Electronic Resources Committee

Meeting Notes

March 12, 2001

Attending:  Holly Mistlebauer, John Saylor, Bill Kara, Phil Davis, Marty Kurth, Phil Herold, David Block (chair).

We addressed a familiar concern, the desire to provide users with access to electronic materials as quickly as possible, or maybe even quicker than that. For the past two years, much of ERC's focus has been on electronic journals, where hundreds of separate titles become available simultaneously. Those who read these notes will know that we have established a set of priorities for processing electronic journal sets. We have also established a recommendation for submission of a single request for all the titles in a set, which consists of a spreadsheet with titles and URLs. The URLs are often available from the journal publisher or aggregator or from searching the aggregator site, one title at a time. While setting priorities and establishing a template have standardized the way we process e-journals, these steps have not, apparently, expedited processing to the degree that users and librarians desire.

Today we discussed two possible remedies: providing progress reports on the status of large sets and streamlining the way that we process e-titles for public display. Progress reports might resemble the list prepared by the Science Team www.englib.cornell.edu/electronic-resources/journals/publishers.html that tracks information on who has taken shepherding responsibility at Cornell, the stage of negotiations, the home page of the resouce, etc. While it was born as a collection development device, this list might evolve to a reference source that one could check to discover where to find Blackwells journals (Ingenta), for instance, and by knowing this, direct readers to the (Ingenta) homepage that would enable them to use a (Blackwells) electronic journal by virtue of our having a paper subscription to it.

The second remedy comes out of recent discussions at IRPC where Marty made a presentation on how e journals are currently processed, with records in Voyager and the Gateway (856 fields in the former and subject captions in the latter). IRPC, though not unanimously, voiced support for some new approach to record creation. (There is a parallel discussion of the role of the Gateway before ENCompass that may involve the Gateway's redefinition, as well.) David expressed a preference for this solution, primarily because it would preserve CUL's dyanmic approach to describing electronic resources, as opposed to building static lists, forever in need of maintenance, and others agreed. At the end of our discussions, Marty summarized our recommendations:

1. that requests for e-journal sets continue to be accompanied by a spreadsheet that provides title-by-title URLs

2. that this list will enable immediate creation of title-level records for Voyager (Marty called these "sleek" records)

3. subsequently, and aided as much as possible by automated processing, these records will be upgraded to full records in Voyager and added to the Gateway (if this is to be the function of the Gateway after its redefinition)

Phil Davis outlined a proposal that he has worked up for addressing the, now frequent, concerns about why CUL does not subscribe to Nature, online. Briefly, he has written a text which a search for "Nature" in Voyager or the Gateway would evoke that outlines our unassailable reasoning and directs readers to Nature to express their opinons. ERC endorses this proposal, and we urged Phil to present it to Ross and suggest that Ross bring it to LMT.

Meeting notes by David Block

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3/15/01, jwg