| Members present: | Binion, Campbell, French, Heinecke, Hume (chair), Peete, Pryatel, Werner, Zelmanowitz |
| Members absent: | Adams, Bergstrom, Bero, Hartford, Hay, Pantelia, Schottlaender, Sharrow, Stead, Vermeij, Withey |
| Staff: | Candee, Lawrence |
| Guests: | Aaron Edlin, Professor of Economics and Law, UC Berkeley |
1. Preliminaries
1.a. Welcome
and introductions
1.b. Review
of meeting objectives
Hume convened the meeting and asked members to introduce themselves.
The meeting objectives were reviewed.
|
1. Receive an update on the current status of the shared
digital collections of the California Digital Library.
|
2. Budget Plans and Strategies
2.a. 2002-03 Operating Budget
(Update)
2.b. Capital Budget (Update)
| Background Materials:
· Governor's Budget Plan Makes Targeted Cuts at UC but Funds Enrollment Growth, Keeps Student Fees Level, Press Release, UCOP, 1/10/02 (http://www.ucop.edu/news/archives/2002/jan10art2.htm) · Display 1: 2002-03 Governor's Proposed Budget (UCOP 1/10/02) · Display 2: 2002-03 Regents Budget vs. Governor's Budget: Partnership Funds (CUOP 1/10/02) · Display 3: 2002-03 Budget for Capital Improvements: Comparison of Regents Budget and Governor's Budget (UCOP undated) |
Heinecke reported that in view of the state’s well-known fiscal problems, the 2002-03 Governor’s Budget was better for the University than expected. Of particular importance, there were no across-the-board cuts, and no reductions in research programs. With respect to the Partnership, the Governor provided 1.5% of the 4% general provision, full funding for 7,100 new students, and full funding for the summer session at UCD (in addition to summer funding for UCB, UCLA, and UCSB, previously funded). The Partnership provision of a 1% increase for unfunded shortfalls, including library materials, was not funded. For 2003-04, the University’s budget priorities are to fully fund the Partnership and meet documented salary needs. It is unlikely that retroactive funding will be forthcoming, and the state will tend to favor one-time funding for needs outside the partnership.
In the capital budget, the state is now proposing three two-year bonds for education under a single legislative authorization, which would provide about $330 million per year to UC. The capital budgets for the California Institutes for Science and Innovation were shifted from the General Fund to lease-revenue bonds, and several already-approved UC projects were accelerated using lease-revenue bond funds as part of the Governor’s economic stimulus package. As a result of these shifts, in order to stay within budget it was necessary to defer three projects until the 2003-04 budget. One of these was the third-phase expansion of the Northern Regional Library Facility. The Budget Office expects that this will impose at most a one-year delay in occupancy of NRLF-3 (Lawrence reported that, owing to the timing of bond funding that would have delayed NRLF-3 somewhat in any case, the effective delay is more like six months). Heinecke observed that, in any case, the Regional Library Facilities are not infinitely expandable, and the University should begin to consider strategies for the time when the RLFs cannot accommodate further growth.
In discussion, Hume noted the importance of continuing support for the development and growth of the shared digital collection, and asked whether off-the-top funding from the University’s operating budget might be justified for this purpose. French, underscoring previous SLASIAC discussions of the CDL’s co-investment model for collections, noted that differences in the financial resources available to the campus libraries continued to affect the growth and integrity of the shared digital collection. Zelmanowitz observed that an off-the-top allocation for shared digital collections would require a consensus of the Chancellors, and Hume expressed the view that no campus would see this as a bad investment. Werner reminded the committee that some provision would eventually have to be made to support expanded RLF operations as well. The RLFs, which provide Universitywide service, are now supported by budgets transferred to Berkeley and Los Angeles when these campuses assumed management responsibility for the facilities in the mid-1990s. Lawrence noted that proposals for off-the-top funding for library collections have not been successful in past years, but Heinecke felt that such a proposal might be justified by the CDL’s successful track record based on a well-considered plan. The Committee believes that a strategy is needed to fund the continued development of the shared digital collection from existing University resources (perhaps through an off-the-top allocation), rather than depending solely on the success of initiatives for new State funds. The Council of Chancellors and Council of Vice Chancellors will need to be consulted about such a strategy.
Returning to the matter of deferral of NRLF-3, Heinecke noted that the role of the RLFs is unclear for many faculty and academic administrators, and that (at least within UCOP) misperceptions are prevalent. It was noted that advocacy for RLF construction cannot really compare with the influential support that campuses can muster for their own high-priority capital projects. The Committee believes that a program of organized advocacy for the RLFs in the capital budget decision-making process may be needed.
