Collections Advisory Group Minutes - May 20, 1998 Present: B. Weil (chair), P. Bischoff, S. Calpestri, G. Ford (guest), B. Hurley (guest), B. Kornstein, L. Leighton (guest), P. Maughan (guest), R. Moon (guest), J. Roberts, J. Spohrer, C. Wanat (recorder) 1. The minutes from the May 6th meeting were corrected and approved. 2. There were a number of announcements: Leighton reported on GOBILINK testing. The plan is to get 6 Yankee-based approval funds on the system by July 1. There were no projections as to when all Yankee approval funds would be using GOBILINK. It was noted that European vendors are also beginning to talk about such electronic linkages between their approval plans and library ordering systems. In connection with this, Roberts noted selector concern about the shifting of ordering work to selectors. Leighton noted that the rules are unchanged: selectors may continue to send orders to the Order Divison for placement. Hurley noted that the Library has received a $186,000 gift of equipment from Sun Microsystems; this will upgrade the library's servers and provide 127 gigbytes of disc space. Also, the Library received word of an NEH grant of $220,000 for the Making of America II project. Weil noted that many CAG minutes are not reflected on the library staff web site. Minute takers are to take responsibility for seeing to it that their minutes are there. 3. There was a discussion regarding the general issue of how our electronic resources are reflected on the Library's web site, which grew out of a concern that our purchased resources are not visible or even easy to find. Hurley noted that he felt the LSO needed direction from a new strategic plan: can we make our services and resources visible via a single integrated framework on the web? He raised questions regarding how we view the "catalog" these days; rather than providing a list of electronic journals (for example) on the web, can we catalog them all so they appear on Pathfinder and then have some canned searches which could provide a list of electronic journals on demand? Spohrer noted that at the present we have nothing close to a virtual periodical room or a virtual reference room; Moon noted the "reference resources" section on the web -- is that close to a "virtual reference room"? Maughan noted that the mechanisms per se were not as important as solving the problem. Moon felt that there were 3 issues that have been raised vis-à-vis the library web: a useful current awareness function to highlight new resources, initial findability, and repeat findability. The group noted that the questions being raised involve broad philosophical issues and we need to determine on which level we want to try to deal with the problems. Is the question "what journals (or A&I services) do we have" the real question here or is it broader? Is the bifurcation between print and digital useful? Roberts noted that users ask "what music journals do you have?" not "what electronic journals in music do you own?". Weil asked what action items we have here: serial identification issues, A&I identifications issues, and the broader issues of how to find critical resources. Moon noted the future possibility of a) cross-database searching and its implications for both users and their training and b) remote access to the CD-ROM databases. Weil wrapped up the discussion by suggesting that we first tackle the serial access question. Under whose aegis should a discussion to determine options for facilitating serial access (both electronic and print) take place? The question is how to identify serials by library location, by subject, and by format (print/electronic). It was agreed that Hurley would form a group with representatives from CAG, PSAG-PS, and Technical Services to explore these serial access issues. CAG and PSAG-PS should send Hurley suggestions for possible members. 4. The previous week, Weil, Urbanic, and Spohrer met with Penny Abell to discuss the collections budget for the coming year. Abell would like to get a handle on how current allocations map to campus academic programs before allocations for the coming year are made. She also mentioned some analyses of this question that Lyman had told her about. For CAG's discussion, Weil identified a number of these analyses and many of today's guests were here to present the ones on which they had worked. Moon discussed a report from Gladis for the 95/96 year which broke down monographic acquisitions by academic disciplines (as mapped from LC classes) by fund and, for items without a payment record, by number of items. [Moon subsequently sent CAG members a copy of the report via email.] Ford distributed an analysis of the 97/98 collection budget vis-à-vis the faculty, graduate student and undergraduate distributions. This showed that in very broad terms (ie, humanities & social sciences / sciences) the collection distribution is fairly close to the academic distributions. Hurley distributed a study of the Main stack collection indicating circulated use and linear stack footage mapped to academic departments (using the earlier mentioned mapping of LC classes to academic departments). He noted such a study could also be done for other library locations. Also distributed was a study done by Dennis Smith (UCOP) of the UCB collection budget between 1988/89 and 1997/98 in two parts, one being an update of the Voigt-Susskind model and the other an examination of the estimated inflation funded needed to restore the purchasing power of the acquisitions budget to the 102,000 volume level specified in the 1977 UC library plan. Discussion of these analyses will continue at the next meeting.
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