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Database Review Task Force 1998

Fourth meeting: 7 May 1998

RWA Notes

Members: Ross Atkinson, David Block, Janie Harris, Ali Houissa, Barbara Prior, John Saylor, Yoram Szekely, Jennifer Weintraub (absent: Michael Engle, Patricia O'Neill, Ed Weissman).

1. Core List. We spent the entire meeting refining the core list, which I had sent to selectors and IRPC-L last week. We settled on adjustments to this list based upon (a) input we had received from selectors and reference staff and (b) two scenarios that Patricia O'Neill had compiled that put forth different options. We made the following decisions, all of which will be subject to review as part of the final analysis of the core list:

  1. Eliminate Humanities Abstracts and General Science Abstracts; do not add Social Science Abstracts.
  2. Add either Book Review Index or Book Review Digest.
  3. Add the Bibliography of Asian Studies and World News Connection.
  4. Add Biography Index and Ethnic Newswatch (assuming assistance from Suzy Palmer from canceling the CD-ROM version).
  5. Eliminate Biological and Agricultural Index.
  6. . Add Enviroline.
  7. Mann will continue to fund Biosis, Agricola, and CAB; we will continue to count these as core databases.
  8. Designate $10,000 of fund 519 toward the full version of Chemical Abstracts; work with the Science Team to find the remaining annual $30,000 needed for the subscription.
  9. Add HealthStar.
  10. Retain Medline through an aggregator, rather than depending on the Lexis/Nexis version.
  11. Stay with Periodical Abstracts rather than switching to Ebsco Academic Search.
  12. For newspapers, rely on Lexis/Nexis and Newsbank, but do an analysis in the course of the year to determine exactly which services provide access to which newspapers.
  13. Consider canceling the subscription to CARL Uncover, because the database is now freely accessible over the Web. (We would keep it only if we decided that we need special access this database, or if the discount received on article orders is of significant assistance to ILS.)

2. Next Steps. We will now send this version of the core list back to selectors and reference staff for a final review. We will also need to look at the various budgeting options, since this list will make for an extremely tight database budget. We will send the list to the other aggregators--Dialog, Ovid and SilverPlatter, to see if they can offer us significant savings. But we are also mindful of the stability syndrome: all other things being relatively equal, we would prefer to stay with our current vendor, OCLC. In discussing packages with vendors, including OCLC, for next year, we will ask about the possibility of multi-year arrangements. We will also ask about the kinds of use statistics we will be able to receive, since it was clear from all of the work Patricia did pulling such statistics together for this year that these can be very useful for evaluation purposes--providing they are comparable. I will distribute copies of this latest version of the core list at General Selectors tomorrow, and at the Public Services Forum on Monday. We will also put a copy up on the Task Force Web page.

At Yoram's suggestion, DRTF will at a later meeting discuss working on a process for comparing the contents of these databases in the course of 1998/99, so that we can identify any significant overlap that we may have overlooked.

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rev. 5/12/98 peo