Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee
December 7, 2005, 10 a.m. – 3 p.m.
UC Office of the President
300 Lakeside Dr., Kaiser Center, Room 512
Oakland, CA 94612

Meeting Notes

1. Introductions; meeting logistics

Ellen Wartella introduced herself and asked attendees to introduce themselves to the group. Wartella announced that the order of the agenda would be modified, as both she and Kris Hafner would need to leave before 1 p.m.

Greenstein began with a general overview, tying several of the ongoing activities to the notion of ongoing access to digital collections. The University’s digital collections now include:

• The University licenses approximately $27 million of digital resources (just counting systemwide licenses). Since these are "rented," access could be lost at any time.
• Special collections on campuses have been digitized locally.
• The eScholarship Repository now contains thousands of papers authored by UC faculty.
• In collaboration with the CDL, the UC Press now makes hundreds of its books available to the UC community (and many of these to the general public as well) in digital form.
• In collaboration with the Library of Congress and others (through LC's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program [NDIIPP]), the CDL is experimenting with capturing content from thousands of public Web sites. The Web has quickly become a core component of the record of current events and contemporary culture, a record that can easily be lost to future generations if not captured and curated. Zelmanowitz noted that the Web has also become an essential part of the administrative record that has already played a role in UC institutional liability.
• UC has joined the "Open Content Alliance," a project to digitize library collections and provide open access to them.
• There are many digital resources that are produced by or support academic work that can be difficult to find and capture.

The Digital Preservation Repository is meant to facilitate campus efforts to address the digital preservation challenge by helping drive down campus library costs through provision of shared infrastructure.

Greenstein concluded by noting that the fundamental questions are about the roles and responsibility of the University within its academic mission, and how to prioritize the issue of preservation. In particular, it will be important to define the limits of the Libraries’ responsibilities in this area.

2. Progress report on Systemwide Strategic Directions for Libraries and Scholarly Information

1. Digital Stewardship. This relatively newly-defined area encompasses several of the strategic directions, including preservation and scholarly communication.
2. Libraries as part of the broader information environment. The role of libraries in support of research and teaching, and the setting of stewardship within that environment.
3. The legal and policy environment in which the libraries operate. For example, the impact of policies concerning copyright, how the University handles copyright, and the area of digital rights management.

A fourth area, the reconcepualization of "library collections," will be taken up at a subsequent meeting.

3.a. Stewardship of digital assets

Lawrence introduced the committee to the work that is starting up to focus on stewardship of the digital scholarly assets of the University in response to the charge to SLASIAC from Provost Greenwood. He described the small internal study that will focus on:

1. Developing a framework for analyzing what the faculty produce, how to categorize the output, etc. The study will use focus groups and interviews to gather information, and will talk with people on campuses, MRUs, and more.
2. Assessing the size and scale of the data. The study will use an automatic web crawl in the UC domain, and will evaluate the types and sizes of files to provide a rough estimate of the scope of the problem.
3. Finding out what practices have been successful for peer institutions that have done similar things.

The group working on the study will bring back something for SLASIAC in the spring.

Wartella suggested that the group look at legal and liability issues, for example, export control laws and regulations. Hafner said that security of the data is also an important aspect. Lawrence noted that the issue of trust and responsibility – both in terms of who curates the data and who stores the data – will also be addressed by the study group. SLASIAC members expressed willingness to serve as test subjects for development of focus group/interview instruments.

3.b.Information Technology

3.b.i. Information Technology Leadership Council/Council of Vice Chancellors for Research meeting on UC Research Cyberinfrastructure
3.b.ii. UC Information Technology Guidance Council: proposal and progress

Hafner passed out two documents:

• UC Research Cyber infrastructure Meeting Summary Notes and Recommendations, and
• UC IT Guidance Committee, A Coordinated Approach to Strategic IT Planning

She discussed the UC Research Cyberinfrastructure meeting that took place in October at UCSD. The group, which included the IT Leadership Council (CIOs), the Research Vice Chancellors, CalIT2 (California Institute for Telecommunications and IT, Citris (Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society), the Industry University Cooperative Research Program, CENIC (Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California), along with selected faculty members, gathered for brainstorming and planning, and to develop a core mission. The scope includes data stewardship and high performance computing.

Hafner then described the IT Guidance Committee, which grew out of the recognition that there was currently no forum to engage campus, systemwide, and faculty leaders in strategic planning for information technology in support of the University’s mission, including how to fund such activities. The goals of the Guidance Committee are to design a planning process that engages UC subject matter experts, identify and prioritize opportunities, and use systemwide cooperation and collaboration to develop strategic initiatives and make wise investments in information technology. The Committee, which will be convened by the Provost, will consist of representatives from all campuses and will report regularly to the COVC. The Committee will also communicate with other decision-making bodies, including SLASIAC, the University Librarians, and the Academic Senate. Given the scope of the task and the time available, as well as the importance of accommodating differences in campus needs and approaches, the committee's product will most likely take the form of statements of broad strategic directions (cf. the UC New Business Architecture), rather than specific implementation plans. Hafner noted that the UC libraries provide an example of a systemwide group that has successfully employed "facilitated collaborative activity."

SLASIAC members noted that it will be important to look at what other organizations are doing (Kaiser Permanente was specifically mentioned), encourage and support a visionary approach to the problem, and provide the committee with the resources it needs to ensure engagement with the faculty at all levels.

Action item: A letter from SLASIAC to Acting Provost Hume (with a cc to SVP of Business and Finance Mullinix) conveying the recommendation that the IT Guidance Committee be adequately supported to ensure broad and close consultation with the faculty.

