Building your own ERMS

The paper aims to demonstrate a method for creating an electronic resource management system (ERMS) from freely available open source tools. This system will help manage bibliographic data, holdings and statistical and financial data for electronic databases and periodicals.

The paper demonstrates how to create a database and interface for managing serials and electronic resources using PHP and MySQL within a *AMP framework.

By following this approach, libraries can maintain structured data regarding their electronic and print holdings with minimal expense and with flexibility that is not necessarily possible through large commercial products, while avoiding the burden of implementing a large, open source solution.

While many products exist on the market, either commercial or large open source solutions, there is little documentation on how to create a small scalable ERMS. This paper attempts to demonstrate a method.