Electronic Collection Committee Meeting Minutes - January 31, 2006

Approval of Minutes:

The Minutes from the November meeting were approved.

Announcements:

There is a new endowment for the ECC, the Early Fund. The fund has $400,000 in it and should generate $10,000 - $15,000 per year.

The renewal price for the Bibliographie der deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (BDSL) is cheaper than last year’s price, due to the decline in value of the Euro. The dollar’s strength should help us with a number of subscriptions. The BDSL has also implemented SFX links.

We are investigating an alternative to the Elsevier “big deal,” examining our usage statistics for title that we might cancel our subscription to, and use the savings to provide individual article access on demand to those journals we do not subscribe to.

Recent Acquisitions

We negotiated a special deal for Black Studies Center and the new Periodicals Archive Online collections, saving about $20,000 of the Board of Governors money, to be used for additional purchases. A major part of the Black Studies Center is the full run of the Chicago Defender, though it is not yet complete, and locating the first four years to digitize has been a problem. It is very difficult for anyone to determine just how much of the file is digitized at the current time; Bill McHugh will write our representative to see if there is a way to determine this readily. We’ve approached the CRL about creating a print archive for Periodicals Archive Online; they are not interested, but might help organize a distributed archive.

Making of the Modern Economy has been acquired; the Board of Governors contributed $50,000, and we are working on locating the remaining $75,000.

We have acquired a set of CDs of Chinese historical census data, purchase by the Board of Governors and located in Government and Geographic Information and Data Services.

Acquisition of Elsevier backfiles in Psychology have been approved by the Board. The Springer Chemistry & Materials Science backfiles will be purchased; there is a special CIC deal for this.

Defining Gender, a database from Adams Matthew, is being purchased with a $21,000 discount.

Our new streaming music databases are now live; there have been intermittent problems with Naxos.

There have been a series of new nanotechnology acquisitions: ISI Derwent Innovation Index, ISI Scientific and Technical Proceedings Index, ASM Handbook, Alloys Center, Wiley Polymer Properties Database, and four or five new journals. The administration seems responsive to our request for another $25,000 recurring for nanotechnology and $75,000 recurring for cognitive science.

Lucy Lyon is working on the Worldcat collection analysis software.

The CDs of the Digitale Bibliothek are now almost cataloged; there are two copies of each, one circulating, the other for Reference.

We’ve signed up for DigiZeitschriften, online access to German scholarly journals back to 1815. The price is €1500 for the first year and €650 per year thereafter. CRL will help coordinate a distributed print archive.

An underspent preservation fund for microfilm reformatting will pay for the capital cost of the JSTOR Biological Archive, so that we now have access to the entirety of JSTOR.

We acquired some new titles from the Oxford digital reference shelf in an end of year sale.

French 17, an index of seventeenth century French studies, is now coming electronically. The price is being raised $5/year to cover the cost of going electronic.

Current Trials and Vendor Demos

There is a trial for ABC-Clio’s ebook site, and the databases African-American Song. A related database, African-American Music Reference, is under development by Alexander Street Press.

Old Business

The problems with the EBSCO Religion Database are still not resolved.

We are still looking at printers so that we can implement Newspaper Direct. We have a list of print units and other itemized costs for moving to this service. We need to figure out what to do with the funds we save from canceling the paper newspaper subscriptions

The Chinese Academic Journals has been paid for.

We are ready to pay the first invoice of the ACS Archives. The purchase of these archives will be amortized over 10-15 years.

New Business

We are looking at acquiring Vault Online Career Library, splitting costs with Career Services.

We’re looking at acquiring the Millennial Edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States. Cost is about $6,000, with renewal costs of $100/year.

A question was asked about the Congressional Research Digital Collection, which integrates several LexisNexis products, and which we have.