ERC ST 060421Electronic Resources Committee George Fox University Portland Center Members attending:
Guests:
10:00 – 11:00 Business Meeting Welcome (John Helmer, Tim Jewell) Jewell thanked Greg Doyle for his work on behalf of the ERC. Introductions: current and pending members of the steering team; new members of the ERC; members of the joint ERC-CDC fall meeting planning team. ICOLC Report (Greg Doyle, John Helmer, Tim Jewell) 1. E-archiving: presentation from Tom Sanville at ICOLC pointed to the need for a strategy for preserving e-journal content as well as a variety of other "electronica": libraries need to think broadly and consider how all the pieces fit together. LOCKSS software has been installed and used by many libraries for archiving e-journals, and some have begun experimenting with using it to archive government documents and other resources. Portico is a new and promising (hosted) service that has been developed by an organization named Ithaka that was founded by Kevin Guthrie and others involved in JSTOR. 2. E-journal economics & Open Access movement. Interesting pro/con debate. 3. Usage data. Presentations on SUSHI, MPS’ Scholarly Stats, and Onelog. 4. E-books: Presentation on MyiLibrary, which is affiliated with COUTTS (book vendor); “big deals” involving ABC-CLIO and Oxford University Press, U. Toronto. 5. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy still seeking funding. 6. Nature – why so expensive? They claim a 90-95% rejection rate, which results in an expensive screening process, and advertising revenue is dropping. Pricing is based on size/FTE, number of existing subscriptions, and the type of library. Alliance experience has found them to be unfriendly to new consortia. Council Retreat Summary, April 2006 (John Helmer) Council identified the following priorities, in order: 1. RLSC: a shared facility with high-density storage and space for instruction, digitization, and preservation. Will be built on the Linfield campus in McMinnville. University of Oregon will be the fiscal agent. Progress has been made on fundraising and legal details. 2. Cooperative collection development: statistical analysis, data-mining Summit; continuing work of other Alliance committees 3. Moving services to the network level: identifying what new and existing services could be done collaboratively; what is the next evolutionary step after Summit? A single shared ILS? More catalog sharing? 4. Infrastructure for digital initiatives: scanning and digitizing collections; control over organizing information that is “born digital.” Need to discuss what the Alliance might do together and/or with other groups. A joint taskforce with NWACC is already in place, and there has been discussion with Northwest Digital Archives, a grant-funded project creating a union catalog of finding aids. 5. Information literacy: how can we embed IL into the curriculum? 6. Next-generation search interface for Summit: not necessarily using III. Summit Catalog committee has begun work on this project. Alliance E-Resources in Review, 2004-2005 (Greg Doyle) http://www.orbiscascade.org/licensing/ER Review 2006.ppt Major points: 10 new products purchased with an estimated savings of $114,000. 88 subscriptions valued at $2.5 million. Successful agreement with Elsevier for ScienceDirect. Non-member program inititated with 18 participants. University of Hawaii is the largest participant in the non-member program. Greg and the ERC expressed mutual appreciation of the deadline reminder emails as a useful part of the renewal and subscription process. This section of minutes prepared by: [Heather Whipple, 1. American Chemical Society ACS is coming out with a new pricing model for 2007. They are moving to a Carnegie Classification system with the addition of usage statistics (similar to the Project Muse model). Greg distributed a handout: “ACS Web savings”. Decision: Concerns about current model can wait until we see what the new model will be. 2. Cambridge journals package Greg sent email on April 18, outlining the Cambridge offer. One question raised at the meeting was: “Will we be able to pay our agent of choice for our subscriptions, and pay Cambridge the surcharge?” Decision: Greg will inquire about that question. There are at least 8 libraries still interested, so he will consider this offer as still active. 3. Wiley journals package 50% of subscribers spend is needed to make this deal happen. Access will be for the titles subscribed to by all participating libraries. Greg discussed the meeting held at OHSU on Feb. 13 with the Wiley VP for Sales. Librarians expressed concern about the cancellation policy. Wiley has changed the cancellation clause: pooling will be allowed, specifically 5 libraries x 1.5% cancellation = 7.5%. And the E-access fee was lowered to 3%, from 5%.
To-Do: Greg needs to know by May 12th who is still interested. (PSU probably won’t participate because of budget cuts). At that point, we can put together a title list of titles that the interested libraries subscribe to, that would be shared among all subscribers. 4. Blackwell Synergy Questions were raised about the “early adopter” fee, whether subscribers could choose the Humanities & Social Sciences collection, or the Science, Technology & Medicine collection, or whether they must get both. Tim commented he doesn’t think there would be much reason for GWLA schools to participate in this offer, instead of the current GWLA deal. Diane said it’s not really a good deal for libraries that already get a lot of the Blackwell titles. There wouldn’t be much potential for subscribers unless the 4 GWLA libraries participate. To-Do: Greg will report to Blackwell that they will need to make a very different offer if they want to go forward with an Alliance deal. 5. New vendor products Greg handed out a list of “Vendor Products not introduced on List”. To-Do: Any library interested in a trial or quote of one or more of these products needs to let Greg know by May 12, or he will drop them from his list of possible new products. This section of Minutes prepared by: Joanna Haney,
As a group, we have a lot of questions about e-books. There’s interest, but most libraries have only experimented. Most of this session was discussion about various issues we have with e-books. We also talked a little about directions we might take as a consortium.
