vamp to remain relevant to the needs of e-resources librarians. We would like to thank our Version 1.0 editors: Ann Kucera, Nathan Hosburgh, Stephen Buck, Anita Wilcox, Anna Franca and Eugenia Beh for their comments and support.

For TERMS 2.0 we would like to announce a third contributor who will join Associate Professor Jill Emery (Collection Development Librarian, Portland State University) and Graham Stone (Jisc Collections Senior Research Manager, Jisc, UK). We are very pleased to welcome Peter McCracken (Electronic Resources Librarian at Cornell University). As a Co-Founder of Serials Solutions, Peter brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the project.

TERMS (Techniques in E-Resource Management) began in 2008 and grew out of a discussion between the authors over a lack of consistency in e-resource management practices. TERMS aims to set out the e-resource life cycle and to define a set of best practice using real world examples gathered from libraries in the UK and US. The original 6 TERMS were crowdsourced for a number of years before a first draft was launched in 2012. During this period a number of very positive and constructive comments were gathered. This version of TERMS was recorded in Library Technology Reports during 2013 (OA version here). The final version of the TERMS blog (Version 1.1) is archived at here.

The original 6 TERMS were:

  1. Investigating new content for purchase or addition
  2. Acquiring new content
  3. Implementation
  4. Ongoing evaluation and access
  5. Annual review
  6. Cancellation and replacement review.

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However, after comments from colleagues and an open access mapping exercise by the HHuLOA project in the UK, which was influenced by TERMS, our sister project OAWAL – Open Access Workflows for Academic Librarians and the US open access life cycle, we have decided that a new version of TERMS is required to support the community.

These comments and suggestions identified an area that TERMS had not covered – preservation. Therefore TERMS Version 2.0 plans to alter the 6 headings to include a section on the preservation of electronic resource content whilst consolidating two of the existing sections, Ongoing Evaluation and Access with the Annual Review section. In addition, we will be adding open access services to the 6 TERMS where they overlap with e-resources management, e.g. APC offsetting.

Over the coming months the TERMS team will start to re-work the original TERMS to transform it into TERMS 2.0:

  1. Investigating new content for purchase or addition
  2. Acquiring new content
  3. Implementation
  4. Ongoing evaluation and access, and annual review
  5. Cancellation and replacement review
  6. Preservation.

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We will crowdsource each section as we re-work them over the coming months. We welcome your comments via the blog, Facebook and Twitter (@6TERMS).