3. Scholarly Information Program
Task Force (Update)
| Background Materials:
· 8/7/01 SIP Task Force Meeting Notes · 12/12/01 SIP Task Force Meeting Notes |
French reviewed the membership and charge of the SLASIAC Scholarly Information Program Task Force, and observed that the main challenge facing the group was that of formulating strategies in the absence of a widely perceived library crisis that would frame the issues and provide an impetus for action. In its pursuit of a clear budget plan with a multi-year view, the group has recognized the importance of an evolutionary strategy, which nonetheless may require revolutionary actions. In its initial meetings, the group has agreed to focus on three broad issues: a) the interdependence of campus libraries with each other and the CDL as well as interdependence of print and digital; b) the continuing issue of the sustainability of library collections and services; and c) the means of leveraging the University’s experience with its eScholarship program of innovations in scholarly communication in order to achieve enduring benefits. Among the more “revolutionary” issues that have emerged from the group’s discussions are that 1) greater collaboration among the campuses in provision of library service may require campuses to forego local comprehensiveness in the interest of a higher-quality shared Universitywide collection, and 2) expansion of shared collections may have significant implications for ownership and the kinds of library metrics that determine national rankings, accreditation assessments, and the like. Initial discussions have also led to the conclusion that the RLFs are central to the planning effort, as a locus for innovations in collection management and a symbol of the shared collection concept. The Task Force has reviewed the recommendations of the Library Planning and Action Initiative Advisory Task Force, developed a topical framework to guide its work, and is preparing a timeline for addressing specific planning issues over its next several meetings. Hume felt that the issue of understanding how this strategic direction intersected the conventions of national statistics and rankings could be an important one, and suggested that it could be useful to develop a one-page fact sheet on collections and access in UC that could be used to describe and explain the University’s unique situation.
4. Planning Context
4.a. Draft policies related
to copyright (Information)
Hume provided a brief update on the work of the Standing Committee on Copyright. He reported that the committee has focused on copyright issues in teaching, and had developed three draft policies, on ownership of course materials, recording of course presentations, and retention of rights to published articles. The Committee reviewed comments on these drafts from campuses and the Academic Senate in December, and a revised draft on ownership of course material will be prepared for formal review.
5. Technological Infrastructure
Support
5.a. Proxy services (Update)
Campbell reported that proxy services for remote access to licensed digital library materials by authorized users are now available at all campuses, including the Office of the President. The University’s Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) authentication services, discussed previously with SLASIAC, will, when fully mature, provide a rich set of technologies for authentication and authorization, but commercial development of these services remains in flux, and we will be continuing to use proxy servers for at least the next couple of years. Campbell also reported briefly on the hardware aspects of the CDL system transition, and on plans to add significant new optical networking capacity to the CalREN-2 California education network by December 2003, subject to availability of funding.
6. Strategies for Managing
Scholarly Information
6.a Collection Management
6.a.i) CDL collections (Update)
| Background Materials:
· 2001 additions to the CDL collection · New Service Provides Free Interactive Access to California Statistics, Press Release, CDL, 8/8/01 · Counting California: Information, Facts, and Data About the Golden State (Brochure) |
French briefly updated SLASIAC on the composition and status of the Task Force, which will meet initially in Summer 2001, and provided some background on the "New Strategies" document prepared in preparation for the first meeting of the Task Force. Schottlaender, a participant in the brainstorming session described in the background material, noted that former University Librarian for Systemwide Library Planning Richard Lucier had felt strongly that the issue of ongoing price increases for library material would not be a successful argument, either within the University or with the State, in increasing funding for the UC Libraries, leading the brainstorming group to explore innovative rationales to focus and justify funding for library and scholarly information services.
6.a. ii) Collection Management Initiative (Update)
On behalf of Schottlaender, French briefly reviewed the background and objectives of the Collection Management Initiative and the two-year CMI experiment, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to remove from library shelves the print copies of selected journals available in both print and digital form. He reported that approximately 300 titles had been selected for study, and the removal of these titles to storage at selected campuses and marking of the same titles for usage monitoring at partner campuses was completed before October 1, 2001, when the official data collection phase of the study officially began. Data on the use of print journals at the “control” campuses, of recalls of study titles from storage at “experimental” campuses, and of digital use at both locations will be collected through September 2002. Use monitoring will be complemented by a program of surveys of faculty, students and staff to be developed after a series of interviews to determine the factors that influence the acceptability and use of digital as a substitute for print.
