From: rkenselaar_at_nypl.org
ALA/ALCTS/CMDS
CHIEF COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT OFFICERS OF
LARGE RESEARCH LIBRARIES
DISCUSSION GROUP
ANNUAL MEETING
JULY 6, 1996
NEW YORK, N.Y.
Ross Atkinson (Cornell), Chair
Heike Kordish (N.Y. Public Library), Secretary/Chair-Elect
l) Introductions and Announcements
Gay Dannelly (Ohio State) was nominated and approved as the incoming
Secretary/Chair-Elect, beginning with the February 1997 Midwinter
Meeting in Washington, D.C.
At the last Midwinter Meeting, it was suggested that a listserv be
developed whose membership would be limited the members of the Chief
Collection Development Officers Discussion Group. Lynn Sipe (USC) will
be working on this.
2. Budget survey.
Bob Sewell (Rutgers) gave some highlights of the budget survey based on
a questionaire distributed on the COLLDV-L listserv. (This method of
distribution worked well, and will be used again in the fall.) Plans
are to make the results of the survey available via a site on the World
Wide Web.
The summary (distributed at the meeting) was briefer than in the past.
There were 32 responses, and the average base allocation was $5.8
million, not a significant change from the previous year. The average
anticipated budget increase was 4.8%, up from 3.8% last year. Ohio State
and the University of Washington had the highest anticipated budget
increases. Most others were between 5 and 10%. No libraries reported
receiving a decrease in their materials budgets, although some reported
no increase. (Last year, the University of Hawaii reported a
significant decrease.)
Most libraries planned to increase spending for electronic resources,
although two libraries planned no increase. The largest planned
increase for this format is at the University of Arizona (15%). The
University of Kansas has received additional state funding, after having
no increase in three years. The University of Florida has budgeted
$800,000 for electronic resources. Cornell has had an increase of 45%
in their central budget. There is a trend toward centralization and
pooling of funding within institutions, whereby individual units are
"taxed," with the pooled, taxed funds going to institution-wide
resources. The format for the budget summary will continue to use NUC
codes as abbreviations for the participating libraries. Fuller detail
will be provided in the Midwinter budget survey.
3) California Principles.
David Farrell (Berkeley) led a discussion on the "Principles for
Acquiring and Licensing Information in Digital Formats," developed by
the University of California libraries (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/
Info/principles.html). The UC libraries have been long-time purchasers
and licensers of information in electronic form, acquiring resources
locally and also making many available through MELVYL, the library
network system shared by the UC libraries, Stanford and USC. Staff from
the participating libraries felt they needed to develop a written
statement of their position, as opposed to the position which is
typically taken by vendors and publishers.
The principles were designed to serve as guidelines for selection and
deselection, to use in developing Requests for Proposals, and to assist
in determining the costs and benefits of information in electronic form,
as compared to print equivalents. Digital data are now reaching a
critical mass; the digital format is more than just an equivalent to
information in print form, but a new kind of publication not comparable
to print. Improved digital products are increasingly available,
marketed by vendors in an array of data sets. The UC libraries are
looking at all the databases on MELVYL and comparing them against the
principles and using them as a basis for negotiating contracts.
The principles are a mix of idealism and practicality. The principles do
not represent a bottom line of what is acceptable. Some of the
principles constitute goals useful in negotiating with vendors, which
might be compromised in certain instances. The question related to
permanent access to information and archival responsibility, for
example, may be among the more idealistic.
Ross Atkinson suggested that there may be an advantage to this approach,
saying that identifying a set of non-negotiable demands might be
construed by some as collusion, or restraint of trade. Others
disagreed. Anne Okerson (Yale) pointed out that this situation is much
different than serials pricing; with electronic information we are
licensing information from publishers, versus purchasing it from them
through serials subscriptions or in book form. Gay Dannelly expressed
concern over licensing having the effect of limiting our ability to
continue to offer free access to information. Some questioned how it
came about that publishers developed the ability to license information.
Atkinson suggested that this might be an agenda item for a future
meeting.
Tony Ferguson (Columbia) suggested that identifying a subset of the
major principles would be a useful exercise, and it was agreed to set up
a working group to address this for the Annual Meeting.
(Note: There was a suggestion to use the Higher Education Price Index
in general, or its specific application for library costs, rather than
the Consumer Price Index [question 2E].)
4. Collection Management Resuscitation
Ross Atkinson led a discussion on making more effective decisions on
collection management. How can we begin anew to improve and coordinate
decision making for offsite selection, weeding, preservation, or
full-text recon? He pointed out that we distinguish judiciously between
collection management and collection development, probably for good
reasons. Generally, we use the point of acquisition as a dividing line,
and define collection development as that which takes place up to that
point, and collection management as that which affects all processes
subsequent. Collection management and collection development are always
in competition for scarce resources. Collection development gets the
most money, with the biggest rewards going for increasing the
collection, not maintaining it. We have never managed to put together
solid collection management principles. We tried twice with an
RLG-sponsored group on cooperative weeding and storage, with limited
success.
