General Selectors Meeting

27 January 2000

RWA Notes

1. New Folks. We introduced new selectors: Michael Cook from Mann, Eric Cooper from Law, Phil Davis from Mann, Bill Sayers from OKU, and Leah Solla from PSL.

2. Voyager Equipment. Oliver Habicht and Laura Heisey attended the beginning of the meeting to talk about workstation requirements for collection development in the new Voyager environment. Selectors should now begin to work with the network administrators in their units to ensure that their workstations will be adequate for selection work, which includes especially reading and in some cases writing reports. Some workstations will be adequate, others will need to be upgraded, and still others will have to be replaced. (All Macs will have to be replaced.) Oliver explained that the power needed depends in part upon the proportion of time that one expects to spend in the Voyager environment: one needs less, if one plans to spend less time. In general, for collection development purposes, Oliver recommended the following: processing speed of at least that of a Pentium 2, a minimum four gigabytes of memory, and a monitor of at least seventeen inches. Oliver said he is hoping to have much of the new equipment purchased by March, so that staff will have it when training begins.

3. Fund Structure. John Saylor and Linda Westlake talked about work on Voyager reports and fund structure. Martha Hsu, Suzy Palmer, Adam Smith, and Michelle Paolillo will be trained in report writing, and will then train other staff. Ann Augustine will be trained in fund accounting. John and Linda explained that Voyager does not have equivalents to class codes or L3 codes, although there are several ways to record and accumulate such information. They distributed a mock-up of one of John's funds, so that selectors could see what the fund information might look like. We now need to determine what format information and other data, currently collected in NOTIS through the class and L3 codes, will be needed when we move to Voyager. John distributed a copy of the current class codes. We decided that each selector should now send to Susan Pickett (slp23) a list of all of those class codes or L3 codes which he or she feels are essential. These can be codes currently used, or codes not now used in NOTIS. John and Linda will keep us informed as their work on the Voyager fund structure progresses.

4. CRL. Ali discussed the final report of the CRL Task Force, which is available at "http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/crl1.htm . Ali chaired the Task Force, which also included Sarah How, Joseph Luke, Caroline Spicer and Yoram Szekely. CUL's present membership in CRL costs ca. $57,000 per year. It was important therefore that we do a review to determine what we are receiving for our money. Ali talked about the ILL traffic with CRL in 1997/98. 317 items were borrowed by CUL from CRL, of which 102 were available from no other library. A further twenty of the 317 are held by only one other library (which may well not have been ready to lend). Ali said that there is a strong sense among staff that the CRL membership is too important to drop at this point. At the same time, however, it is clear that awareness and use of CRL collections and services by CUL could be considerably higher. It is for this reason that the Task Force recommends renewal, but with the proviso that CUL systematically increase use of CRL, become more involved in the administration of CRL, and reassess whether use has been increased after three years. Yoram stressed that, from a strictly dollar perspective, this is a very expensive service-although the value to the users of the specialized material borrowed from CRL was probably considerable. It is for this reason that we need to increase use. Lenore made the point that increased use would certainly result from making the CRL catalog much more accessible to our users; other institutions do a much better job at this. She also said that we need to persuade CRL to create at least minimal catalog records for their foreign dissertations. Mary Ochs noted the importance of CRL's foreign science materials, as was discussed at the most recent CD Big Heads meeting. Sarah How said that CRL has a strong reputation as a key cooperative agency, upon which many institutions and programs depend. CRL serves especially humanities and social science students and scholars-for whom access is becoming ever more difficult. Allen Riedy said that CRL supports critically important foreign microfilming programs-and while one need not belong to CRL to participate in the programs, the demise of CRL (if membership declined significantly) would probably mean the end of those programs. There was unanimous endorsement of the Task Force recommendation by the selectors at this meeting.

