Center for Research Libraries Report
to Chief Collection Development Officers of Large Research Libraries
ALA Midwinter Meeting, 2002
1. Collections Assessment Task Force
Chaired by Ross Atkinson of Cornell University the Collection Assessment
Task Force was formed to determine the relative importance of the many
collections held by CRL, to assess their relative accessibility, and to
suggest strategies through which CRL can make those collections more usable
by scholars. The work of the Task Force was funded by grants from the
Andrew W. Mellon and Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. The Task Force
report was issued in mid-November and was published in the December
2001/January 2002 issue of FOCUS.
Some key conclusions and recommendations of the Task Force and the Center’s
responses:
· Foreign newspapers, microform sets, and foreign dissertations are
the most important and heavily used of CRL collections. The small
percentage of the foreign dissertations that are cataloged makes these of
less use to scholars.
The Task Force recommended that the Center catalog the foreign
dissertations collections, creating brief records with keywords and adding
the records to OCLC. The Center is focusing on developing the workflow
to make such a project feasible, cataloging the incoming stream of
dissertations and dissertations on special topics in the retrospective
collection (e.g. dissertations on Islam highlighted in CRLONLINE), and
seeking funding for a major support to catalog the retrospective collection.
The Center is preparing a list of all microform sets it owns along with
tools available to access those sets.
· Access to some uncataloged CRL collections could be improved by
making collection descriptions and lists available on the Web, in a format
effectively discoverable through Web search engines.
U.S. College Catalogs Holdings have been added to the CRL Web site, and a
collection level record has been created.
Foreign Bank Publications List has been added to CRL Web site, and
collection level records by country are being created.
In process: List of textbooks held by Center
· CRL should re-evaluate its collecting policies, to insure that its
holdings best fulfill its member needs. There is good evidence that member
needs have shifted significantly in the last decade and CRL acquisition
strategies need to reflect those new needs.
The Center is working with the Collections and Services Advisory Panel,
chaired by Edward Shreeves, to structure and prioritize reviews in the
areas recommended by the Task Force.
2. Strategic Planning
Over the November 4 weekend, the Center for Research Libraries Board of
Directors held a two-day strategic planning retreat. At the retreat the
Board began charting a clear course for the Center in meeting the
challenges posed by new and changing conditions in the world of research
and scholarship.
Among the retreat participants, strong consensus emerged around some major
new directions for CRL. Specifically, the Center will:
· Strengthen its partnership with the research community by providing
better means of access to core CRL collections, and by making CRL a more
responsive and transparent organization.
· Aggressively support the development and preservation of research
collections, both print and digital, on a collaborative basis, favoring a
coordinating and brokering role for CRL, over that of a stand-alone library.
· Better engage the academic community in CRL collecting decisions,
improving the alignment of CRL and member library collection development
with user needs and interests.
CRL Board members and staff are working on developing a strategic plan,
complete with actions and initiatives that support this new agenda. The
plan will be submitted for Board approval in March, and presented at the
CRL Council meeting on April 19.
3. Area Studies Cataloging and Imaging Projects
CRL has served as the "home base" for a number of geographical area studies
projects, providing support and the assurance of continuity for resources
developed cooperatively by universities and libraries. Having a common
base for these projects creates synergies and economies of scale that will
promote the long-term stability of project-based resources.
The Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP) acquired some important
new microform sets this year, including the Paris Evangelical Missionary
Society Archives and African newspapers from Northwestern University filmed
as part of their Committee on Institutional Cooperation-NEH preservation
grant. CAMP has often reported on its cooperation with Title VI
institutions in the joint project to film colonial records at the National
Archives of Senegal. This project will continue in a second phase of
cooperative work, to preserve records of the "Affaires politiques et
administratives du Senegal, Serie D." These materials will be filmed as
part of a larger effort for which CAMP will seek outside support for
continued preservation in archives throughout Africa.
The Latin American Microform Project (LAMP) completed preservation filming
of mining records from Tupiza, Bolivia, and court documents from Brazil's
Military Supreme Court documenting human rights violations by the military
government in Brazil from 1964-1979. LAMP also initiated some large-scale
projects in Argentina to film significant portions of The Standard, the
most important English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires, and public
opinion polls from the Archivo Miguens. Under LAMP’s long-standing
cooperation with the Library of Congress to film ministerial reports from
Latin America, these memorias are being cataloged by CRL staff according to
CONSER standards.
