Coordinating Committees
Collections and Resource Sharing Coordinating Committee
Progress Report, July 22, 2008
The most significant happening during the past three months was the UW Library Staff Conference held June 3-4 in Madison. The Collections and Resource Sharing Coordinating Committee helped shape the program through its sponsorship of a number of roundtable and breakout sessions, namely: Library Dynamics, La Crosse’s ERM Access Database, Assessment, Electronic Resources Management, Shared Electronic Collection, Universal Borrowing, Google Book Project, and Blackwell. Coordinating Committee members as well as others involved in our broadly defined functional areas were either presenters or attendants at these sessions. In addition to the conference, notable progress has been made in the following areas:
Universal Borrowing Working Group: Reviewed and endorsed the final report of the Universal Borrowing Working Group submitted in May. Their recommendations will be taken up by CUWL at the July meeting. This committee included Edie Dixon (Madison), Dineen Grow (Madison), Emily Rogers (Green Bay), Michele Strange (La Crosse), and Mary Rieder (Colleges and chair).
ERM Working Group: The ERM Working Group was appointed in May to conduct a needs assessment for an electronic resources management system. The Working Group intends to determine the extent to which our needs can be met either by one of the primary vendor-based systems in the marketplace or by a less elaborate, locally developed database. The committee has been asked to complete its charge by the end of 2008. Comprising the Working Group are Michele McKnelly (River Falls), Bill Doering (La Crosse), Karen Jander (Milwaukee), and Sharon Knight (Whitewater). Chris Kline (Madison) has been appointed the chair.
Document Delivery Working Group: Ron Hardy, Working Group chair, used the CRS as a sounding board for talking through the challenges presented by the document delivery pilot project. As identified by Ron’s committee, two issues primarily accounted for the early low use of the System-funded initiative: 1) limiting the project to Elsevier and Wiley journal articles does not address the faculty research needs at some of the comprehensives, and 2) the pilot would be more successful if it could be extended to upper level student-faculty collaborative research. There was also a recognized need for developing a shared payment model for FY09 as stipulated by System. The Working Group’s July report incorporates many of these ideas.
Blackwell Evaluation Working Group: The ad hoc committee appointed to evaluate Blackwell as the System’s primary book vendor conducted a survey of Blackwell’s services and of each campus’ monographic expenditures for the first 10 months of the year. A report of the entire FY08 expenditures is now being compiled and will be distributed later this month. The members of this group are Kim Bartosz (Parkside), Diane Osborne Passafaro (Milwaukee), Mary Rieder (Colleges), Joan Robb (Green Bay), and Richard Reeb (Madison and chair).
Collection Development Committee: When the CDC met on April 25th in Madison, they made recommendations on summer renewals; received training on the collection assessment product, Library Dynamics, from its president, Howard Harris; established a committee chaired by Judy Wurtzler (Platteville) to review bid specs for renewing the periodicals contract; invited Cheryl Bradly (WiLS) to discuss her responsibilities of negotiating vendor contracts on behalf of WiLS libraries; and elected Judy Wurtzler as secretary for 2008/09 and chair elect for 2009/10. As of July 1 the CDC chair responsibilities transferred from Karen Jander to Sharon Knight (Whitewater).
Shared Electronic Collection budget report: The CRS updated the Shared Electronic Collection’s (SEC) list of resources substituting full names of resources for abbreviations, e.g., New England Journal of Medicine instead of NEJM, and editing the entries for a few products to reflect their current titles. Historical cost data back to FY01, the consortium through which each product is licensed, and information on campus-level contributions to the SEC budget enhance the value of the document. Now stored as an Excel spreadsheet, the report has recently been added to the CRS webspace under password protection. The XL file has also been made available to the CDC.
Submitted by Richard Reeb (Madison), CRSCC chair
Other CRS members are Ewa Barczyk (Milwaukee), Ron Hardy (Oshkosh), Karen Jander (Milwaukee), John Jax (La Crosse), Lisa Jewell (System), Dina Kaye (Parkside), Lee Konrad (Madison), Lisa Pillow (River Falls), Tom Reich (Stevens Point), Mary Rieder (Colleges), and Kathy Schneider (WiLS).