Somewhere over the Verde Rainbow

When the electronic resource management system (ERM) at Kansas State University Libraries suffered a horrible data loss, the "contract db" presented a challenge for the librarians responsible for electronic resources. It was a decent data repository, but it had no ability to manage the tangled process of licensing, acquiring, activating, using, evaluating, and renewing electronic resources. Efforts were made to consolidate information that could not be shoehorned into the database (email correspondence, license files, etc.) to a shared network folder, but a good deal of vital information remained, almost by necessity, available only in the memories of those individuals who worked closely with electronic serials and databases. As the vendors are producing ERMs, implementing one seemed like the next logical step to take. In this article, the author recounts her experience in managing the Verde ERM implementation project at Kansas State University Libraries and shares some lessons to be taken from the experience.