Minutes of August 13, 2010 Meeting

Present:

Mary Belinsky, Mary Fetzer, Rebecca Gardener, Karen Hartman, Helen Hoffman, Quan Hu, Mei Ling Lo, Laura Mullen, Jim Niessen, Michelle Oswell, Gracemary Smulewitz, Mary Beth Weber, Ryan Womack (Chair), Connie Wu, Tao Yang (recorder)

1. Approval of Agenda

The agenda was approved.

2. Reports & Updates

Chair's Report (Ryan)

• Ryan first acknowledged that due to low attendance, today's discussions on goals (item #5 on the agenda) will be preliminary.
• The state funding may come a bit earlier this year and selectors were encouraged to start to accumulate orders to avoid potential bottleneck down the road. There is a fund for special faculty request available now, but Ryan reminded people that it is for urgent requests only.
• An NBCG taskforce is finalizing recommendations on publishers, but it will leave a few publisher decisions to individual selectors. The charge of the task force is to generate savings by identifying smaller academic publishers and adjust the profiles accordingly.
• Ryan mentioned that Rutgers faculty authors profile has not been used much and some faculty publications may be blocked on this profile because they are covered by other plans - this issue is being investigated.
• Books donated to libraries through the faculty publications exhibit were being routed to appropriate libraries. Laura Mullen echoed that these new books need to be sent to appropriate libraries in an expedient way.

DTS report (Gracemary)

• Cancellation project is proceeding. The journal cancellations are pretty much done and standing orders and orders of monograph series are being examined.
• Migration to EBSCO from Serials Solutions is progressing. On August 23, the new EBSCO product will be available.
• Various weeding projects are taking place in New Brunswick Libraries.
• Gracemary also informed the group of the status of the transfer funds.
• She will work with team leaders of NBCG on Elsevier titles swapping and Springer titles cancellation. In the case of EBSCO, the credit resulting from the Business Source Premier subscription needs to be exercised this year. She also reported some success in negotiating with a publisher who lowered our subscription price.
• Connie mentioned that almost all print subscriptions in science have been cancelled, so she stressed the need of keeping aggregators.

CTS report (Mary Beth)

• Mary Beth reported that the Central Technical Services Department is operating on a small staff due to staff vacancies and illness.
• She will send list of open orders from Coutts to selectors.
• The loading of IEEE records into IRIS is still being discussed.

3. New Acquisitions Process (Mary Beth)

Mary Beth continued to report that due to budget cuts, Acquisitions has to explore service cutbacks. The staff will try to reduce the usage of OCLC by changing workflow (searching LC records or OCLC Bibnotes first). They will also try to do more original cataloging in OCLC (to get credit). When needed, staff will also do just minimum cataloging, but this does not apply to media and non-Roman materials.

4. New Data Services - Ryan

Ryan reported on several new data services being planned (he will send out an email announcement to RUL everyone later).

• A new secure data facility in Alex. In this facility, PCs are not connected to the Internet. It will host restricted data (e.g. federal education or health data). People can go and do research on these confidential data. The facility can be used to acquire data that can't be acquired before. Faculty and grad students can access this facility at the beginning of fall.
• Workshops on open source statistical software (R) in Alex. Ryan has scheduled to go to Math Department to talk about R.
• Managing research data. NSF proposal are now required to include data management plans. Data group is looking at archiving data in RU core, but it is not yet ready for everyone.

5. Goals for 2010/11

Here are the issues that came up during the preliminary discussion of NBCG goals:

• Prioritizing weeding (also a LRC goal)
• Looking at the role of Collection development librarians
• Books in NB/P and the lack of funding for books
• Change in publishing industry & patron driven model for collection development
• The move to ebooks and its impact on access (especially ILL)
• Review of the collection & NB budget
• Review of the workflow for getting new books on shelf quickly

(Ryan has sent out the formal NBCG goals in September)

6. Announcements

Mary Fetzer announced that state-wide library services grant has been restored, which was used to fund an ILL position; new self-checkout machine became available but some issues are discovered. Michelle will continue to assist people with LibGuides. Gracemary has started to arrange visits of major publishers. Qian will offer training on REAXYS, a chemistry database from Elsevier.