6.a. iii) Reconstitution of
the Collection Management Planning Group (Information/Action)
| Background Materials:
· SLASIAC Resolution B: Continuous Strategic Planning for Universitywide Library Collection Management, Approved by the Committee 1/14/00 · Standing Committee on Universitywide Library Collection Management Planning Roster, 2000-01 · Standing Committee on Universitywide Library Collection Management Planning - Steering Committee Roster, 2001-02 |
On behalf of Schottlaender, French explained that the SLASIAC Standing Committee on Universitywide Collection Management Planning (known colloquially as the Collection Management Planning Group, or CMPG), while it had two productive meetings in 2001, had proven too large and unwieldy to schedule for regular meetings. After consultation with the members, the chair of SLASIAC, and others, it was decided to appoint a small subcommittee, as described in the background material, to guide the committee’s regular work. The subcommittee will be composed of the three faculty members of the full committee, three University Librarians, and a collection development director from one of the campuses to serve as a resource for the group’s deliberations. Consensus: the proposed reorganization of the CMPG was endorsed by SLASIAC.
6.b Infrastructure
for Scholarly Information Management
6.b. I) Melvyl/A&I
Transition (Update)
| Background Material: Melvyl Catalog Transition/Journal Database (A&I) Transition |
French reported that, owing to minor delays in the delivery of software from the vendor and in installation of necessary hardware, the schedule for the transition of the MELVYL online union catalog and other CDL systems to the new platform is revised. On the new schedule, a prototype of the system will be running this spring, and available for public use in Fall Quarter 2002. The public prototype will include all UC catalog and periodical records, but not records from external sources such as the California State Library and the Center for Research Libraries. “Old MELVYL” will continue to operate in parallel with the new system (“MELVYL-T”) through June 2003, when all operations will be cut over to the new system. As part of the transition, the UC Libraries have agreed to more vigorous enforcement of standards for catalog records to be included in the new system, which will have the effect of improving quality and decreasing costs for ongoing processing of contributed records. This may, however, imply that campuses and external contributors will incur additional costs to comply with standards. The transition of locally mounted abstracting and indexing databases to vendor-hosted systems is proceeding on schedule. MELVYL Medline was decommissioned on February 2, and the National Library of Medicine has implemented new features in its Pubmed service that UC has requested to ensure effective integration of services with CDL systems. As unanticipated problems arise, CDL is seeking “global solutions” that will sustain existing services across all vendors of A&I products. For example, CDL has discovered that many library users use their desktop citation management software packages as searching clients for A&I databases in the online catalog, a capability that is not commonly supported by the new commercial hosts for these databases, and is searching for a solution for these users that will work simply and effectively for all remotely-hosted databases of this kind.
6.c. Scholarly Communication
| Background Material: "Op. Cit.," Policy Perspectives 10:3 (December 2001), a publication of the Knight Higher Education Collaborative (http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/pp-pubs/V10N3.pdf) |
6.c.i) eScholarship
faculty advisory committee (Information)
6.c. i) eScholarship
update (Update)
| Background Material: eScholarship Update – February 2002 |
Candee reported that eScholarship is coming to the end of its initial experimental period. In reviewing lessons learned and defining new challenges from this period, eScholarship has discovered that the readiness of faculty to initiate and participate in digital scholarly publishing ventures is greater than originally expected; to capitalize on this readiness, however, many “business model” questions, including the role of eScholarship, the responsibilities of the partners, and the sustainability of publications, remain to be resolved. eScholarship’s experience in launching new digital journals has been mixed: some have been straightforward, and others exceptionally difficult, raising questions about the allocation of responsibility and involvement and the role of eScholarship in starting and sustaining e-journals. Candee also noted that availability and understanding of underlying technologies to support digital scholarly publishing is uneven among UC faculty groups, and that the role of strategic partnerships, such as that with bepress, must be better understood. In the latter case, the proposed launch of a social science working paper archive program in partnership with bepress has allowed eScholarship to raise and grapple with a number of questions regarding roles and responsibilities of faculty groups, ORU and campus administrations, bepress and eScholarship.
