Science Team Minutes

Meeting of 11 March 1998

Present: Demas, Saylor, McDonald, Rockey, Brumberg, Weintraub, Stewart, Funk (via teleconference)

1. CUL/CUMed Collaboration CUL Administration has approved the concept proposed by the Science Team. Ross Atkinson will appoint a planning team, of which Susanne Whitaker will be chair, to organize this effort. John has information on purchase of teleconference equipment and will arrange a vendor demo.

2. ACS Visit John is arranging for representatives of the American Chemical Society to come to campus on March 26 to outline our options for acecss to the 13th collective index to Chemical Abstracts and/or access to the CA database. He will inform us of specific times and locations for related sessions.

3. Elsevier's Science Direct service Jen and John led an interesting discussion and review of the Elsevier e-journals service Science Direct. The search and navigation features were discussed, along with a pricing proposal and the terms and conditions of use. Various scenarios were discussed along with the implications (budgetary and collections) of each. A task group comprised of John, Jen, Steve and Peter will develop a counter proposal for Elsevier (and a list of options for Cornell to consider), which will be discussed at the next team meeting.

4. AAAS "Science Online" The pricing scheme and the terms and conditions of access to the online version of Science magazine were discussed. The cost for a library subscription is $25 per specific machine on which the magazine can be read. Because this scheme seems to be designed to promote and protect individual subscriptions to the magazine, is is (purposely?) quite clumsy from the point of a library wishing to provide wide network access to an important journal. The title is available electronically (but not current issues) in one or more aggregations. No logical, unified CUL approach emerged from the discussion, so each library will make its own decision about subscribing to Science Online.

5. Peter McDonald assumed the chairmanship of the Science Team at the end of the meeting to the acclaim of his colleagues.

Minutes recorded by Sam Demas.

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Rev. 9/3/99, mc