The Middle East Microform Project (MEMP) continues its own long
collaboration with the Library of Congress to film important Arabic
pamphlets and serials from LC's collection. MEMP is also cooperatively
cataloging its backlog of titles to enable access to many useful serials
and monographs from Algeria, Lebanon, and Sudan. The group is currently
examining strategic directions and collection priorities for the future to
provide better services for its members.
The South Asia Microform Project (SAMP) successfully carried out its first
field project using its portable camera to film Bengali manuscripts
collected by the eminent scholar Sukumar Sen. The result has been to
preserve more than 900 critical manuscripts that are considered to be the
core of the vernacular Bengali literary canon. SAMP and DSAL are also
collaborating with institutions on the subcontinent to acquire, film, and
digitize vernacular newspapers from India, Pakistan, and Nepal.
The Southeast Asia Microform Project (SEAM) continues to film a large
collection of Southeast Asia newspapers held at Cornell University. SEAM
has also received a large collection of Javanese language material from
Surakarta, Central Java, to round out its mammoth collection of historic
manuscripts from Indonesia. Other important initiatives include
cooperation with the Yale University and the Documentation Center of
Cambodia to film the Santebal Archives of secret files of the Khmer
Rouge. This collaboration will also preserve biographies, dossiers, and
files relating to genocide in Cambodia in the 1970's.
The nascent Slavic and East European Microform Project (SEEMP) collection
continues to grow, as projects developed since 1996 come to
fruition. Current material includes recent newspapers from Bosnia,
Croatia, and Yugoslavia, and various regions of Russia. New items
available to SEEMP and CRL members include a collection of extremist
newspapers that document the changing nature of Russian politics and
opinion from 1990-1998, with additional titles and years planned. Other
new receipts include 300+ rare monographs in the Yakut, Kumyk, and Chuvash
languages of the former Soviet Union, which will be fully cataloged in
CRL's OPAC. A complete list of projects is available on the SEEMP Web site.
In addition to their regular operations, many AMP projects continue to
support and facilitate special grant projects. Among these are:
CRL / LAMP Brazilian Government Document Digitization Project -
http://wwwcrl.uchicago.edu/info/brazil/
This landmark project has finally reached its terminus, as all 2,800
reports in the collection have been indexed and made available over the
Web, resulting in more than 675,000 page images. The project has also
dramatically increased the speed of access by upgrading to 73GB hard drives
rather than the now outmoded jukebox technology. A final report will be
issued on CRL's Web site in January.
Cooperative African Newspapers Project: African Newspapers Union List -
http://wwwcrl.uchicago.edu/info/camp/afrinul.htm
This project, managed by CAMP and the Africana Librarians Council and
sponsored by the AAU/ARL Global Resources Project, seeks to provide
enhanced bibliographic information on African newspapers held in the U.S.
and abroad. A searchable union list database for the African Newspapers
Union List (AFRINUL) has been created, and the project is currently
developing an on-line administrative tool to input additional records.
The SEAM/Luce Microfilming and Preservation Project in Vietnam -
http://wwwcrl.uchicago.edu/info/seam/seamviet.htm
Sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Harvard Yenching Institute,
SEAM/Vietnam has been working with the National Library in Hanoi to
preserve important material (in French and Vietnamese) from dynastic and
colonial periods of Vietnam. To date, SEAM has received over 200 reels of
film, representing a number of early and publications journals not held
elsewhere in the world.
The Center for Research Libraries is a partner in several of the ARL Global
Resources Projects: the Digital South Asia Library, the Cooperative
African Newspapers Project, the Japan Journal Access Project, and the Latin
Americanist Research Resources Project.
The NEH-funded International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON) is a program,
based at CRL, to preserve foreign language newspapers by microfilming and
providing comprehensive Web-accessible information on holdings. The
current two-year initial phase of ICON is intended to lay the groundwork
for coordinated access to and preservation of non-U.S. newspapers.
This year the prototype database for the ICON holdings and preservation
information was developed and populated with holdings information by ICON
partners including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the
University of Washington. The ICON Web site has been mounted and now
contains information about the project and links to information on
newspaper preservation and databases. Plans call for an ICON Web site,
which will have a link to the ICON database, to be added to CRL’s Web site.