5. netLibrary. Greg Lawrence is the project manager for the CUL netLibrary experiment. He has formed an ad hoc netLibrary group, which he chairs, and which includes Tom Gale, Marty Kurth, John Saylor, and Tom Turner. Greg reported that the CUL IP addresses have been loaded by netLibrary so that we will be able to have access to the 800 titles selected by the four institutions. Connectivity is fine, but we have encountered a serious obstacle that we had not seen previously, namely that netLibrary has created a system that requires all users to register and use individual passwords. We would much prefer to provide seamless access, without individual passwords, as we do for our other networked resources. Greg and others on the group have had a lengthy phone conversation with netLibrary about this. There will be further meetings of the group to work toward a solution, which will then be presented to ERC; some public service managers have been invited to the next meeting, since these issues clearly have public service implications. John Saylor explained how selected netLibrary materials will be made accessible specifically to students in two innovative classes being taught this semester in the computer science and communications departments.

6. NERL e-books. I announced that eight members of NERL will be participating in a pilot project funded by Mellon, beginning next month. This project will entail the comparison of reserve lists in areas of history and English language literature. Once the reserve lists in these areas of all of the participants have been consolidated, the group will analyze what would be required to convert a significant number of the monographs on the consolidated list to electronic form. This could then lead to a larger project grant proposal to convert those monographs.

7. E-Journals. The remainder of the meeting was spent discussing the new issues that are arising from subscription offers by large science publishers for electronic journals. We used the Elsevier offer as an example, since Elsevier representatives were visiting yesterday with a new proposal. In short, Elsevier is charging two fees-a content fee and a platform fee-which for us amount to ca. $110,000. This would then be added to the $1.26 million dollars (ca. 10% of the total CUL materials budget) which we now spend on ca. 650 Elsevier journals. In return for this we would get unlimited access to the electronic versions of the journals we subscribe to in print, ca. 10,000 downloads of articles from other Elsevier journals that we do not subscribe to, and a guaranteed price increase of no more than 7.5% for each of the next two years (2000-02). At the end of that time, the arrangement would be renegotiated. Once cannot, however, reduce the amount one is paying between now and the end of 2002-i.e., one cannot cancel without purchasing another Elseiver journal of approximately the same price. If we want electronic access, we must agree to keep the Elsevier journals we have (or at least Elsevier journals that add up to what we are paying now) through 2002, and agree to increases of 7.5% per year. We did all acknowledge that we had seldom if ever seen price increases by Elsevier that are so small (i.e., 7.5%).

John said he feels that, of all the offers made by major science publishers for electronic journals, this is probably the best. Leah said her concern was less the problem of finding the extra funding than the fact that we would be locked in to all of these journals for three years: if there are special, unexpected pressures on the budget, we would still be obliged to purchase all of our Elsevier journals. Janie noted that Science Direct, Elsevier's electronic journals program, includes despite its name all Elsevier journals, including social science and humanities titles. In the case of social science titles, Janie said, it may be that the electronic versions of journals we have in paper may not be as valuable as the monographs we would need to forego in order to purchase those electronic versions. Steve said that Elsevier journals are not as valuable to mathematics as some other journals, and that in a condition of serious budget distress, Elsevier journals would probably be at the top of his cancellation list. John agreed that there would need to be serious discussions about how such a purchase might be funded. Janie said that, if Cornell is aiming for true excellence in computer and information science, materials science, and genomics, then we should be encouraging each of those areas to be starting core journals at Cornell in their subjects--as alternatives to the high prices of journals from publishers such as Elsevier. Yoram (!) said that he could understand how one could view the Elsevier offer as a good deal: it controls price increases, it provides unlimited electronic access to high use journals--and we should always bear in mind the centrality of the sciences to Cornell. I said I was not certain whether there will be much of a role for collection development in future, if this becomes the dominant process: if we end up buying a few giant aggregations, it will be in effect the publishers who build the collections. Greg wondered whether we might not defer a decision on Science Direct for a year, while we review our subscriptions and perhaps do some cancellations. Martha noted that, because such large journal aggregations are for journals in many fields, trying to pay for such aggregations from funds divided by subject becomes increasingly problematic: using central funding (e.g., fund 519) may be the most effective method for funding large e-journal aggregations.

Minutes recorded by Ross Atkinson.

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