ERC

Meeting Notes 8/9/99

Attending: Diane Hillmann, Karen Calhoun, Scott Wicks, Ed Weissman, Holly Mistlebauer, David Block (chair)

At our last meeting of the summer we set our calendars for the fall and spring terms, reflected on a recent Gateway problem and revisited the Committee's decision on access to Academic Ideal.

1. Time keeping. With various changes in the meeting schedule over the past year, we are now totally confused as to hich Monday afternoon our "every-other Monday" schedule refers to. We agreed establish August 16 as the beginning of a new count (and then we agreed not to meet on August 16). So our next meeting will be Monday, August 30, 2-3 PM in Olin Room 703. We also agreed that the Committee will meet only when there is an agenda, and to signal the meeting or to cancel it, David will send a message on the Thursday preceding the scheduled meeting. So, you can mark your calendars for 8/30, 9/13, 9/27, 10/11, 10/25, etc., or wait for those Thursday messages.
2. Merriam-Webster's dictionary on the Gateway. We performed an audit on this strange case of a disappeared resource and discovered that our procedures hold firm, even though the conditions under which we acquire electronic resources are becoming more complex daily. In this instance the dictionary was an adjunct to our subscription to Britannica On-line. There was, at the time that the URL for the dictionary changed, a catalog record for Merriam-Webster's in NOTIS but no o/p/r. Thus the confusion over who should make the decision on connecting to the resource's new location. Again, it was Scott who trouble-shot and Jim LeBlanc who established the new link.
3. IDEAL's additional electronic journals on the Gateway. For background, I paste in a relevant passage from ERC's 7/19/99 notes:

   "Changes in aggregator offerings. Since our signing an "Ideal" license, Academic has purchased a set of 21 journals purchased by WB Sanders and Churchill Livingstone. These titles, most of which are medical, have now been added to the Ideal package. Since we have not (yet, as we still may) paid the 15% electronic premium for these titles, they are not available to Cornell readers in full text; however, Academic does make the article abstracts available at no extra charge to the library. I had intended to frame this as a policy issue, i.e. how the library will respond to market-place events like this one, which could end up establishing different levels of access for journals within the same license. This position found little sympathy with my colleagues, however. I have been convinced that the market place is not a policy issue, that selectors will decide (and this a good thing) which levels of access a resource should receive, based on anticipated use and available processing resources."

   Karen related what has happened subsequent to the posting of these minutes, that she had received e-mail and face-to-face encouragement to bring this issue up for further consideration. Subsequent discussion revealed the traditional difficulty that the ERC has experienced with establishing "policy." We have a tradition of doing what we once said we would not, and not out of caprice but because of changed circumstances. While not everyone was convinced, we agreed to stand by our previous conclusion, i.e. not to take a stand that would prevent establishing Gateway access to resources such as the WB Sanders titles, cited above, should selectors choose them. However, should this become an issue beyond the abstract (should selectors, in fact, choose them), ERC would have to consider a number of issues, e.g., how to describe these "abstracts to full text," how to identify the resources to catalog them, how they would be interpreted by public service librarians.

Minutes recorded by David Block .

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Rev. 8/11/99, mc