In addition, microfilming of the third title, Kaiser-I-Hind, was completed
and the fourth title, Shanghai Times was begun. Founded in 1882 in Bombay,
India, Kaiser-I-Hind was the voice of the fledgling Indian National
Congress and the Parsi community in the 19th and 20th
century. Arrangements are now being made to film ten additional titles,
and CRL has submitted a grant proposal for the next phase of the project to
the National Endowment for the Humanities.
4. Cataloging
During the past fiscal year the Center cataloged over 9,600 monographs and
serials into OCLC and its online catalog. Of these, 2,688 were new
bibliographic records (i.e., original cataloging). Some of the materials
cataloged were: post-World War II European newspapers (100+titles),
Memoria from the Dominican Republic microfilm set, Indian serial titles
(137) from the Foreign Documents collection, and the backlog of Japanese
language materials. This reflects the Center's emphasis on adding unique
or rarely held materials to the national database.
CRL is exploring ways to build subject- or discipline-based pathways into
its collections in general, which will make them more accessible to
scholars and other researchers. In this spirit, the Center recently
disseminated via its CRL-Online mailing list, an e-letter on primary
sources on Afghanistan.
The Center recently appointed Amy Wood as the Head of Technical
Services. Amy will be responsible for coordinating and managing the
cataloging operations at the Center.
5. Historians' Conference
CRL and the University of Chicago's College of Arts and Sciences, with
support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will convene a two-day
invitational conference March 8-9, 2002. The conference will bring together
at the Center 30 historians from North American colleges and universities
to explore ways to increase awareness and promote use of the Center's
holdings among historians.
6. Aberdeen Woods Conference
The Center is sponsoring the second triennial conference on the cooperative
development of scholarly collections and resources on November 8-10,
2002. The conference will be held at Aberdeen Woods Conference Center in
Atlanta, Georgia. The 2002 Conference Planning Group is co-chaired by
Bernard Reilly, President of the Center, and Beverly Lynch, former Interim
President of the Center; other members of the planning group are Gay
Dannelly (Notre Dame), Chris Filstrup (SUNY-Stony Brook), Dan Hazen
(Harvard), Joyce Ogburn (University of Washington), Ed Shreeves (University
of Iowa), James Green, CFO and Vice President of Membership and External
Affairs, CRL. Ross Atkinson (Cornell) and Dan Hazen will present invited
papers, and the four working groups formed at the last conference will
report on their work. A call for contributed papers, focusing on three
broad topics - best practices in cooperative collection development and
management, measuring results and setting the terms for cooperative
programs, and the development of digital resources - has recently been
issued and can be viewed
at http://wwwcrl.uchicago.edu/info/awcc2002/02callpapers.htm
7. Acquisitions
Members will receive the list of purchase proposals to be voted on in early
February.
8. JSTOR Archive
In 2000 the Center announced that it would create an archive of the print
journals available through
JSTOR. As of January 7, 2002, the Center’s archive consists of over 3300
bibliographic volumes from 98 titles. Twenty-five titles are
complete. The Center is working with JSTOR to identify additional
possible contributors to the archive.
9. Foreign Official Gazettes Project
The Center, with the help of its Foreign Official Gazettes Task Force, has
continued a long-term project to build a retrospective collection of
Foreign Official Gazettes. The collection, to be comprised of
all national level gazettes for all countries with publication dates from
inception through 1995, builds upon the already substantial holdings of CRL.
Holdings within the Center's collection and holdings within the consortium
are currently being analyzed. Several products from this analysis have
recently been completed; these include lists of
· titles for which holdings are complete on microfilm at CRL
· titles/dates which exist only in hard copy at CRL and in the
consortium and therefore need to be preserved on microfilm; and
· titles/dates from Africa which exist only in hard copy.
Work is underway on two lists: titles/dates which are not held by CRL and
therefore need to be acquired, and titles/dates which exist on microfilm,
but are not held by CRL.
The Task Force plans to use the lists above to provide the information
necessary to generate proposals for pursuance of microfilming and selected
acquisition projects. It has been proposed that potential projects be
formed by specific area of the world. Africa has been proposed as the first
area of the world for a project and the goal of that project would be the
completion of a collection of record at CRL for gazettes from Africa
through 1995.
Compiled by Melissa Trevvett, January 14, 2002, with contributions from
Bernard F. Reilly, James Simon, John Dorr, Patricia Finney, Carol Stukey,
and James Green.
.
Received on Thu Jan 31 2002 - 10:39:07 EST