University of California Libraries

U.S. and British History/Women's Studies Consortia

Room 303, Doe Library

University of California, Berkeley

December 12, 2005

10:00 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Present: Sherri Barnes, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ellen Broidy, Patrick Dawson, Sam Dunlap, Daniel Goldstein, Sylvia Hu, Phoebe Janes, Elliot Kanter, Diana King, Sheila O’Hare (Chair), Beth Sibley. Guests: Bernie Hurley (CDC), Camille Wanat (JSC)

1. Administrative Matters and Announcements:

Minutes for June 6-7, 2005 were approved with corrections, and the files would be sent to Elliot for posting on the website.

Sheila announced that she would be leaving UC in January and there was discussion of who would assume her responsibilities that touch on the Consortium.

· Dan will take over as Acting Chair through June and Diana will take over as Chair for 2006-2007.

· Diana will take charge of the Consortium archives

· Santa Cruz will need to determine who will serve as representative for the Consortium's subject areas

· CDL will be informed of the need to appoint a new Resource Liaison for Digital Evans

Diana has taken responsibility for the California Feminist Presses Project and will contact the group as she explores what needs to be done next. An important issue at this time is how titles received from the project will be cataloged in the future to reflect acquisition via the Project, as memories fade. Diana will survey what has been done in the past and report on suggested standard language for the note.

Place, date of next meeting: UC San Diego, June 5-6.

2. Nation Digital (Ellen): [added to the agenda]

The database, currently hosted by The Nation, is moving to Ebsco, with an offer of perpetual access, with quotes and discounts varying by campus. Is there interest in a Tier 2? UCLA currently has a 10-year license (paid through 2012); UCB, UCI and UCSD have subscriptions. Conclusion: not enough interest to pay that much for perpetual access to a single title, 40 percent of which is in public domain. Update: UCI decided to go ahead and license for perpetual access.

3. CDC/JSC Reports:

JSC: Camille Wanat summarized the role of JSC, which is advisory to the CDL director of shared content (the newly appointed Ivy Anderson). JSC membership, in addition to the director of shared content, is based on discipline areas: Lorelei Tanji (Arts & Humanities), Rhonda Neugebauer (Area Studies), Lucia Snowhill (Social Sciences) and Camille Wanat (Sciences). Their meetings are monthly conference calls, and minutes are distributed. Camille then touched on some items that might be of interest to our group:

CDL is meeting with Taylor & Francis in January, the last major publisher with which systemwide negotiations has not worked. T&F is apparently worried about a reduction in the impact factors being given to their journals and is wondering if that might have a relationship to the heightened subscription costs.
Additional journals moving into the Cambridge contract were approved by JSC.
JSC recommended that CDL make a 3-year contribution to the endowment for the open access Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: CDL paying for half, the campuses contributing the rest. This is now being considered by the campuses. Q from Sam: why didn't this go through the Religion/Philosophy Consortium, which is the appropriate route for recommending resources?
Nineteenth Century Parliamentary Papers: This is a one-time purchase and these remain on the table until the end of the fiscal year. There is some concern on JSC about paying commercial producers for public domain content. If the Consortium has additional justifications for this purchase, or have requests for it from faculty, that should definitely be communicated to Lorelei.
Project Muse: The Standard Collection has been renewed, but the "Premium" collection, which will include many more journals, is being considered. Additional (ballpark) cost would be $4,000 - 6,500 per campus. Wendy and Terry Vrable are checking the pricing.
GLBT Life: Q from Beth: Why was availability delayed so long, especially after the pressure to decide quickly last summer? A: It was a backup in the licensing queue. The time required for licensing is highly variable and unpredictable, depending on the publisher.
Times of London: Q from Dan: Negotiations had been suspended because of barriers to perpetual access for 20th century portions. As a group we had urged the importance of the historical (18th & 19th century) portions, for which perpetual access would be available. Why has this disappeared from consideration? A: Camille wasn't aware of this.
Priorities for shared cataloging: Q from Sam: Who sets these priorities?

CDC: Bernie Hurley reported on some major areas of interest/concern

Scholarly Communication/Licensing.