6.c. iii) Changing
Scholarly Communication, a Faculty Perspective
| Background Material:
· "About bepress.com," (http://www.bepress.com/aboutbepress.html), downloaded 1/24/02 · California Digital Library and Berkeley Electronic Press Announce Partnership For Scholarly Communication Initiatives, Press Release, CDL, 10/4/01 (http://www.cdlib.org/about/publications/BepressPressRelease10-4-01.pdf) |
Candee introduced Aaron Edlin, Professor of Economics and Law, UC Berkeley, and co-founder of Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress). Edlin told the group that bepress was founded in response to three issues: 1) the increasing pressure on faculty to publish, which requires that academics be able to efficiently locate, retrieve and read professional literature; 2) the extensive lags between submission, refereeing, acceptance and publication; and 3) the ongoing consolidation among scholarly and scientific publishers, which leads to decreased competition and increased prices. Electronic publication addresses these issues by promising publishing that is fast, cheap, available around the clock, with advanced search and presentation capabilities, and the ability to scale up well. However, “home-built” publications (such as posting papers to a faculty member’s personal Web site) and development of “one-off” systems to support a single publication are not effective ways to exploit the benefits of electronic publishing, as these tend to duplicate investments in fixed costs, are disorderly and make discovery difficult, and raise problems of quality assurance. The bepress software was created to provide a common solution for decentralized production and control of scholarly publications. The software is flexible to adapt to different formats and forms of publication (preprints, newsletters, peer-reviewed journals) and different editorial and review processes, while supporting common metadata and encouraging economies of scale through central storage and archiving. In addition to the software, bepress is the publisher of several journals in economics, law and related social sciences. Each bepress journal highlights some innovations in scholarly publishing; for example, in economics, bepress journals highlight fast peer review (typically 10 weeks or less) and publication immediately upon acceptance. In the corporate banking area, well-established commercial journals are slow to respond; bepress authors agree to expedite their review of submitted papers in return for rapid publication of their own submissions. The bepress internet-only journal, Journal of Legal Scholarship, is organized topically; topic editors for each issue solicit contributions, and after publication the issue is kept “open” to publish peer-reviewed commentary on the original papers. The “Economist’s Voice,” to be edited jointly by Edlin and Nobel medallist Joseph Stiglitz, is a monthly publication on economic policy that is aimed at fast, wide dissemination of short pieces on topics of current interest.
The bepress partnership with eScholarship is based on a shared vision of scholarly communication, and is manifest in two ways: co-sponsorship of a working paper repository in the social sciences that it is hoped will have an impact similar to that of Paul Ginsparg’s arXive in physics, and development of extensions to the bepress software to support a wider range of collaborative and decentralized publishing initiatives similar to the social science archive. The proposed implementation of the bepress software in support of the eScholarship social science archive supports variable branding (presentations can be linked to the sponsoring ORU, to UC/CDL/eScholarship, and/or the journal that eventually publishes the contribution), a persistent archive with keyword access across all contributions, output of products tailored to the requirements of the sponsoring ORUs, output of products that provide service to and highlight the research contributions of UC, and linking to and from the sites of the journals that publish the papers. The partnership provides value through merging of multiple perspectives: the bepress founders understand the literature of their field, prevailing professional practices for referencing and using journal content, and the underlying scholarly processes, and the CDL understands issues of organization, dissemination, access and archiving.
In response to discussion about the acceptance of publication in bepress journals for promotion and tenure purposes, Edlin explained the bepress four-level quality hierarchy designed for its macroeconomics journal; each submission can be directed to the journal appropriate to its judged quality, and it is not necessary to reject submissions in order to establish the quality of each of the four titles. Edlin stated that the business model for bepress is to achieve revenue through journal subscriptions, licensing of its software, and investor equity, but it aims for a low cost-high volume pricing model. Edlin acknowledges that other models, such as going to authors, institutions, or government agencies to cover the fixed costs of publication, are worth exploring. bepress is also committed to standards and interoperability, and intends that its software will make it easy to create interoperable publications.
7. Future meetings
and agendas
7.a. Joint meeting
with the Standing Committee on Copyright (Discussion)
7.b. SLASIAC 2001-02
work plan (Discussion)
7.c. Next meeting
(Discussion)
| Background Material: SLASIAC 2001-02 Plan (1/30/02) |
Hume reported that the UC Standing Committee on Copyright has expressed interest in a joint meeting with SLASIAC focused on issues of scholarly communication. SLASIAC endorsed this idea. Consensus: the Spring meeting of SLASIC will be a joint meeting with the SCC focused on scholarly communication, to be held in May or early June, 2002.