January 13, 2000
Note: because of the unresolved issues raised in our discussions of "Electronic Books," we delayed release of these minutes to April, 14, 2000.
Attending: John Saylor, Philip Herold, Scott Wicks, Bill Kara, Holly Mistlebauer, Suzy S. Palmer, Ed Weissman, Marty Kurth, David Block
We began by calling the roll and welcoming two new members, Marty Kurth who has replaced Karen Calhoun and Philip Herold delegate from IRPC Steering.
Last week, Marty introduced a new mode of transaction, using an e-mail ballot to register approval of his proposal for the cataloging of John Wiley electronic journals. He reported resounding, 100%, agreement with his "it's a no brainer" option, and we agreed that Marty should begin to catalog the Wiley journals for the Gateway as soon as he can.
We are now very close to mounting a record for SciFinder Scholar, the proprietary client that runs against Chemical Abstracts. John has been working with Leah Solla on the intermediate screen that will direct users to the SciFinder location and instruct them on downloading. We were pleased with the content of the message, and Holly agreed to outfit it with the Gateway-standard banners and footers before we roll it out.
ISI links. As you may recall, Web of Science allows the activation of hyperlinks from their bibliographic databases for those journals that the library has electronic subscriptions. John has discovered some puzzling requirements on the ISI application and is trying to resolve them with our sales representative. At this point, Ed raised the issue of the number of ports that the library purchases will likely need to increase as readers enter journals through the several portals we are providing and leap from article to article as they check footnotes.
Electronic books. We have much more experience mounting electronic journals than electronic books, and, as our discussions showed, we are still working through a number of access issues for books. Marty reported on a recent meeting of IRPC concerning netLibrary.com, where consensus emerged for placing the 600 plus titles in the Gateway as well as NOTIS. This would be accomplished through a "searchable title list" (which we agreed would need to include some author information as well). But as we discussed the addition of humanities titles available from the University of California Press, we wondered aloud if the Gateway is an appropriate access agent for books. In my synopsis, the issues are: consistency- readers have come to associate "electronic" with "Gateway." Thus, having electronic books represented somewhere other than the Gateway will be hard to explain and confusing. On the other side of the discussion rose the issue of substantial effort at a time when a change in LMS may obviate the need to create and maintain two databases. We were unable to resolve this dilemma, but felt that our indecision should not undermine the approach that IRPC had endorsed for cataloging netLibrary titles.
Meeting notes by David Block.
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