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Third meeting: 23 April 1998
RWA Notes
Members: Ross Atkinson, David Block, Michael Engle, Janie Harris, Ali Houissa, Patricia O'Neill, Barbara Prior, John Saylor, Yoram Szekely, Jennifer Weintraub, Ed Weissman.
1. OCLC. We reviewed the subscription information for OCLC First Search databases provided by Yan McCann during her visit last week. The $256,000 price quote is what OCLC would charge us, if we were to remain in the Pi2 consortium. Clearly OCLC wants us out of that consortium. They are offering another, customized option, which is more reasonable, but which includes fewer databases. Basically we would need to buy a base package of databases, some of which we doubtless do not need, in order to obtain unlimited access for other databases that we would also subscribe to and that we definitely do need. If we do not buy a base package, we will need to pay for ports, which would limit access and would probably end up costing more than a base package. Through a special arrangement with NY State, we will have free access to one of the base packages in 1998/99, but we are doubtful that OCLC would count that toward unlimited access to other databases: we would probably need to pay for the base package regardless. We would also receive discounts on databases we select, based on the number of other subscribers in NY State; since we would not know the number of other subscribers until mid-June, we would not know the extent of our discount until then.
2. Stability. We reviewed the discussion in the Public Services Forum last week about the need for stability in databases from one year to the next. We talked about the dollar value of such stability, and the fact that we live today in an unavoidably unstable information environment. Because of the emphasis placed on stability by public services, we must make stability a core criterion. What this seems to mean is that, all other things being equal--or even relatively equal--we should make some effort to stay with OCLC, if we can. Ed also made the point that a shift to another vendor will have a significant impact on those who are responsible for programming--especially LTD, cataloging, and Fred. Ed said that, if we are to change aggregators, we should make that decision by 15 May, so that we have some chance of completing the necessary programming by 1 July.
3. Other Aggregators. Patricia has created a worksheet in which she shows the costs of all individual databases available from Dialog, Ovid, SilverPlatter, Wilson and OCLC. We went through this spreadsheet and looked at the different pricing models of each of the aggregators. We need now to define a core set of databases, so that we can obtain exact price quotes from each of the aggregators. An Ovid representative has visited Patricia, and has indicated that their prices would be competitive. If we are going to look seriously at Dialog, moreover, we will need another evaluation by IRPC; last year, IRPC judged the Dialog interface to be unacceptable--but Dialog has apparently made some significant changes since then.
4. Next Steps. We had an animated discussion about how we should gather information from staff. It is clear that we need to do something more than simply refer people to last year's poll on the Task Force Web site. We decided we need to provide a spreadsheet, which shows the top ranked databases from last year's poll, the databases we presently are providing access to, and any use statistics we have for those databases. Patricia will work on this. This led to an interesting discussion about how the selection should actually be done. Yoram, Michael and John all made the same point--in different ways--that we already have a clear core of databases that we need to retain. We should not confuse the role of the Task Force this year with its function last year. I had already noted that we must take as our first priority maintaining access to those bibliographic databases that we feel are essential, based on our experience from this year; only after we have done that can we examine the possibility of adding full-text databases. The next step would seem to be, therefore, that I construct a core of databases, based on my best judgement and the use statistics, and then do a rough calculate of what it would approximately cost for us to purchase access to those databases for next year. It may be that--given the significant increases in prices from OCLC (which may be roughly equivalent to the prices of the other aggregators) and CIS--that we do not have the funding to increase beyond such a core. If that is the case, the main task we have will be to confirm the databases that constitute that core.
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