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Science Team Meeting Minutes
08 March 2002

Math Library Conference Room
Attendees:  Mary Ochs, Mary Patterson, David Brumberg, Phil Davis, Leah Solla, Steve Rockey, Susanne Whittaker, John Saylor, Pat Viele, and by phone, Mark Funk and Marty Schlabach.

Scribe: Mary Ochs

  1. Leah Solla reported on the ACS online journals. There are about 33 titles. The subscription for web editions [current volumes] is approximately $7,500.00 per year. This is a rolling 5 year subscription. Archival files will be available soon. The archive goes back to volume one and runs up to the current 5 year moving window. May and June will be a free trial period. The price starting in July would be $4,500.00 for the Ithaca campus and Geneva and another $1,500.00 for the medical library. The sales rep has offered a discount to $5,100.00 total [annual fee]. The total ACS bill [paper + electronic] is approximately $47,000.00. ACS promises "archival quality" from 1996 forward. This will archive cross-linking and other functionality. We decided to discuss the issue again in December hoping that the pricing and access model will improve. Leah will post a message to Chem inf listserv regarding the pricing structure.

    SciFinder is 25% "busy". Perhaps we can negotiate additional seats.

  2. Opinion was divided about the use of LC pre-publication cards. Points made: LC includes anything that is copyrighted in the US and thus is more comprehensive than approval plans. Cornell is experimenting with electronic versions of the LC cards. Send feedback to David Block.

  3. Mary Ochs met with Leah R. Schwager of the Cornell Teacher Education Program. Mann Library will be enhancing support for this program through purchase of more monographs in several areas, such as classroom management, multicultural education, special needs students, etc. Mary will create a list of the librarians to contact in the science libraries to give to the CTE program staff. It was suggested publications from the following organizations be considered for acquisition:

Other suggestions should be sent to Lee LaFleur at Mann Library.

  • TOC pilot is going well at Vet. As of March 1, several other libraries went live. On July 1, TOC will go public for all of CUL. People have noticed that TOC of Science and Nature come very late. Libraries interested in participating for the July 1 launch should contact Adam Smith at Mann Library or their team leader, i.e. Mary for the Science team.

  • The electronic version of the Annals of the NY Academy of Sciences is free with paper. Since we go through a vendor [Yankee] the publisher doesn't recognize Cornell as a subscriber. Mary will follow up on this with Scott Wicks.

  • Phil Davis, Pam Baxter and Mark Funk plan to submit a proposal to the Internal Grant Program to purchase a local journal citation report from ISI. It would cover from 1981- present. Uses of this report include: identifying high use journals; identifying titles used across the Ithaca, Geneva, and Cornell Med campuses, identifying journals where Cornell faculty publish. The plan is to archive the report and burn a CD for every selector. The general consensus was that the report would be useful as one indicator of the importance of journals. As chair of the Science Team, Mary will write a letter for support for the grant proposal.

    News/Announcements:

    1. Mark Funk is now on the advisory council for Highwire Press.

    2. We have experienced some problems, especially with EBSCO, with electronic journals not being renewed on time and losing access.

    3. Leah announced that the version of Merck Index available through Dialog@Carl is in the online catalog.

    4. Mary Ochs will ask for further discussion about the local loading of databases at CD Exec. Leah mentioned that in chemistry there is still a need for local loading, for example the new spectral database. [Sadtler]

    5. John will be on vacation for 3 weeks starting 3/9/02. The engineering budget has been 100% spent. He has been reviewing expenses to identify any unused funds.

    6. John mentioned that Cornell might become a mirror site for Numerical Recipes online books provided by Cambridge University Press. http://www.nr.com/

    7. We decided that the April presentation by Theresa Danks from Elsevier would serve as the April Science Team meeting. [Note: Mary may try to schedule an additional meeting, since the May meeting falls during the presentation by Ken Frazier]

    8. Future agenda item: the Kluwer and the Elsevier deals through NERL expire this year. We need to discuss our priorities regarding journals from those publishers.

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