Library Management Team
Notes from October 27, 2004 Meeting

Attending: Karen Calhoun, Lee Cartmill, Tom Hickerson, Anne Kenney, Janet McCue, Jean Poland, Sarah Thomas, Ed Weissman, Rick Silterra

1) Announcements

Anne announced that Susan Currie has accepted the position of AUL for Public Services at Binghamton University. Susan's last day at Cornell will be December 3. Anne also announced that Beth Katzoff will serve as the Interim Assistant Curator of the Echols Collection on Southeast Asia.

Tom reported that CIT has selected CommonSpot by PaperThin <http:www.paperthin.com/> as the university's content management system (CMS). CommonSpot is out-of-the-box software to create and manage web content. The primary advantage of using a CMS is to reduce up-front development and ongoing support costs. It is especially very effective in maintaining shared content in a timely manner. Tom also reported that the Charleston Advisor, "the library industry's leading consumer report and review tool for Internet accessible electronic resources," gave its 2004 Best Pricing award to Project Euclid "for it’s varied, thoughtful and reasonable pricing schemes that are designed to meet the needs of different constituencies." <http://www.charlestonco.com/features.cfm?id=165&type=me>. Lastly, Tom said that he has recently been appointed to the CISER Advisory Committee and is soliciting feedback and comments about CISER.

Janet reported on a meeting that she and Mary Ochs had with Carolyn Reid and Mark Funk. The purpose of the meeting was to examine the issues related to enhancing journal access to the Ithaca and NYC campus and to draw up a draft charge for a task force. Janet also reported on the meeting held with JGSM, ILR, and Mann library staff to discuss services and collections for business students.

2) Integrated Framework

Karen and Rick Silterra presented the draft report, An Integrated Framework for Cornell University Library Digital Collections: High-Level Requirements and Internal Implementation Issues, to solicit LMT comments and amendments to the report and recommendations. Developing an integrated framework is one of the nine priority objectives LMT has identified for 2005-2006. The report was written by a task force that Karen chaired consisting of Deb Gagnon, Jim LeBlanc, Maureen Morris and Rick Silterra. It proposes "a framework for the Library's digital collections that offers integrated discovery and a set of best practices to underpin collection building" in order to "give users at Cornell and around the world a powerful and easy way to search across our existing and future collections and to retrieve integrated sets of results." The task force based its recommendations on the information gathered in interviews with CUL staff members, an inventory of the Library's digital collections, and an environmental scan of relevant systems. Karen stated that the most important implementation issue is "to create and achieve consensus on CUL best practices and organizational structures for creating, sharing, sustaining, and documenting CUL digital collections." Rick provided an overview of the proposed system architecture which allows for both federated searching across distributed collections and for the harvesting of metadata to create a shared index.. Collections that can not be integrated into the framework using federated searching, will have their metadata harvested. Comments included the need for a fuller set of recommendations about digital preservation/digital life cycle management within CUL's best practices. Karen agreed to solicit from Anne Kenney further input about what should be added to the report in this regard. Also, the fact was noted that the integrated framework will make it easier for people inside and outside Cornell to discover and access CUL collections while, at the same time, positioning us to contribute to large-scale distributed online digital libraries (such as that envisioned by the DLF), and to enable CUL content to surface in other more popular environments (like Google).

Karen will incorporate the comments from LMT into the final report which then will be made available on the Staff Web page.

Edward Weissman