The "summit" held in mid-2005 charged CDC to come up with different scenarios for limiting the cost of licensing scholarly resources
approaches to valuing journal packages in terms of the actual value of their content
open access projects and their economic sustainability

Share Print Archives:

Journals High cost of processing archival print copies of current journals in existing agreements is beginning to exceed cost of acquiring them separately. CDC is beginning to question the principle/model/justification for shared print archiving in the first place. Which titles justify "insurance" in this way?
Retrospective archiving of JSTOR journals is moving forward

Shared Print Archives:

Monographs from Small Press Distribution (SPD) : Unanticipated logistical flaws in processing/acquisitions, including the risk of duplication of purchases at multiple libraries, have made it undesirable to proceed at this time.
Anglophone Canadian Literature: Processing, and avoidance of unintended duplication, is much simpler because of the common use of Gobi2 for ordering among all campuses except Davis.

OCLC Collections Analysis Tool: Each campus is looking into it but not sure of how useful it will be.
Title Swapping: Titles moving in and out of the Elsevier and Blackwell packages are currently under campus review and CDL will notify the publishers of our decisions by January 31, 2006.
Government Documents: A new charge for CDC

What is happening with U.S. documents, as the depository library system moves further into a digital environment
Similar attention will be needed for state and local documents, where the landscape is much more decentralized

Preservation: The UC Conservators asked to establish a Common Interest Group to meet their concerns but CDC decided "against it.
E-Dissertations: UCSD is the first to make Proquest Digital Dissertations the official archive for their dissertations. Other campuses may follow if this works well.
East Asia Digital Library: It has been functioning on its own until now. CDC is looking at models for co-investment to cover costs of acquisitions and technical support. Q from Ellen: Why set this precedent requiring coinvestment when shared cataloging and shared acquisitions have absorbed in the past. A: There is a growing call for coinvestment to fund new initiatives of all kinds. Otherwise, we will be limited in what can be afforded.
Q from Dan: Talk more about shared print collections and perceived flaws, especially for prospective monographs. A: We need to get through a project for a few years to evaluate how well it functions. How well will users react to having single copies of key print monograph materials hundreds of miles away

4. Liaison with Euro Bibs - status report (Sam)

Sam chairs the UC European History, Languages and Literature Group and Dan is our liaison. A website has been established at Santa Barbara (URL forthcoming) with a roster of 45 "members" and links to subject pages. Two issues have been sent out for consideration by email: a trial of two databases from KG Saur: International Bibliography of Periodical Literature and International Bibliography of Book Reviews (nobody responded) and a request to consider supporting our own recommendation to for acquisition of Proquest's British Parliamentary Papers database (a single response). Sam will try to elicit more responses with additional communications, e.g., discussion of goals. It was suggested the group might be reduced to those who choose to be on it, or limited to 1-2 responsible persons per campus. If it remains a large group with amorphous overlap, how can interest in participation be sustained?

5. Shared Purchase of Additional Sections of the ACLU Archives Microfilm Sets (Elliot)

Elliot distributed descriptions of the two sets, Series II and IV, and pricing information, with a 70 percent discount good through December 31. One model for copayments could be the same percentages as used for CDL copayments in 2005. (San Francisco and Merced would be excluded from the formula, since they aren't part of this group.) If we go ahead with the purchase, it would be housed at SRLF (along with Series I and III acquired in previous shared acquisitions.) San Diego would handle purchase order, invoice and acquisition, with campuses to pay by recharge.

Interest was expressed by those present, although they would need to return to their campuses for approval. There has already been a faculty request from UCSB. Elliot was to send by a calculation of the cost for each campus. Sheila would contact Roger Strong, the Thompson/Gale sales representative, for more details about content. In addition, Ellen reported that the “new” Adam Matthew set, Sex and Gender: Manuscript Sources from The National Archives, is simply a title change from the old Public Records Office materials. UCI has two parts of the series. The series is now complete in four parts and Ellen will pursue acquisition for UCLA and we should let her know if other campuses wish to make a contribution.

6. Library support for Bibliographers’ groups and number of meetings.

The Group discussed these questions and affirmed our commitment to holding meetings twice a year, with a two-day meeting in summer. This joint meeting (of two groups) is economically advantageous and the two-day meeting allows us to invite guests or vendor representatives, and we could also invite the local UL.

7. Last Copy Agreements (Ellen and all):

The discussion arose from three questions: 1) Do we wish to continue with these labor-intensive projects? 2) Who will shepherd them forward? 3) Is there potential for a Shared Print Archive?

These lists predate CDL, and there is concern that some titles will never be available in electronic format and that active subscriptions may be in danger of cancellation. In addition, many titles on these lists are paid on funds that are out of our control. Shared Print Projects are very complex and will put this idea “on hold” for now. Diana is working on a related project for the ALA/WSS and she volunteered to work on the Women’s Studies list. Dan and Ellen will review and revise the statement on last copies.

The group adjourned at 2:30 p.m.