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Notes for the meeting on September 11, 1996
Attending: Ross Atkinson, Lee Cartmill, David Corson, Claire Germain, Tom Hickerson, Gordon Law, Lynne Personius, Catherine Murray-Rust, Sarah Thomas, Ed Weissman.
Ed presented the report of the Committee on Electronic Resources. Among the issues discussed were the parallels between selecting and implementing networked electronic resources and selecting resources in more traditional formats. The technical infrastructure for electronic resources is in the process of being created so we are very conscious of the costs involved and take them into account in the selection process. The cost of the infrastructure for print and other more traditional format is taken for granted in the selection process and this often causes problems.
In the process of selecting networked electronic resources we have been responding to infrastructure needs on a case-by-case basis, e.g., to select and mount locally a particular database, we need to purchase another disk pack. This requires negotiation and slows down the selection and implementation process. There was considerable sentiment that this is not a sustainable approach. We began to explore ways to build the technical infrastructure in anticipation of rather than in response to needs. The question of how much additional technical support is needed and in what form was also raised.
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rev. 1/31/97 dih