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Notes from the 12/23/97 meeting
Attending: Ross Atkinson, Christian Boissannas, Lee Cartmill, David Corson, Tom Hickerson, Sarah Thomas, Ed Weissman
Absent: Janet McCue
1) LTD Priorities
We discussed the process by which project requests for LTD will be prioritized:
a) Requests will be sent to the AUL for Information Technology. The AUL-IT in consultation with LTD will evaluate the project requests both with regard to the effort needed to complete the project and their "appropriateness". The AUL-IT will schedule those projects that can be handled with a relatively small amount of effort or that are necessary to maintain existing functionality and will notify ET/ULMT. Those project requests that require a large amount of effort or that represent new or improved functionality, will be brought to ET/ULMT with the AUL-IT's recommendations regarding their prioritization.
b) The AUL-IT will provide ET/ULMT with a list of project requests that require prioritizing along with lists of active projects and completed projects.
c) The AUL-IT and members of LTD are available to attend meetings of various functional groups in order to increase their understanding of issues and to improve communications.
Tom reported that a new 2 year position in LTD was being created from funds designated for Lee Brink's line (through June 1998) and CIDC funding. This will provide more support for the Notis 6.4.1 implementation in the spring. He also reported that he would be recommending a charge and members for a digital archiving task force. The task force will look at digital library infrastructure issues and it will allow for the linking of various digital library efforts and for the establishment of criteria for the long-term preservation of and access to digital files.
2) Retrospective Conversion
We reviewed a report on the status of retrospective conversion at Cornell from Ross. Based on the restructuring of the shelf lists in CTS and then extensive sampling, CTS determined that there are over 900,000 titles remaining to be converted. This number includes titles housed in Olin, RMC, Law and the Annex collections (including the Area classification and the not yet cataloged Tibetan titles.) The estimated cost to convert and bar code these titles is $3,211,000. We agreed that completing the conversion of these collections is a high priority. It is a basic component of the digital library allowing us to make the full range of our collections accessible and easier to use. (The conversion of 40,000 titles in the Harris collection would cost an additional $300,000. The question of the Harris collection conversion will be reviewed separately.) Sarah and Lee will look at the budget to identify funds for this purpose and Sarah will make a presentation to Don Randel in order to solicit funding from the university. Christian will model several projects.
3) Travel Budget
Lee distributed a report detailing the changes to the CUL Conference Travel funding policies since 1988/89 and an analysis of the money spent on conference and administrative travel since 1991/92. It also included information from Harvard, Emory, and Pennsylvania specifying the support these institutions provide to their library staff. We will discuss this on at our next meeting.
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rev. 2/10/98 dih