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Second meeting: 9 April 1998
RWA Notes
Members: Ross Atkinson (Chair), David Block, Michael Engle, Janie Harris, Patricia O'Neill, Barbara Prior, John Saylor, Yoram Szekely, Jennifer Weintraub (absent: Ali Houissa).
1. OCLC. Our core aggregator for this past year has been OCLC (Panorama). We have learned that the price of the OCLC package for next year will increase substantially (and the Inspec database will be dropped). It may be that we can buy simultaneous uses for some key databases, but we will not be able to afford unlimited access for everything on OCLC that we had this year. This will require that we do a basic review again of all databases, in order to settle--probably--on an alternative core aggregator.
2. Data. Patricia has now assembled a range of information that will form the core of our work, including what we are now spending from the central database line (fund 519), search history of Pi2 databases for the past seven months, an initial list of all databases available from the main aggregators, and a summary of the options and prices from each of the main aggregators. Patricia said she thinks we should concentrate on the same aggregators as last year for bibliographic databases: Dialog, OCLC, Ovid and SilverPlatter. For full text databases, we should also look again at UMI, Lexis/Nexis, IAC and Ebsco.
3. Poll. We spent some time discussing whether to do another poll this year. We decided that this should not be necessary--that the information gathered last year is still up to date, provided that collection development and reference staff have the opportunity to submit individual supplementary information. The poll results from last year are still on the Task Force Web site, which is at www.englib.cornell.edu/cul/a2i/reports/. We have an advantage in evaluation this year, moreover, because we can now take use statistics into account. Jen noted that, if possible, it would be easier to ask people simply to vote or provide us with information on aggregators, rather than on databases-always allowing, of course, for the fact that some databases are not provided by aggregators, and some aggregators do not provide packages but rather permit a selection of databases by the buyer.
4. Full Text. While we need to protect our core of databases, we need also to balance this with a need to acquire full text materials. Yoram emphasized that we need also to protect our traditional holdings: investing more in online access to bibliographic databases at the expense of our ability to maintain traditional main stacks materials cited in those databases makes little sense. Patricia said that the full text challenge is not as complicated as we might assume. The main collections of full text are available through the regular aggregators. We must not expect, therefore, that we will necessarily be making separate decisions on bibliographic and full text databases: we will most likely be looking at them together-provided as a package by the same aggregators. Patricia said there are, however, very few science e-journals available in this way. Many science e-journals are accessible only directly from the publisher (e.g., Elsevier, Academic). We decided therefore that we need to consider these major publishers as further options.
5. Next Steps. Jen suggested that we separate the decision about the main, general aggregator from the other decisions on individual databases that are more specialized. Others in the group felt similarly that we need to keep these two decision streams distinct. For our next meeting in two weeks, Patricia will try to complete her list of all databases, and the rest of us will study all of the data Patricia distributed. We will then aim to make final decisions on how we begin formally to gather information this year from staff to update last year's poll. We also want to look into the possibility of trials or demonstrations of different aggregator products.
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rev. 4/27/98 peo