COLLECTION ADVISORY GROUP MINUTES 12/3/97

COLLECTIONS ADVISORY GROUP MINUTES

Meeting: Wednesday, December 3, 1997 1:30 - 3:00 pm, 250 Moffitt

Present: P. Bischof (recorder), S. Calpestri, D. Fortner, B. Glendenning,
J. Roberts, A Urbanic (chair), B. Weil Ex-officio: L. Leighton, J.
Spohrer, E. Woods

1. Announcements:

	J. Spohrer announced that a subgroup of the Academic Senate
Library Committee has done a brief report on the status of the Moffitt
Library Collection. Peter Lyman requested Spohrer to appoint an interim
selector for the Moffitt Collection, and Phoebe Jan es has generously
agreed to assume this role until the end of February. This interim
appointment will create time for a reconsideration of the future of the
Moffitt collection.

	M. Rancer responded to CAG's discussion of November 19 with an
offer to set up training for selectors in the retrieval of activity
reports from the web. CAG felt that such training would be most important
only if a desktop delivery were not feasible in t he near term (e.g. by
the beginning of the year). Ideally selectors would receive a weekly
mailing of batched transactions. CAG will invite the person designated to
set up such programming to our next meeting on December 17 to discuss
desiderata for this delivery system. 

A. Urbanic will e-mail all selectors to assess whether training is
desired, and ask information relevant to any such effort, namely the
equipment used by each selector, including word processor,
platform/operating system, and generation of browser installed on the
machine. B. Weil pointed out that in some cases equipment in use provides
only very slow access to Netscape, and that in other cases the equipment 
refuses to accommodate Netscape searches at all. Variant versions of 
Windows also will cause selectors to have more or less difficulty in 
accessing the reports from the web. 

B. Weil discussed pricing proffered by ISI for the three web versions of
its citation indices which varies according to how many of the three files
an institution purchases. The data on these files go back to 1987. ISI has
agreed to provide credit, should Berkeley subscribe to these files and at 
a later time enter into a consortial arrangement for them. 

2. Minutes of December 3, 1997 were approved with one minor change.

3. Early Planning for FY 1998/99 Collections Budget

	Peter Lyman has requested CAG to devise a more rational basis which may
explain collections budget allocation decisions. Our options, should we
receive additional money in the current FY, would be to allocate it
according to a similar percentage of the wh ole in terms of current
allocations, or to attempt to reflect changes in campus programs. For the
latter, CAG might look at such measures as changes in the numbers of
faculty FTE in given disciplines over time, and numbers of students, both
graduate and u ndergraduate, enrolled in classes, as well as numbers of
Ph.D.'s conferred by various degree-granting departments and
interdisciplinary majors. We might take Omega numbers and see how they
measure against pre-VERIP faculty numbers. CAG should convey to Pe ter
Lyman that we are beginning to examine this issue. One way we would like
to proceed is to take a snapshot of the pre-VERIP numbers and compare them
with present numbers, thereafter requesting advice from the campus. 

	CAG's responsibility is to advise on general directions for the CD
budget. Now that we have a breakdown of this budget with AULs given
responsibility for large areas of the curriculum, one part of our
allocations methodology can be to leave some of the de cisions to the
AULS. Since CAG could not micromanage all of the budget, the AUL's would,
in consultation with selectors within their resource groups, make internal
adjustments to meet specific needs. Neither democracy or mathematics alone
are the best way s to make these decisions; in the past what we normally
allocated was based upon the allocations of previous years. 

	Finally, unless there are increases from the campus, we will have
to begin a serials cancellations project once again. The months of April
and May are especially busy in terms of planning activities. 

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