Collection Priorities Subgroup Meeting Minutes

February 7, 2002

Present: Mischa Buczkowski, Faye Chadwell, James Fox, Carol Hixson, Robin Paynter, Tom Stave, Ed Teague

Rankings

The group reviewed the rankings of the high priority collections and discussed the ranking criteria again. Chadwell and Hixson reviewed the group's charge and reminded everyone that the group was not limited to discussing traditional cataloging as the only means of providing bibliographic access. The group consensus was that having one entry point for users to search for library resources was desirable and, at this point, the library catalog was still the best single entry point. However, products were being developed, even by III, that would soon allow for searching across multiple platforms simultaneously. The group concluded that providing public bibliographic access more than one way was a luxury that this library could ill afford, given the large number of collections that had no access. There was some discussion of the desirability of common data elements for different bibliographic databases, with Chadwell and Hixson speaking out in favor of such an approach.

Based on the group's discussions, Stave decided to move two of his collections from high to medium priority. He noted that while they were high priority within the Document Center, in the librarywide context they were more of a medium priority.

Teague raised the issue of collaboration based on commonalities, noting that a number of his collections could be considered to be of greater importance if they were linked with other collections in Special Collections.

After some discussion, the group agreed that its earlier work in ranking the high-priority collections did not need to be revisited and the rankings could stand.

Decisions

The group reached consensus on a number of issues and decided the following:

in the rankings, sort the collections into two groups and approach each group separately, with those requiring item-level access being in one group and those needing only collection-level access being in another
on the ranking sheets, include the number of items in the collection and the estimated number of hours needed to provide bibliographic access
in the collection-level group, give higher priority to records that could act as portals to existing databases
when a set of rankings is finalized, one collection from the Document Center and one collection from Special Collections will be worked on simultaneously. If bibliographic access to a collection from one area is completed while work to provide access is still going on for the collection in the other area, work will begin on the next highest ranked collection in the area whose collection was completed first. In this way, work should always be going on for both major areas

Next steps

The top two collections out of the high-priority group (one from each area) are the American state papers for the Document Center and the Burgess collection for Special Collections. Paynter asked Hixson if teams were going to be established within cataloging to focus on the top priority collections. Hixson noted that the Catalog Dept. was down two professional positions and there were not enough people to be able to establish teams who would work on one of the collections exclusively; work on the collections would have to be added on to ongoing work for new materials, retrospective conversion, and other projects already in the pipeline.

The next meeting will be from 11-12 on February 21.

notes by Carol Hixson

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