General Assembly Meeting Minutes

13 November 2001

Meeting was called to order at 2:10 by Chairperson Cathy Weng.

Business meeting:

Minutes of the Assembly meeting of September 2001 were approved with one addition to the attendance list.

New Librarian to Temple: A. Vara introduced Molly Thomas, Electronic Resources Librarian.

Report of the University Librarian M. Pastine:

1. Mary Edsall began her work on October 1, 2001 for the Philadelphia Dance Archive, a collaborative libraries/university/community project. Mary’s title is Curator/Archivist. She is in a temporary part time position through July 31, 2001.

   We will be submitting a proposal to Dance Advance for funding, including permanent staffing for the position, along with other funding needs. As a temporary staff member, she is not a member of AAL, although she does have a library degree. May want to consider inviting her as guest to general assembly meetings however.

2. The Libraries/Press Executive Board’s second meeting took place on Monday morning, September 24, 2001. We brainstormed ideas for networking, building contacts for fundraising for priority projects. Several member of the board have contacted us since on areas that they would like to work on and some further ideas for contacts.
3. Highlights of the October 16-20 139 ARL Membership Meeting:
   • Plenary discussion on the ARL Statistics Measurements Committee on the Preliminary Findings of the ARL E-Metrics Project to obtain improved and expanded data on electronic resources and services. This Phase II project is an effort to explore the feasibility of defining and collecting data on the use and value of electronic resources. A group of 24 ARL libraries funded and are participating in a study to end on December 2001. The report recommends 16 network statistics and 3 performance measures; the collaborative efforts need to establish with the publishing and vendor community to support reliable and ongoing production of measures related to database use, users, and services; the value of these electronic resources and services to our community of scholars, faculty, students, as well as to the unidentified users who are accessing research library and university resources from around the globe. They have found that electronic resources from 1992-93 were 3.6% of the libraries’ budget and in 1999/00 12.9%. concentration on vendor statistics are from 12 vendors: Academic Press/IDEAL, Elsevier, Lexis/Nexis, OVID, Bell & Howell, Gale Group, ISI, netLibrary, Silver Platter, EBSCO, JSTOR and OCLS/FirstSearch. Key issues are related to acquisitions, accounting and cataloging systems not set up to support data collection; prescribed definitions and procedures are not compatible with local practices; and varying levels of resources are available to support data collection in libraries. Data elements tested are vendors, number of log-ins (sessions), number of queries (searches), items examined, and number of virtual visits to resources. The reliability of data by vendors is unclear. The focus is on high impact databases. They plan another pilot with more volunteers, along with the existing 24 libraries. They are counting consortia statistics the same as those paid for by individual libraries. The assignment of staff may be more important than the number of transactions.
   • The Scholarly Communication Committee requested approval of establishing an International Scholarly Communications alliance with international organizations (a virtual alliance). This was approved. This will not be a part of IFLA. There was discussion of the public library of science of free and unrestricted access to scientific literature and a similar library for social sciences and humanities library open archive. There was a discussion of the role of SPARC, particularly the European SPARC Initiative interested in Open Archives and the planning of a  Japan SPARC Open Archives.
   • There was a discussion on how the U.S. Copyright Office has not done the library community any favors – i.e. standards developed in digital rights movement is alarming – moving in the direction of patent law. There was focus on looking at models that provide free literature to the public domain. An important question: why are we paying for intellectual property we developed? At what point do we quit sending funds out to commercial publishers and repurpose those monies and get our institutions to understand? How can we keep AAU involved so that our institutions understand the crucial role of University Presses and provide strong subsidies? The AAU president is pushing hard for local recognition of university presses. ARL is setting up a virtual communication network.
   • Internet 2 middleware standards for multimedia is crucial. How will standards affect libraries? This is moving quickly and is closely related to electronic reserves.
   • More and more universities are focusing on being revenue producing – including libraries (often referred to as “Diversified Financial Capacity”). One half of the universities represented at the meeting have been told to be income producing, including the libraries.
   • There is a decline of state support to universities from 23% to 16% thus universities are being forced to create new revenues, including from the intellectual property of faculty. Space and information resources on our campuses are being forced to build new markets. It is predicted that universities will be for profits within 10 years. The risk is high. There will be more commercial partnerships between community and university. We will see many high level reference service models and be doing more grant and other fundraising. It was said that we need to create marketing departments for library products/services.
   • There was lengthy discussion of the place of technology in the libraries and changing position configurations/titles and hiring more non-librarian technical personnel. However, there is a poor pool out there. We need cutting edge thinking on this issue. It was noted many times the importance of middle management and how good it must be. Salaries must be made more competitive. We are losing our own graduates to the corporate world and to the disciplines who want to build their own “cybrarians.” Of the libraries represented there was a 50/50 split on Systems heads being librarians and nonlibrarians.
   • Jerry Campbell spoke about the need for a complex set of digital resources with a “Google” like approach for a super scholars portal. We must be knowledgeable experts with software such as Blackboard.
   • Some concern was expressed with a Council on Library and Information Resources newsletter being sent to our Presidents and Provosts without informing librarians with an implied note not to trust librarians on digital issues. CLIR seems to see themselves as not speaking for librarians but for academe as a whole. This is a concern. All were urged to scale up their digitization projects and not be blind-sighted by CLIR. Some disagreement with this issue – i.e. perceiving CLIR as undermining ARL’s role.
   • From the other representatives it was noted that Temple University librarians were gaining recognition throughout the country via heavy involvement in organizations, which was great to hear.
   011113MP
   (rev.WhAAL)

