October 31, 2003
PRESENT: Val Burris, Deb Carver, JQ Johnson (Guest), Judith Musick, Peter Mills, Dan Pope, Margaret Prentice, Lee Roth, Mark Vanscheeuwijck.
Deb Carver, University Librarian, convened the meeting at 10:00 a.m.
Deb provided an update on the budget situation. All schools and colleges, including the library, have had 3% taken out of their base budget. The library has applied that 3% to labor and materials costs. The library does not have plans to hire this year. There are two critical positions that are currently vacant—Map Librarian and a reference librarian with Sociology/Psychology subject specialist responsibilities. The Documents and Reference departments are working with current staff to cover those services. This hiring freeze may continue into next year. Staff are putting together a grant application to help temporarily fund a GIS position in Documents. Deb added that the library does not have plans to lay off current staff members. If the budget situation worsens over the next year, she would hope University Administration would provide some kind of emergency support.
The 3% reduction in the acquisition budget will not reduce current departmental allocations. It will eliminate carryovers. Next year there will be $200,000 cut in serials; those titles have already been identified through last year’s process. The monograph lines and approval lines will also be reviewed next year. The practice has been to maintain a balance of 70/30 (serials/monographs), but that ratio is not the most appropriate for some disciplines, for example, the sciences.
Deb reported that she has met with Rich Linton, Vice President for Research, about receiving an increase to the library’s ICC funds. The library’s portion of the University’s ICC money is 2.5 – 2.8% of the total of $350,000. If we do receive an increase we will use it to acquire databases that are being requested by some of the colleges. For example, faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences, have requested three databases (Old English Book, Early American Imprints, Web of Science Backfile), which total $400,000.
The Library’s share of the University’s Campaign is $10 million. We have raised close to $3,000,000. It was suggested to send the new members of the ULC the summary of the library’s campaign priorities that were submitted last winter.
Val asked about the Rowecom situation. Rowecom, one of the library’s largest serials vendor, filed bankruptcy last year, after the library had paid in advance for subscriptions. The UO is one of the top 30 creditors. Some publishers have graced their titles even though Rowecom never paid them. Those not graced are more general titles and the Library has no plans to fill those gaps. The library’s loss is close to $300,000. Val asked Deb to send a report to the ULC discussing how the library ended up as a result of the bankruptcy.
Deb reported that September’s statistics show that 1,000 loans per day, system-wide, have been processed through Summit Cascade. The merger between Orbis and the Cascade Alliance is proving to be a huge resource for its members.
Deb suggested that if possible, ULC members try to attend the Lindsey Waters lecture “Crisis in Scholarly Publishing” today at 4:00 in the Browsing Room. Open Access is a new approach to move away from subscription-based model. Costs would be covered by institution memberships, granting agencies, or author fees. There are about 500 open access journals currently being published. The question was asked if the library has a list of those free journals. The question was asked if the library has a list of those free journals. The best current list is the "Directory of Open Access Journals" at http://www.doaj.org/. Leland commented that the quality of illustrated journals is reduced in the online version. Deb responded that she does not expect open access to be the only model. It will co-exist with the commercial model. Deb would like to continue these discussions throughout the year.
JQ Johnson, Academic Education Coordinator, gave a report to the ULC on the library’s Institutional Repositories initiative. He distributed two handouts: 1) An Institutional Repository for the University of Oregon, and 2) “DSace at the University of Oregon” web page.
An institutional repository is an alternative way for an author to make his/her original intellectual work available. The library has been researching how to build an IR at the University of Oregon – how to create a digital place where UO faculty can deposit their work and have it preserved. It is important to keep costs (software and staffing) low. Departments/faculty members would make decisions on what to deposit to the IR. The software chosen to support the UO’s IR is DSpace. A pilot project has been in place since April and the hope is to make this a full service by December 2003.
For more information on IR’s and DSpace, see http://libweb.uoregon.edu/catdept/irg/
JQ was invited to attend the next meeting to answers questions that ULC members may have after reviewing the handouts and Web sites. Some questions presented after JQ’s discussions were:
Val agreed to serve as chair for the 2003/04 committee. The next meeting will take place mid-late January. S. Gray will send out requests for winter term schedules. [12/22 update: the next meeting is scheduled for January 29, 8:30 a.m.]
Submitted by S. Gray
http://libweb.uoregon.edu/ulc/dir03/031031.html