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Minutes
Council of Librarians Meeting
December 19, 2005 - Warren Hall

Attending: Eric Acree, Ross Atkinson, Pam Baxter, Mary Beth Bunge, Karen Calhoun, Jean Callihan, Lee Cartmill, Barbara Eden, Elaine Engst, Erla Heyns, Tom Hickerson, Peter Hirtle, John Hoffmann, Bill Kara, Zsuzsa Koltay, Gordon Law, Jim LeBlanc, Xin Li, Tami Magnus, Susan Markowitz, Mary Ochs, Jean Pajerek, Jean Poland, Oya Rieger, Steve Rockey, Marcy Rosenkrantz, Pat Schafer, Marty Schlabach, Don Schnedeker, Sarah Thomas, Martha Walker, Ed Weissman, Scott Wicks; and Linda Miller, guest.

1. Announcements

• The Academic Assembly Professional Development Committee is interested in knowing the names of library staff members who review for journals. Those who are reviewers should contact Gail Stenhart <gss1@cornell.edu>.
• Susan Markowitz announced that Cornell has established a process to assist employees who desire workplace accommodations for religious reasons. The full policy may be viewed at: http://www.policy.cornell.edu/vol6_13_8.cfm
• Lee Cartmill welcomed Tami Magnus, the new director of Library Account Services, to her first meeting of the Council.
  

2. The Future of Uris Library

Lee Cartmill - Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002: In response to unprecedented corporate and accounting scandals, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was signed into law to protect investors by improving accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures. Currently the act is applicable to publicly traded corporations and does not apply to higher education, but some provisions are becoming “best practices” and will be adopted. NACUBO, the organization that represents chief administrative and financial officers of more than 2,500 colleges, universities, and higher education service providers across the country, strongly recommends that universities implement best practices. The Cornell trustees felt the University should implement best practices as well. As a result, Steve Golding, Cornell’s Vice President for Finance and Administration must certify that financial reports contain no misstatements. All University units, such as the Library must sub-certify-- attest to no wrongdoing.

Sub-Certifications will …

• Improve the flow of information from financial leaders responsible for the financial results of units
• Give senior officials a basis for assurance on the underlying numbers, controls, and financial events requiring disclosure
• Start from the same representations provided to external auditors

How to implement

• Each senior business officer will …
  • Review unit’s financial reports and understand any reconciling items between the reports and the official general ledger
  • Understand why items are included or excluded from the reports
  • Consider future events, commitments that are in place, what’s in discussion phase, etc.
  • Establish a level of materiality for their unit

The process for sub-certification for library units needs to be determined.

• Level – AUL or department head?
• Form – questionnaire or statement?
• Level of Materiality - $50,000, $25, 000? $10,000 threshold?

Next steps: Proposal by Lee Cartmill and discussion with Library Management Team

3. Xin Li – Catalyst (formerly Cornucopia)

Catalyst is intended to be a regional service aimed at protecting vital scholarly materials for current and future generations of users. It builds on the seven-million-volume collection of Cornell University Library and continues to grow by working closely with participating institutions throughout New York State. It also provides a range of innovative services to support the collection and the changing needs of libraries and users. Participating libraries benefit by enhancing access to materials while reducing library material expenditures and freeing up staff resources and vital space to support other service needs. Catalyst targets libraries in NY State that are interested in shared collection and access, as well as storage space. Catalyst hopes to offer "Borrow Direct-like" unmediated borrowing and lending between CUL and all participating institutions. This not only includes the material housed in the Annex that is owned by CUL and by the other participating libraries that store their materials there, but also all CUL holdings housed on central campus (with exceptions such as RMC materials.) In addition, several core services are also being considered, such as print on demand and digitization on demand. Catalyst services will be fee-based.