Returning to an earlier discussion item, Greenstein spoke about the importance of a broader engagement with the legal, regulatory and policy issues that influence our ability to develop and exploit the digital information environment in ways that advance the academic mission. He raised the question of how we proceed to organize for and effect wide-ranging consultation on these issues. SLASIAC’s sister committee, the Standing Committee on Copyright (also chaired by Wartella), deals with only a subset of the relevant issues (which expand beyond copyright per se), and generally brings a narrower focus to the issues, dealing largely with responses to legislative initiatives, fostering copyright education, and responding to encroachments on fair use. There is also considerable overlap between the two groups in terms of ex officio representation and staff support. Zelmanowitz, a member of both groups, observed that their domains are converging, and noted another important function of the SCC, monitoring of campus practices.

Action item: Staff will prepare for SLASIAC’s review a proposal for the merger of SLASIAC with the Standing Committee on Copyright (SCC), justified by changes in the academic environment. The proposal will include how to effect the merger, and a draft charge.

With additional time in the agenda, Dan Greenstein spoke briefly about the fourth aspect of the SSD, Collections Development. So far in the University, shared collection development has included:

• Shared regional facilities (the NRLF and SRLF)
• Resource sharing such as interlibrary loan (ILL), the Melvyl union catalog
• Licensed digital resources
• Shared print collections
• Digital reformatting of print collections

It has become evident to the UC Libraries that all of these components are interrelated and interdependent, and steps are being taken to ensure that, at least at the strategic level, the Libraries have the capability to consider all of them comprehensively, rather than dealing with each as an independent programmatic "silo."

Related to the "digital reformatting" component, UC's participation in the Open Content Alliance, which rests in large part on the principle that UC (and its peer organizations) should not pay a commercial firm to digitize and sell back to us the materials that are already in our collections in print format, provides an outstanding opportunity for the Libraries to develop principles for participation in mass digitization projects (including terms by which the Libraries would make their collections available to commercially-motivated projects like Google Book Search), as well as understanding how third-party digitization platforms and projects can be effectively integrated into the Libraries' service models.

During lunch, Greenstein and LeCuyer discussed the topic of submission of digital dissertations, and the Committee agreed on the need for a letter to the Provost to encourage UCOP leadership in facilitating discussion by the Council of Graduate Deans, with appropriate participation by campus libraries and the CDL, on adoption of policies and procedures for electronic dissertations.

Action item: Letter to Acting Provost Hume, encouraging UCOP leadership to facilitate discussion by the Council of Graduate Deans, with appropriate participation by campus libraries and the CDL, on adoption of policies and procedures for ETDs.

At this point, Wartella left the meeting and Zelmanowitz chaired the meeting (at Wartella’s request) for the remainder of the afternoon.

4. Scholarly Communication

4.a. Scholarly Communication Framework and strategy
4.b. Office of Scholarly Communications update
4.c. Special Committee on Scholarly Communication update
4.d. University Committee on Library update

Candee gave a presentation on current developments in eScholarship services, focused chiefly on the eScholarship Repository, highlighting the “metadata” aspects of the web site design, and describing the procedures for submitting papers. Candee also talked about the issues surrounding copyright and the submission of post-prints into the repository.

Ober provided a brief update on the current work of the Office of Scholarly Communication, which continues to focus on activities that both inform (e.g., UC faculty) and influence (e.g., publishers, peer institutions) the development of the scholarly communication system. Cullenberg and other SLASIAC members of the Senate’s Special Committee on Scholarly Communication (SCSC) took this occasion to recognize the tremendous value of Ober’s contributions to the work of that committee.

Cullenberg gave an update on the Academic Council’s Special Committee on Scholarly Communication (SCSC). Originally formed out of a concern about scholarly monographs, the committee expanded its scope to include journals as well. The faculty perspective means that the committee will focus on major issues and concerns, not necessarily implementation. The primary concerns of the committee right now are:

• New forms of dissemination of scholarly materials
• New forms of knowledge (e.g., visualization, simulation, virtual reality) and the means of representing these in the scholarly communication system
• Quality, especially the maintenance of high standards of peer review
• Open access
• The power of UC's faculty acting together to effect change

The SCSC has developed a series of white papers to be presented to the Academic Council that together seek support for the evolution of the scholarly communication process to a more sustainable future. See the background material for more detail on each of the papers.

The group discussed whether there might be reaction from the publishing community when the white papers were released, and if so, how would the faculty respond? What would the faculty be willing to accept?

Crow reported that UCOL is currently focusing its efforts in three areas:

• Scholarly Communication. The committee has discussed at length the SCSC white papers, and will continue to engage in that dialog. Vice Chair Elaine Tennant has suggested the development of an interactive video on scholarly communication issues, to afford more effective and inclusive communication with the faculty on these matters.
• Digital Stewardship. The committee has expressed its strong interest in being informed and involved with the digital stewardship planning effort discussed earlier today, and has discussed the benefits of having guidelines for minimum criteria for digital journals, and a list of best practices.
• New library roles. There is interest in understanding and articulating the new roles of the libraries in the face of extensive change in the scholarly information environment. UCOL plans to ask Divisional COLs to examine their campus long range, and assess the extent to which library issues are being incorporated. In this connection, the committee is exploring the concept of the "library impact statement" that has been incorporated into UCB's academic program approval process. SLASIAC members encouraged UCOL to view these inquiries as an opportunity to stimulate creative thinking about library roles and scholarly information practices on the campuses and among the faculty.

Dan Greenstein expressed his appreciation for the leadership provided by Julius Zelmanowitz, who will be leaving UCOP at the end of January.

Action item: SLASIAC will draft a resolution on the occasion of Zelmanowitz leaving his current position of Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives.