erc st 080521

ERC Steering Team Meeting Minutes

Teleconference 1:00– 2:00 p.m.

May 21, 2008

Attending: Lee Keene, Diane Grover, Sue Anderson, Teresa Hazen, Joanna Haney, Greg Doyle

Absent: Donna Packer, Laurel Kristick

I. ERC annual meeting (April 25):

Review of meeting -- the consensus is that it was a successful meeting, with good presentations, discussion and lots of useful information. We didn’t ask members to fill out an evaluation; should we do that next year?

Suggestions for next year:

We had planned to hand out 3x5 cards in the morning to all attendees, so they could jot down questions, comments, ideas to share during the last half hour of the meeting. We forgot to do that, but still think it’s a good idea for next year.

Lee mentioned that the name cards we used to have on the table in front of each member are much easier to read than name tags. Maybe we could have both?

Lee echoed a concern Greg has voiced in the past, about the large number of EBSCO databases Alliance libraries subscribe to. Is this something we should be doing something about? Is it a worrisome trend? Some databases that used to be available elsewhere are now only on the EBSCO platform (CINAHL, America: History & Life, Historical Abstracts). Is it really easier for patrons to only have to learn how to search on one or two platforms? This might be a topic for next year’s meeting.

Greg reminded us that vendors always want to know if they can come to our annual meeting.

II. Greg will have news about new steering team members at the next meeting. They haven’t yet been contacted.

III. Discussion of E-book deals

We had a wide-ranging discussion of E-book deals, mostly having to do with an updated offer from Oxford for its subject collections. They gave Greg a new proposal which would allow access by all Alliance member libraries. The proposal included an option for subscription and one for purchase. We discussed whether and how a purchase might work, and whether the subscription model is preferable to most libraries. Greg will go back to the Oxford reps. and ask for more information.

Someone asked whether we should have a joint meeting with the CDMC on this topic. Greg noted that they are very focused on the YBP project right now and would probably not be able to give any attention to this in the near future.

There is a concern about the impact on Summit of individual purchase or subscription of e-book collections. Also, with the subscription model, we don’t own the titles.

Diane noted that some vendors do allow ILL rights for e-book chapters; Springer has a very user-friendly license. She also mentioned the cover story in the current (May, 2008) issue of American Libraries (“The Elusive E-book” by Stephen Sottong).

The next meeting is scheduled for Wed., June 18^th at 1pm.

Minutes submitted by Joanna Haney