ALCTS CMDS Chief Collection Development Officers
Summary of Meeting
June 16, 2001
1. Welcome and Introductions
The meeting was called to order by chair Karen Schmidt. The usual
introductions took place.
2. Minutes and Other Administrative Tasks
Our group is not required to prepare formal minutes of each
meeting. There were no corrections to the summary of the previous
meeting. Karen commented that her efforts to elicit e-mail summaries of
local library activities and initiatives prior to the meeting, like those
that are prepared in advance by the Technical Services Discussion Group,
did not succeed. Only a few institutional representatives provided the
updates.
3. Report from the Nominating Committee
Joyce Ogburn and Cindy Shelton reported that Caroline Early of the
National Agricultural Library will be the next chair/chair-elect.
4. Reports from Allied Organizations
ARL Report (Deborah Jakubs)
Jakubs had distributed the report prior to the meeting and asked if there
were any questions. She mentioned the ARL E-metrics project and referred
requests for more information to Julia Blixrud (julia_at_arl.org). She also
called attention to the fact that Special Collections in ARL Libraries has
been published and will be sent to each ARL institution, as well as being
available for purchase.
CRL Report (Melissa Trevvett)
Melissa Trevvett introduced herself as the new Vice-President and Director
of Programs and Services at the Center for Research Libraries. She noted
that the search for a new President was underway and a report was expected
by September. Melissa also called attention to Ross Atkinson's role as
chair of the Collections Assessment Task Force at CRL, a group charged with
determining the value of the collections and making recommendations for
processing (e.g., the foreign dissertations). She mentioned the JSTOR
archive that will be housed at CRL, and indicated that CRL hopes to have
more direct outreach to faculty. There will be a conference for historians
at CRL in Fall 2001 on how to utilize the Center's resources in historical
research. Other topics she discussed included: the International Coalition
on Newspapers (ICON); data on whether institutions are loading CRL records
into their OPACs; purchase proposals; foreign dissertations (a top
priority); the follow-up to the Aberdeen Woods conference on cooperative
collection development. Regarding the last topic, a set of working groups
are developing an agenda for a successor conference planned for November
2002. She indicated that she would do an online update on the activities
of those groups and send it to the CCDO list.
LC Report
No one was present from LC and no report was made.
5. Archiving of Electronic Information
Jeff Horrell and Dale Flecker described the Mellon-funded project underway
at Harvard. In December 2000, Harvard University Library received a
one-year planning grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation to create a plan
for archiving electronic journals. During this planning year, both the
Steering Committee and the Technical Team of the Harvard E-Journal
Archiving Project have made significant progress in refining our broad
understanding of the research topic and exploring the detailed implications
of this understanding. Harvard has selected and begun to discuss the
business and technical models with three publishers as our partners in this
project. These publishers are: Blackwell, University of Chicago Press, and
Wiley. The goal of this one-year planning grant is to produce a grant
proposal for a three or four year grant to build a viable electronic
journal archive.
Among the issues being examined by the Steering Committee and the
publishing partners are: which objects within the ejournal will be
archived; who will have access to this archive, under what conditions and
when; how to analyze the costs of development, maintenance, administration,
and preservation of materials within the archive; how to finance this
archive in order to make it sustainable; and what the governance of this
archive should be. The Technical Team is basing its work on the OAIS
Reference Model and is focusing on how objects will be ingested,
transformed to a standard, stored, and migrated to more current formats. A
great deal of effort is concentrated on defining standards, or best
practices for the Submission Information Package and for an article
archival article DTD.
6. The Artifact
Abby Smith of the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR)
reported on a project that brought together a group of scholars and
librarians to look at the role of the artifact in the new digital
environment. The fifteen members of the group began their work in October
1999 and in February 2001 put on the web a draft of their final report,
entitled The Evidence in Hand: The Report of the Task Force on the Role of
the Artifact in Library Collections <see
http://www.clir.org/activities/details/artifact-docs.html>. Abby's
presentation stimulated much discussion.
7. Cooperative Collection Management Initiatives in the UK
Geoff Smith, Director of the Co-operation and Partnership Programme of the
British Library, spoke about projects that provide access to subject
collections. Geoff's presentation highlighted some major initiatives in
which UK libraries and the British Library are working more closely
together, particularly through the British Library/Higher Education (BL/HE)
Task Force. Work of that group has led to the formation of the Research
Libraries Strategy Group (a working title at the time of the presentation),
combining librarians and members of the academic community. The group has
an ambitious agenda, including the endorsement of the concept of a
distributed national collection (DNC). For more information on this
initiative, contact Geoff Smith geoff.smith_at_bl.uk.
8. North American Title Count
Fifty-three libraries signed on to the project this time around, including
several Canadian libraries. All those who participate will receive a CD
containing the data. The group discussed the utility of the NATC. Several
people reported that they use it to check trends, to compare their
institutions with their "peers," as determined by academic departments
9. Roundtable on Current Issues
Among the topics discussed: the follow-up to the annual budget survey
formerly conducted by Bob Sewell (Michael Stoller and John Ingram
had agreed to work with Bob to take the next steps); new collections money
available at some institutions (Texas A&M, Duke, Stanford); problems
caused by state legislatures passing budgets late (including serials
cancellation projects undertaken as a result of uncertainty); OCLC
collection analysis service (ex-Amigos).
Received on Thu Jan 31 2002 - 10:35:55 EST