| Members attending: | Butter, Dyson, French, Miller, Munoff, Pritchard, Schottlaender, Thompson, Howard for Sharrow, Werner |
| Members absent: | Kruger, Lease, Leonard, Vermeij |
| Staff: | Johns, Lawrence, Le Donne |
1. Preliminaries
a.
Welcome and introductions
2. Collection Management Initiative
– Progress Report
| Background Materials: Collection Management Initiative, Preliminary Schedule of Journal Selection and Project Implementation Tasks (CMI Project, 4/19/01) |
Schottlaender noted that all University Librarians had responded to his April letter. All campus project liaisons have been identified, and six of nine campuses (UCM is not able to participate) have expressed intent to participate in the project. A database of about 2,500 journal titles is now available to support the title selection process. This database was derived from CDL Shared Acquisitions records located at UCSD, and consists of titles available in both print and digital format, from publishers (a) handled by CDL Shared Acquisitions and (b) for which the necessary data on usage are or may be available. This database will be made available to campuses to support the title selection process immediately, with selection and implementation following the timetable set forth in the meeting background materials. Johns proceeded to provide a more detailed status report on project activities, and responded to questions from the committee.
Pritchard requested from project staff a clear and explicit statement of what the obligations would be for a campus electing to serve as either a control or an experimental campus for a particular title. ACTION: Johns will prepare such a statement for distribution to the Campus Liaisons.
There was consensus that there should be a quarterly executive summary of project status, progress and upcoming events and deadlines, to be distributed to Campus Liaisons and other groups as needed. ACTION: Johns will prepare a quarterly report.
Guidance was requested on the number of titles that a campus could or should select at this stage in the process. It was suggested that each campus should initially select at least 30 titles as candidate experimental titles, but is welcome to identify a larger number, up to 200 or so. ACTION: Johns will provide guidance on this question in her communications with the Campus Liaisons and other groups.
The Committee was comfortable with the project schedule set out in the background materials, subject to consultation with the ULs’ Systemwide Operations and Planning Advisory Committee (SOPAG) at their joint meeting the following day.
3. Scenarios for future development
of the Regional Library Facilities
Background Materials:
|
Schottlaender reminded the committee that, at their February meeting, they had "endorsed a suggestion by Dyson that the initial focus should be on the roles and capabilities of the Regional Library Facilities, and by Werner that this inquiry begin with development for committee discussion of some scenarios or models for the future development of the RLFs."
The 1991 report of the LAUC Ad Hoc Committee on Shared Resources (included in the background material for this meeting) is a valuable effort to envision new roles for the RLFs. Some of the suggestions in that report bear renewed consideration by the current committee.
To provide a point of departure for committee discussion, a small group met at UCSD on April 19 to brainstorm ideas for future roles for the RLFs. A report of that discussion was distributed at this meeting. In summarizing the April 19 discussion, Schottlaender noted that the RLF deposits represent a kind of "operational definition" of a "shared print collection" for the University, somewhat analogous to the University’s shared digital collection. This "shared print collection" could be envisioned as consisting chiefly of those materials for which the University has accepted ongoing archival responsibility, as well as those discrete collections that are best developed, housed and managed as a shared responsibility, rather than as an autonomous responsibility of the individual campuses. The organization and function of the archival print collection can be conceived as analogous to that of archival collections resulting from microform or digital reformatting, with print copies designated as "master," "printing," and "service." In this schema, the RLFs could serve as "dark" and "dim" archival repositories, storing the master and printing copies of archived materials. Additional roles for the RLFs, consistent with this framework, might be to accession and retain one or more print copies of materials available in digital form to all campuses, or to collect and retain a single print federal depository collection that would be more complete than the selective depository collections now available on the campuses.
In extensive discussion of these concepts, it was noted that determining what materials would be designated as archival in the shared collection would be a challenge, although application of "old-style" collection planning concepts might go a long ways in informing the planning for the shared print collection, and the committee was reminded that Phase III of the CMI project is largely dedicated to laying the policy foundations for determinations of this kind. It was also noted that the federal depository concept might be extended to include California government documents as well. The issue of the need for off-site storage for campus collections in the RLFs was also discussed. While this need is acknowledged in the report of the brainstorming session, it would be instructive to consider a "purer" off-site storage regime (with storage decisions controlled entirely by the depositing campus, subject to off-site space constraints) as one end of a continuum of RLF roles. The other end of this continuum might be a shared print collection constructed exclusively by collective design, with campuses assuming sole responsibility for accommodation of their purely "local" collections. Issues and questions could be set out for comparative analysis along this continuum, allowing for a richer assessment of the implications of various scenarios.
4. Planning the Standing Committee
Agenda
a.
Next steps
b.
Next meeting
It was agreed that the committee would continue to meet in conjunction with planned two-day University Librarian meetings (i.e., with SOPAG and the University Committee on Library), and that for the next meeting RLF scenarios would be set forth in the analytical framework described above.