1. Selecting: How do you decide which books should be purchased online and which should be in print? Do you buy things that you didn't think were worth getting in print? OHSU tries to buy the e-version of anything that gets checked out more than 10 times in print.
Reference, computer science, business, and distance education seem like areas where e-books might be useful. However, how you approach reference changes with ebooks. Does this impact how you make your decisions?
We also have to figure out when and how to weed our e-books.
2. Budget and purchasing issues: Once you decide to purchase an individual e-book, how do you go about purchasing it? How do you find out whether it’s available? OHSU looks in OCLC. That information is also available in Books in Print.
What should the process look like? Which line item do e-books get assigned to? Do you use your book budget? Electronic resources? Reference? Serials? Subscriptions? This is being handled differently in different libraries.
There are questions about vendors. Are our libraries just using NetLibrary or are some experimenting with other vendors (and their interfaces)? How do we evaluate those interfaces? What are the problems of having too many different interfaces? Are the smaller vendors reliable?
Some reference e-book purchases are made for the “life of the edition,” but this can have unclear meanings in the online environment.
Can you purchase PDFs? And then are their issues about providing broad access to these?
3. Pricing Models Some pricing models are less viable than others. Some vendors use a subscription model but we question whether paying a large amount annually for something that’s not updating content is appropriate.
Some librarians like the Safari model, although it’s high maintenance. Safari doesn’t offer consortial pricing. Many of us do, however, prefer the ability to handpick the books for our collection rather than purchasing a block. The recent reference book deal with Oxford is a good example.
4. Licensing Licensing is a big barrier. Maybe we can get a standard license to share among Orbis Cascade libraries for particular vendors (like NetLibrary).
5. Access It’s important to get the e-books into the catalog, or students won’t realize they’re available. But getting them into the catalog takes time and so it’s also a barrier. In addition, standards should be established for how e-books are handled in the catalog—perhaps the Cataloging Committee could address this. For instance, there is a matching problem in Summit, especially when libraries get their records from somewhere other than OCLC.
Can students have off-campus access? And if so, how straightforward is it? In NetLibrary they have to set up an account which is not straightforward at all. The ebrary reader is not easy to download off-campus.
The access issue is particularly confusing to students who are looking at records for e-books held at other libraries in the Summit catalog. They don’t understand why they can’t access them. Is there a remedy to this problem?
Are some students going straight to Summit (and bypassing their local library catalog)? There needs to be a way to easily see in Summit what you can have access to.
If we purchase e-books as a consortium, do we need to purchase multiple copies to ensure access? What if a big school wants to put the e-book on reserve?
6. Other Problems: Sometimes there are quality problems with e-books. They also can be slower to use and the printing can be very inconvenient. In addition, some students find the checkout process burdensome.
7. What could we do as a consortium? ebrary has different subscription models for different collections. The main academic collection is $2.48/FTE which won’t work for most of us. There may be more flexibility with some of the smaller collections. Individual titles with perpetual and multiple access are priced at retail plus 50%.
24/7 wants too much money so we won’t be able to pursue a deal with them.
There was some interest in a smaller collection of books that had searchable full-text, but it would have to be affordable. E-Resources Usage Statistics, SUSHI, and Market Developments (Tim Jewell) Attempts to improve the quality of usage statistics continues with COUNTER Code of Practice Release 2 in April 2005 which will include an audit of the vendor’s compliance by June 2007. SUSHI (Standardizing Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) goes one step further to solve the problem of harvesting and managing usage data from a number of providers http://www.niso.org/committees/SUSHI/SUSHI_comm.html. Look for new products and services as this new standard evolves (Scholarly Stats, ISI: Journal Use Reports; Open Source: JUNO). Matching of the cost of the ejournal with the correct time period of use data could be problematic. For the details, see the PowerPoint posted on the Alliance-cer site (password protected) for the content of this talk. Electronic Resources Summary Report 2005 (Laurel Kristick) Compiled from database and ejournal usage statistics, WAM (Web Access Management software from Innovative) authentications and Serials Solution click-through statistics, a 16 page report on Oregon State University’s usage of electronic resources is summarized for 2005. A copy of the report can be downloaded from their D-Space archives at http://hdl.handle.net/1957/1613 . Ejournal use statistics (Diane Carroll) http://www.orbiscascade.org/licensing/AllianceUseStats.ppt
Ejournal article download use data was merged with data on ILL borrowed, number of OHSU authored and cited papers to create a serials decision database. Titles were categorized into high, medium and low use to better manages titles to be added or canceled. WSU serials spreadsheet (Lynn Chmelir) WSU in the process of automated a serial spreadsheet and merged information downloaded from Innovative, ejournal usage data, impact factors from ISI Journal Citation Reports and other sources. Data matches on ISSN in a manner that is less time consuming to maintain. Cost per use is calculated. WSU is part of the beta-ERM testing of SUSHI and was one of the first to upload EUCLID ejournal use data into ERM checkin records. 3:15 – 3:45 Open Discussion
This section minutes prepared by Carrie Fry
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