ABSTRACT
Standards have always been vital to the mission of libraries, as they facilitate interoperability. Standards for electronic resources (e-resources) are no exception. It became clear in the past ten years that metadata and data related to e-resources defied the traditional cataloging paradigm. E-resources themselves were discovered to be elusive, messy, and unstable, and required high maintenance-but entirely necessary-because they constitute the preferred format among most scientists and scholars. The fact that EBSCO Information Services distributed a promotional brochure called “The E-Resource Life Cycle” (Figure 14.1) at library conferences in 2005 speaks to the extra attention that e-resources demand of library staffs. Integrated library systems (ILS), while adequate for print resources, were not designed with e-resources in mind.