While the Catalyst project is still at the fact-finding stage, the intention is for Catalyst to:

• Accept and maintain copies of unique monographs and serial runs in print, which must be accompanied by cataloging records.
• Preserve one print copy in dark archive and guarantee perpetual access to the circulating copies.
• Ensure that all holdings will circulate to all participating libraries regardless of ownership.
• Provide unmediated patron borrowing of all holdings, including CUL’s collection of 7 million plus volumes.
• Provide expedited delivery in print and/or digital format.
• Support on-site reading room access and walk-in request fulfillment.
• Offer statistics and analysis of collection use.
• Deliver digitization, print and preservation on demand.

Discussion followed and included the following:

• Xin Li said that all three modules at the Annex were up and ready and that space for over 4.6 million volume equivalents had been added to the Annex since late October. The available space at the annex should be adequate to house our collections for 15 years or more at our current rate of acquisition. Access and delivery will need to be quick and efficient especially when unique titles are involved. Policy regarding which copies of unique titles will be retained is being addressed by CUL Priority Objectives Implementation Team #6 (Expand and coordinate document delivery services to facilitate use of both digital and analog information.)
• Sarah Thomas said that the concept of regional repositories reflects the trend of ARL libraries moving away from ownership to access and beyond volume counts. A network of regional repositories could evolve into a global initiative which would merge the traditional service model with 21st century concepts, where the importance of the physical location of the material fades away and the aim is to rapidly deliver information to the user. Cornell needs to be in a leadership position and not in a reactive role during this transition to regional repositories. Since Cornell has both digitization and access services in place, we can deliver quickly either a digital or physical version.
• Karen Calhoun said that Catalyst could complement projects such as the Million Book Project and Google Print and build towards the future. Google Print has the potential to drive a lot of business towards libraries and a service such as Catalyst could “take off.”
• Ross Atkinson said that it will be important to emphasize and define the benefits for medium sized academic libraries—unmediated borrowing for borrowers, rapid delivery of materials, plus access to Cornell’s 7 million plus volumes.
• Elaine Engst asked about the implications for current collection development policies. Sarah responded that in the short term, partner institutions will want to have their own core collections but that may change in the long term.

For Cornell, Catalyst offers the opportunity to attract unique titles we do not own to the facility, spread infrastructure cost across partner institutions, and to get Cornell into a leadership position and our brand “out there.”

The timeline for implementation is very tight. The business model will be refined and a market analysis completed by ate February/early March, and systems will be designed from March through the summer with the goal of accepting partner institutions next fall. Senior administrators in Day Hall have been positive about the general description and concept.

4. Linda Miller: Statistics.

The CUL Annual Statistics report is posted on the Staff Web at http://www.library.cornell.edu/staffweb/AnnualStatsArchive/indexStatArch.html. This year the Research and Assessment unit tried to make reporting easier and more transparent, the data more consistent ,and the report more useful to library managers and staff. Definitions have been made available to both data providers and consumers.) There is both a summary version and a detailed version.

Some noteworthy changes (most of which are noted with symbols in the table of contents):

• an effort was made to include data on some new or relatively new services (e.g., Library-to-Library Delivery and MyDocument Delivery);
• data from the CUL Fact Sheet and the ARL(Association for Research Libraries) statistics site were included in an effort to centralize and provide easier access to data;
• changes were made to existing tables to provide more information (e.g., breaking out types of circulation transactions original circulations, renewals and reserves);
• more footnotes were included; a new notes section was added at the back to keep the tables clean;
• definitions were expanded (based for the most part on ARL and NCES (National Center for Education Statistics) definitions)
• moved tables around to group resource, usage and production statistics, mainstreaming e-resources.

Linda asked the Council for comments and suggestions. Suggestions for what to add to the statistics:

• A table with grant funded activity
• Database usage tracked and plotted, displayed by cost and by use.
• Explain the decrease in volume count when e-use increases and how to count e-resources.
• Track how patrons found resources – how are discovery systems, both the Library’s and outside (e.g., Google), being used?
• Put an explanation next to each chart with the purpose for gathering the data in the chart and how it is useful
• Show the growth of collections by subject area
• Be cautious about showing the number of articles scanned for e-reserves. This could be a source of controversy with the Copyright Clearance Center
• Consider contracting with a statistician to develop more sophisticated analyses

Andrea Barnett, Library Administration

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