Coordinating Committees

Collections & Resource Sharing Coordinating Committee
Conference Call

March 4, 2009

8:30 AM – 9:30 PM

Present:  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), Richard Reeb (Madison, Tom Reich (Stevens Point), Mary Rieder (Colleges), Kathy Schneider (WiLS)

Meeting was called to order at 8:35 AM.

Approval of December and January Conference Call Minutes
December minutes approved with no changes.

Corrections to January minutes:  Reider changed to Rieder, last sentence in Criminal Justice Abstracts paragraph struck so as not to affect ongoing negotiations with Emerald.  Minutes approved as amended.

Discussion ensued about payment of invoice from Library Dynamics. The invoice was received late, and at the vendor’s request immediate payment was made. Discussions are still ongoing on the question of exactly what time period is covered by this invoice.

BadgerLink Update (Kathy)
Kathy has not received any update from DPI as to what resources will be available via BadgerLink next fiscal year. She’ll update us as soon as she hears anything.

UW System Conference in June:   Soliciting Ideas for Sessions (Dina)
The committee has met and agreed to two possible keynote speakers: Marshall Breeding of Vanderbilt University, or Joan Lippincott, the Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information. A committee member is in the process of contacting Mr. Breeding. They will be meeting again in mid-March and would like ideas for possible sessions, which can be e-mailed to Dina, before then. Dorothea Salo will also be sending out an e-mail on the Coordinating Committee mailing lists seeking input. Possible topics suggested were a roundtable discussion on ILLiad issues, Library Dynamics and the ERM project. Dina will contact Joan Robb about Library Dynamics and Kirsten Houtman about ERM.

The committee has discussed possibly extending the amount of time devoted to roundtable discussion from 50 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes this year, since many people commented that there wasn’t enough time for the discussions last year. They hope to have a program finalized by April 20th.

Ewa noted that a maximum of 190 people can be accommodated in the largest room at the Pyle Center which will be used for the Conference, so a cap on the number of attendees will have to be in place again this year. Last year only attendance from Madison actually had to be capped, however. A request for who will be attending from each campus will be sent out soon.

Emerald License Renewal Update (Lisa J.)
The Emerald Working Group (Lisa J., Richard, John Jax and Sharon Knight) has had several conference calls and has not been impressed with Emerald’s latest offer. UWS still wants just the content we have now, but the “custom quote” that Emerald sent for that set of titles was higher than the amount they want to charge for the package of titles they originally offered, which package we did not like. After several requests, Emerald finally gave a quote of an average of $23 per article for document delivery from their titles. Richard has staff looking at possibly licensing subject sets from them as an alternative. He noted that the prices for print titles from Emerald went up 100% in 2009.  John felt his usage of the Emerald package was mainly in reaction to Table of Contents alerts he receives, so he wonders if the usage statistics for the package are inflated because of others doing the same thing. He thinks System should just drop the Emerald license. Ewa commented that most vendors are hungry for business right now and are willing to break up packages in order to get some revenue, but not Emerald, probably because they are late to coming to the idea of presenting packages of titles for licensing.  Negotiations are still ongoing.  Technically, the license expired last month, and the Emerald rep wants an agreement this week, but Lisa and Richard don’t see how that is possible.

Recent ILLIAD Problems (Mary)
Questions about how to best communicate about ILLiad problems and share information were raised in the discussion last Friday after ILLiad had been running extremely slowly at times most of last week.  The problem was eventually discovered to be that we have too many transactions saved on our shared ILLiad server, but the jobs that need to be run in Database Manager slow the server down even further.  Genie Powell from Atlas Systems, who monitors the UW ILLiad mailing list, explained what the problems were and offered to have Atlas staff run the necessary jobs to clean out old transactions after hours so as not to bring ILL operations to a standstill.

This situation raised a couple of issues, the first being that most of the LAMs who do the technical work on the ILLiad server don’t do ILL as part of their day-to-day jobs, which creates a basic disconnect between them and the ILL staff when problems with ILLiad have to be resolved. When ILL staff have functional problems with the software, the LAMs can’t always help them with them because they don’t use the software every day.  The Colleges have found that having the ILL people ask their questions of each other on an internal ILL mailing list seems to be the best way to work those problems out.

That brings up the second issue that was raised in the discussion: communication problems and how to share information about ILLiad issues and solutions.  No one on CRS but Mary is on the UW ILLiad mailing list, so we missed the conversation when it was ongoing.  We don’t really have anyone on the committee that supports ILL as part of their day-to-day work except Tom, and that might be a good addition when new people are appointed in July. Leigh Dorsey specifically asked if the CUWLCRS mailing list was someplace that discussions like the one on Friday should be taking place.  Should the UW ILLiad mailing list be folded into the CUWLCRS list like the LAMs mailing list was folded into the CUWLTECH list?  Kathy commented that WiLS hosts the Midwest ILLiad Wiki, which had also been suggested as another place where such conversations could take place, and where information could be shared.  They haven’t aggressively marketed the site, though, so many people might not even be aware that it exists.  Its address is http://midwestilliad.pbwiki.com/.  Kathy also noted that Mark Beatty is working on putting together a discussion on ILLiad issues at next month’s WAAL Conference.  Mary will send a follow-up message on the UW ILLiad mailing list in response to Leigh’s questions.

