ERC ST 051003

Electronic Resources Steering Team Teleconference—Minutes

October 3, 2005

Members attending:

Present: Carroll, Diane (OHSU), Doyle, Greg (OCA), Fry, Carrie (SPU),

Haney, Joanna (LC), Hinken, Susan (UP), Jewell, Tim (UW),

Miller-Francisco, Emily (SOU), Whipple, Heather (Reed)

Absent: none

Pre-meeting Discussion:

Minutes/notes from May OCA-ER meeting are not available. Tim has

requested notes from Diane, John, Greg & Barbara to reconstruct notes.

Tim will be trying to remember the future meeting topic requests.

Greg mentioned that password if a password protected area was created on

the OCA website that John recommended should be a well formed plan not

just set up for one group, but no further work has occurred on this

project. This means that some items from May meeting cannot currently

be posted

Carrie will take minutes for today's meeting, and then secretary duties

will rotate alphabetically to other members of committee.

1. Introductions of new members:

Carrie Fry - SPU subscribes to about 60 databases receiving about 20 of

them from OCA. Current gap in holdings is in history databases. Carrie

is the Systems/Electronic Services Librarian, and monitors the ER

budget, but new databases are selected by subject librarians and require

a transfer from Monograph to ER budget.

Joanna Haney - Lewis and Clark subscribes to about 100 databases and

have pretty good coverage, would like to see databases in new subject

specific areas for example: drama film and dance. Electronic resources

coordinator, investigate set up and negotiate licenses; gradually

switching over to ERM.

2. ABC-CLIO:

ABC-CLIO is trying to standardize their pricing to use primarily FTE.

When Greg brought to their attention that the prices were too high they

thought that Greg was complaining about the new structure and offered

the options of staying with the "Legacy Based Pricing" which is a bit

cheaper but seems to miss the point - that their prices are just too

high in general.

We are left with two choices. Do we want to continue historic pricing

or come to some new pricing structure? Also, what will happen if there

is drop out? - ABC-CLEO claims they will deal with it case by case,

although great shrinkage will probably raise prices for everyone.

Tim mentioned that when UW campuses are presented with vendor, they

generally accept the vendor distribution as it is more time consuming to

maintain other systems over time.

Others pointed out that staying with the vendor price can often negate

our first principle which no institution should pay more than list

price.

As an example of someone whose pricing would increase Emily said that

her institution could not pay so much more - even last year's price was

too high. So it is quite possible that some institutions will need to

drop out of this deal.

It was recommend that we take the legacy based pricing and distribute it

as we wish.

Greg will put current FTE and Budget information into spreadsheet so

that everyone can test some pricing structures. - return any ideas to

Greg by October 14th.

Susan will request an individual quote for PU from ABC-CLEO.

Carrie asked about the possibility of a pricing phase in if needed to

keep all participants in though a shift in pricing systems. 

For distributions that include UW an FTE and Materials Budget cap will

need to be developed to keep pricing fair for them as they are so much

larger than all other institutions.

Current pricing systems:

1) Some percentage of Equal & FTE & Budget

2) big/small

3) equal and FTE

In general we hope ABC-CLEOs pricing structure can be modified somewhat

by encouraging other vendors to develop history databases and checking

out other DB when ever possible.

3. Elsevier and Science Direct:

1) Thanks to Diane for all of the work that she has done with the

spreadsheets. This summer at one point there was a proposal and

understanding - but then there were rep changeovers, and as more

questions arose it was harder to get answers. The reps seemed to be

changing decisions. About a week ago there was a conference call w/

Reps and OCA members. The final decision was to honor all previous

agreements. Elsevier is worried about all of the cancellations - have

added a clause if more than 3% of subscriptions canceled you could loose

access to UTL. One title could be more than 3% for some libraries so

we are hoping to strike this clause. Hopefully have something finalized

over this week

2) UW & WSU were also reliant on some of Barbra Kaplan's promises

so when she left Elsevier, it was worrisome. 6 months ago told had

concerns about the no cancel clause. Had to cancel many titles to keep

system going. What the final agreement was is a 5 year agreement with a

5% annual increase that allowed them to cancel the title, but will have

to pay a content fee for the canceled titles. Can cancel every year but

content fee will become permanent and increase as titles are canceled.

4. Agenda Setting

Unfortunately this meeting time will not work for Carrie, so Tim will go

back to the drawing board to develop a new time for Monthly conference

calls. Which he would like to set for year (Day and Time). Also plan

to do better at getting agenda's out earlier - including soliciting

information

Possible future topics: Better communication with OCA-ER as a whole and

the possibility of having a joint meeting with the CDMC next May.

Meeting adjourned at 2:34pm

Submitted, Carrie Fry