On June 26, William and I had the pleasure of presenting at this year’s annual American Library Association conference with Benjamin Heet and Robin Malott from the University of Notre Dame. We had a good audience and for me, it was fantastic to hear more about CORAL, and to be able to see the unique characteristics of CORAL and ERMes as open source ERMS.
As we noted in the program, CORAL is often described as well-suited for large institutions. The CORAL feature for e-resource workflow tracking that e-mails alerts and the module for managing licenses were two of many highlights for me. ERMes on the other hand, is primarily used by small to medium-sized organizations. Right now our instance of ERMes has 384 resource records and ERMes’ reports are a feature that I rely on heavily for quickly determining cost-per-use, cost increases, renewal time periods, and lists of resources by subject and source.
Presentation materials are available via SlideShare:
Open Source Electronic Resource Management Systems: CORAL and ERMes
Program Description: To tame the complex and ever-changing electronic resource management landscape, electronic resource management systems need to be flexible, evolving and affordable. Two such systems are ERMes and CORAL, developed by libraries for libraries and made freely available. ERMes runs in Microsoft Access and is suitable for small and medium libraries. Released in summer 2010, CORAL, is a modular, web-based system. Presenters will discuss the development, use and future plans for each system.
The ERMes Blog 