For large research libraries, generally, we don't weed, we store.
Quantity is quality. As a result, we've developed the largest
collective paper archive in history. Cornell adds nearly 150,000
volumes per year alone -- 2.5 miles of shelving. (Atkinson doesn't see
this as continuing indefinitely for the foreseeable future; for one
thing, our purchasing power will not be increasing.)
The growth of paper collections is the biggest impediment in developing
our future. For the most part, we have done poorly in cooperative
efforts in collection development. (Largely because we can't spend
resources locally to meet a national need.) We might be tempted to
think that when there is more information online things will change for
the better. But in fact, the electronic environment will just
complicate matters. We will need someone to decide what we will
digitize and what won't want to digitize. And we'll be presented with
new preservation problems we can't even imagine now. Will collection
development survive the transition to an environment where electronic
information predominates? Will it be phased out? If it does survive,
we'll still be faced with new, big problems. Whether it does or it
doesn't, we will still need to put increasing efforts and resources
toward collection management.
Ultimately, collection development and collection management are not
separate; they are a yin and yang. If we do something to one it will
affect the other. We are facing a monumental dilemma if we don't do
something with collection management soon. We need to restore a
balance. Not doing so will be to the detriment of scholarship, and will
impede our ability to move to a digital environment.
David Farrell suggested that we need to get solid management information
for evaluating our collections -- something more than the number of
volumes in our collections, or data on highly used materials, but a
measure of the effectiveness of our collections.
Tony Ferguson suggested that in order for us to effectively address
collection management, we'd have to recognize it as a problem at each
institution. One factor that impedes this is that the various functions
of collection management -- weeding, offsite selection, preservation,
full-text recon -- are highly decentralized, performed by very different
groups. It's not perceived as a matter of needing to spend a certain
budget on weeding, for example. Whereas, with collection development,
problems are often considered in terms of budgets.
Richard Ring (Kansas) considered the distinction between collection
development and collection management as exaggerated. They are two
different processes, but they use the same principles. You use the same
principles in selecting an item for purchase as you do for preservation.
All major research collections have a small amount of materials that
are heavily used, and an enormous amount of material that is essentially
not used. But there is no collective mechanism available to store that
enormous amount. Issues of enormity notwithstanding, Susan Rabe pointed
out that part of CRL's mission is to serve as such a mechanism, a
centralized storage site for little-used materials, in addition to
developing collections in microfilm.
Atkinson mentioned that we're all building offsite storage facilities,
and there is no question that what they contain is duplicative.
Unfortunately, the cost of doing this is less than the cost of
coordinating this effort, but we might be reaching a threshold. A title
by title approach wouldn't work; it would be too labor-intensive.
Coordinated storage might work if the East Coast institutions were to
concentrate on the humanities, for example, with the West Coast taking a
different emphasis. Rich Ring doubted that this would be possible;
there would be no way for coordinated storage to be successful without
taking a title-by-title approach. Even if we were to go so far as to
record retention decisions in a national database, some questioned
whether this would change local behavior without a major coordinated
effort.
Tony Angiletta (Stanford) pointed out that in California, offsite
storage is coordinated among major research libraries, and a policy is
in place whereby if a title is already in regional storage, a library
will withdraw it from its collections rather than deposit it in storage.
Such regional cooperative efforts would be easier to implement than a
national storage program. Rich Ring brought up the fact that although
we're a lot further along than we were ten years ago because of various
recon projects, we still don't have a complete national online catalog.
There are huge amounts of titles without online records. (And as
Atkinson pointed out, creating online records for these materials
complicates matters by enhancing use.) We don't have any collective
data identifying low-use material. We have to solve these problems
before we can come up with a national solution.
Mark Sandler described the University of Michigan's experience of
building and quickly filling an offsite storage facility with 2 million
volumes. The provost asked staff to look into digital conversion as an
alternative, but after this was costed out, he said "build another
building." Maybe if we were to act collaboratively, costs could be
reduced and digital technology could be used successfully to address
collective storage problems. Ross Atkinson and Brian Schottlaender
(UCLA) questioned using the major criterion for offsite storage -- low
usage -- as the criterion for selecting materials to digitize. (Someone
else reminded the group of microfilm as anther technology to continue
considering.) Atkinson thought that a scenario involving digitizing
usually assumes outside funding, where he feels that we should consider
shifting funds from collection development to collection management, and
considering digital technology as part of the latter. Maybe we should
be willing to let large segments of our paper collections go in order to
make digital collections possible, to eventually discard materials equal
in number to what we add. Tony Feguson wondered if, rather than a
collection development problem, what was being discussed overall could
be characterized as problems of "cataloging stream/shelving
stream/preservation stream." Should we really consider using our budget
for buying new materials to solve these problems?
Still, the group felt that collection management issues needed further
examination. Atkinson suggested developing a statement of the problems
particularly with an eye toward establishing some statistical validity.
A working group will be set up to explore these issues further, and
discussion will continue in a future meeting.
(continued in separate message)
Received on Wed Jan 22 1997 - 18:01:07 EST