1. Focus groups seem the only reasonable approach to gathering information, given our time constraints.

2. We will try to coax some 20-30 summer students and a few faculty to participate.

3. We'll contact Linda Bryan to review her experience with staff focus groups, perhaps even transcribing some of her tapes.

4. We're particularly interested in learning about how patrons currently access electronic journals and how they conceive of and use the Gateway.

Defining the contents of the new Gateway:  

Following the "Jim Report," we have used the metaphor of reference collection to characterize the new Gateway. That is, the Gateway would hold resources that primarily direct readers to information, rather than the information itself. Using the vocabulary of the subject captions, these resources fall into the categories of: audio-visual, catalogs, indexes, numeric and spatial. The nature of electronic resources will expand the idea of reference to include electronic journal collections, since they are accessed by a search interface. So Project Muse would be part of the new Gateway, although its component journals, e.g. American Imago, would not. Marty pointed out that many of these journal collections have been designated already, using the local 899 field, which would allow us to easily extract individual titles from the Gateway database.

This is only a first iteration of what comprises an electronic reference collection, but whatever our ultimate definition, it will have to be applied to the thousands of resources that currently make up the Gateway. We spent the rest of our meeting working through the list of subject captions and deciding which of the CUL selectors would be best qualified to review the resources in each of them for inclusion in the new Gateway.

Minutes recorded by David Block.

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6/21/01, jwg
rev. 6/22/01, jdl