Laying Down the Whack-A-Mole Mallet: One Inexperienced ERM Team’s Story About Adopting the Agile Philosophy to Manage Electronic Resources

The transitory nature of electronic resources requires that staff and faculty working in this realm keep a vigilant eye out for the myriads of changes that inevitably come our way. We are often required to suspend a critical task for a more critical task, and keeping up with all the work we have to do is daunting, if not overwhelming. Electronic resource management (ERM) requires agility. If our aim is to provide superior customer service, we must continually adapt to the landscape of the day. ERM systems have made tremendous progress toward managing electronic resources in the last ten years. Unfortunately, they still lack some basic functionality that require us to use additional tools to complete our day-to-day work efficiently, effectively, and with agility. This is a summarization of the ERM team’s adoption of the agile philosophy and the learning process in applying agile principles to electronic resource management.