Marquette’s Interest in Reviving Cooperative Collection Development with UWS (Richard)
Richard was forwarded an e-mail message that the Director of Marquette’s Raynor Library, Janice Welburn, had sent to Ken Frazier and Ed Van Gemert in which she asked about including a representative from Marquette in CDC meetings as had been done when Lou Pitschmann was at Madison.  The representative had been Jay Kirk, who is still at Marquette, and still on the CDC mailing list. Ken and Richard noted that there had never been a formal agreement on coopera-tion between Marquette and UWS, but, given the current budget climate, now might be a good time to look at such an arrangement that would be mutually beneficial to both parties. Kathy and Cheryl Bradley from WiLS didn’t think that including Marquette in UWS group licenses would be a problem for vendors, and Lisa J. noted that they already participate in the current Web of Science agreement, which will be coming up for renegotiation next year.  Kathy said that the private colleges used to have a group like the CDC, but it never really came together. Marquette is on a very different level of collecting than the other private colleges. She proposed making a formal invitation to Marquette to have a representative come to CDC meetings.

Mary stated that Mark Rozmarynowski, the Colleges’ CUWL rep, brought to her attention yesterday that Marquette charges very high fees to borrow materials from them, $25 for a loan and $15 for copies.  Should negotiating a reciprocal borrowing agreement between them and the UW libraries be part of any arrangements we make?  The group agreed that this would be very important.

Richard will put this item on the agenda for the May 1st joint meeting with the CDC so that it can be discussed with them.

Draft Calendar of CUWL Activities (Lisa J.)
Lisa said she has put this draft calendar together to eventually be posted on the wiki so that everyone is aware of timelines.  There are also plans to post calendar information for committees, meeting information, ALS statistics, budget information, and more on the wiki.  Mary asked if distributing the DoIT service level agreement information to the LAMs and Directors included budget information, since April would be too late to be receiving that type of information for budget planning for the next fiscal year.  Lisa said there wasn’t really budget information in the agreement and that the DoIT costs are fixed. What we paid last year will be what we pay this year.  Mary also suggested aligning the request for ALS statistics with the Department of Education’s usual request in November, and distributing the compiled statistics after the DOE’s normal February deadline.  Lisa will make those changes.  Any other suggested changes should be e-mailed to Lisa and she will get the calendar posted up on the wiki.

Joint Meeting with CDC/CRS on May 1 (Richard)
Richard suggested possible ideas for discussion such as the list of UW-Madison purchases extended to other UW campuses which had recently been distributed, and found to be lacking a few titles such as MDConsult and Nursing Consult, as well as the rush book bid contract current-ly being put together by Madison staff with their campus procurement people.  He stated that there are plans to post as much information as possible on the CUWL Wiki before the meeting. 

Mary suggested that the new periodicals contract be discussed.  Richard wasn’t sure how close to being completed that working group was, but Lisa J. said that Judy Wurtzler, the group’s Chair, had posted a message yesterday to the group which sounded like they were close to being ready to present the contract to the CDC.

Karen and Mary suggested discussing budget issues for next fiscal year.  Lisa J. said that a budget group had been meeting with Ed Meachen, and he feels there will be an 8-10% cut in OLIT’s budget. They are going to meet with Rebecca Martin tomorrow to lobby that the library monies be maintained as is since the automation fund had already given up $100,000 last year.  Lisa also noted that there had been a major restructuring of the UWS library budget which CUWL approved at their last meeting. It now consists of a section for Support for Resource Sharing which covers the Shared Electronic Collection, document delivery, British Library, CISTI, limited ILLiad support from WiLS, the UWDC, Voyager escrow and UB maintenance, the SCLS delivery service, and WorldCat/BadgerCat which now totals $9 million. The other section of the budget is Support for CUWL Operations and Infrastructure which supports the Voyager test environ-ment, DoIT support of System-wide library applications, Library Dynamics, LibQual+, iSkills, and a student employee, which now totals $151,000.

Suggestions for other topics should be e-mailed to Richard.

Proposed Revisions to SEC Budget Spreadsheet (Richard)
Everyone agreed that the additions Richard had made were very good ones (expiration dates, percentage of price increases, who holds the contract, and the publisher/vendor).  Mary asked if the data on the older SEC databases that have since been cancelled would be included eventually in the historical information?  Richard said yes.  Mary has a lot of the old budget sheets, if they are needed to reconstruct the information.  Richard will post the updated budget spreadsheet on the secure wiki site.

Continuing Problems with CUWLCRS E-mail List (Richard)
Madison personnel, in particular, are still having problems posting messages to the list sporadically.  He cited the recent problem Women’s Studies had had in posting a message about gay/lesbian/bisexual issues to the list.  Lisa J. stated that that particular message was held up by the Postini filter System uses to filter e-mail because of its subject line.  No one else has noted such problems posting to the list, but that might be because they don’t post to the list as much, or it might just be a Madison issue.

Posting of Usage Data on the Wiki (Richard)
Richard asked John, who is working on the timeline of when data should be posted, if he was close to being ready for CDC members to post their data.  All of the CDC members have been given write permission for the secure section of the wiki now.  John noted that there had been questions from his library if others would also be able to post data there, since the CDC rep is not necessarily the person who gathers usage data.  Should passwords be shared?  Richard said that separate logins could be created for other UW library staff members who need it.  He will send a message to the CUWLCRS list about that.

Richard asked if there was going to be some format for posting data, or if everyone would be posting their files in whatever format they have them in.  John and Kathy agreed that posting data would have to be into a set format.  Kathy and WiLS staff will put together the formats in the next few weeks and post them on the wiki.

Meeting adjourned at 9:32 AM.

Next Conference Call:  April 1st

Submitted by Mary Rieder, Recorder