Continuing Education Committee report (B. Mayes): The first program of the year by the Committee will be on November 27th in the Lecture Hall: “Academic Publishing and the Future of the Book” with guest speaker Charles Ault, Director of Production and Electronic Publishing and Assistant Director of Temple University Press. Also at the meeting Lisa Panzer (Blitman Library) and Brian Schoolar (Zahn Library) will discuss their collections and the services they offer. (Discussion and refreshments). M. Pastine will send us the URL of C. Lynch’s site on e-books for pre-program reading.

PARA Committee update (M. Darby): The Committee has not met yet but has been active in meeting with candidates (currently four). There are more contract renewals coming up in February.

Faculty Senate Library Committee (rep. L. Lane): She attended the first meeting of the Committee on October 1st. Following an overview of the function of the Committee they continued with other concerns and interests: (a) student printers in SICs and in Paley, noting wasted time and wasted paper, and noting that printing across from the Reference Desk is now improved, (b) remote and compact storage problems noting that the Kardon building request for funding was not approved by the University to be passed on to the State Legislature, but approved by the President for partial Library use combined with apartments; noting a second priority on bettering the Traylor building storage reservations on security); and noting the completion of the compact storage shelving for Government Documents on the Paley ground floor, and (c) review and discussion of the success of the library in attracting outside funding and its acceptance of gift materials from the reporting by M. Pastine – of note were the Dance Archive, the $75,000.00 music cataloging grant, the $100,000.00 Norwick gift annuity, and the recently received Daily News Obituary File for Urban Archives. The Committee ended with a discussion of the future goals of the Library.

Steering Committee report (C. Weng): the Committee met in July with the chairs of the AAL standing committees to discuss revising and updating the procedures and guidelines of these committees, to be due to be submitted in March. In October the Committee revised its own Procedures, and they and the Minutes of the Steering Committee will be posted on the Home Page, not distributed. President Adamany has requested each unit of the University to produce, revise, or write its By-Laws for documentation and approval by he and the Board of Trustees. As part of the By-Laws of the University Libraries the Committee has begun revising, if needed, the By-Laws of the Assembly. C. Weng noted that the recent Enhanced College Visit program was very successful, heavily due to the participation of the Librarians.

Program (2:50 p.m.):

VIRTUAL TOUR OF BIBLIOTHECA ALEXANDRINA:

Laila El-Zein presented an illustrated review of the still to be opened Alexandrian Library in Egypt, which captivated the audience. During her May 2001 visit to family in Alexandria she was able to secure a private tour of the Library during which she documented her tour with photographs of the exterior and interior. With a cost now approaching $220 million dollars the library had its groundbreaking in 1995, was expected to open in June 2001 and now has a scheduled April 2002 opening. Designed by a Norwegian firm the building is circular with the entire ceiling glass and is designed to be a national library with an 8 million-volume capacity, in open stacks. It is a seven level or story building with the upper two floors for a School of Information Science. Her pictures vividly captured the reading areas, stack areas, and architecture of the building.

The presentation and the meeting ended at 3:30 p.m.

T. Whitehead, recorder