May 14, 2001
Attending: John Saylor, Scott Wicks, Phil Davis, Bill Kara, Holly Mistlebauer, Marty Kurth, Phil Herold, Ed Weissman, David Block.
Before talking about the resources offered by NYSL (Dialog@Carl and Ebsco Host MasterFILE Select), we tried, once again, to generalize ERC’s experience, this time for aggregators. As in the past, we found that our decisions are guided much more by experience than from established principles. Ed reminded us that, from the Digital Resource Task Force days, content has been the most important single selection criterion, but just what content means is sometimes difficult to determine. We reflected, a bit, on our recent discussion of the sleek records proposal which IRPC has accepted as the best available solution to timely record creation. We briefly mentioned several interface issues: speed, search engine, and Phil Davis pointed to the importance of favoring digital object identifiers (DOI’s) wherever possible. But in the end it became apparent that all of this was revisitation, and that a combination of collection memory and our understanding of the issues before us will inform our decisions.
Turning to the issue of evaluating the NYSL resources revived the discussion and prompted several suggestions. Sleek records depend on the compilation of tabled information on titles, URLs, ISSN and content statuses. We discussed how these tables might best be built and concluded that we’d like publishers and providers to do (more of) that. John, who has been successful in getting such compilations done in the past, agreed to try to encourage IEEE to do so now so that we could try to manipulate such a table for creating sleek records. Expanding on this a bit, we imagined how nice it would be to have aggregators regularly make such information available on OAI sites so that we could more quickly compare contents for unique titles, duration of back runs and the like for evaluation of competing packages. When elephants fly, right?
By the end of the hour, we were ready to make three suggestions concerning Dialog@Carl and MasterFILE Select: that we submit an überNERF for the latter to give users at least basic access to the files and identify those full text resources in the package to which we do not have access through other providers and that we continue to create records for individual Dialog@Carl titles requested by users.
Since two weeks from today is Memorial Day, we do not anticipate meeting at our normally scheduled time.
Meeting notes by David Block
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