University Library Committee

Minutes
November 24, 2008

PRESENT: Alex Asbury, Deb Carver, Alisa Freedman, Andy Karduna, David Levin, Noor Rajabzadeh, Gordon Sayre, Steven van Enk

GUESTS: Sara Brownmiller, Head, Library Systems; JQ Johnson, Director, Scholarly Communications; Barbara Jenkins, Head, Reference and Library Instruction

New Summit Interface

Sara Brownmiller, Head of Library Systems, gave a presentation on the new Summit interface and delivery service, which will go live Monday, December 1. The reason for the change was to provide a better search interface and because the current vendor was going to increase the cost over 700%. OCLC was willing to work with the Orbis Cascade Alliance to develop a new interface - saving the consortium money and providing a better product. The first month of the new service will focus on resolving any problems resulting from the change, allowing the library to focus on a strong delivery service by the start of winter term.

This new interface will expand resources available to patrons. If something is not available in Summit, it will then automatically search WorldCat. Sara pointed out several new features:

Offers a variety of post-search filters
Includes journal article citations in search results
Link to Google Book previews
Ability to create personal bibliographies
Information about an author's publication history
Provides examples on how to cite references
User can select preferred language for viewing

Loan periods for most items will be six weeks, with no renewals. Short term loans, such as videos, will have a 3-day loan period, with no renewal. It may take a day or two longer to obtain requested material initially, but the goal is to maintain a 3-4 day delivery time frame.

There was some discussion on the system advertising materials for purchase. Should the university subscribe to a commercial enterprise that directs purchases to a particular vendor? Deb responded that Summit is owned by Orbis Cascade Consortium, which consists of 35 libraries in the NW. She will present this concern at the next Orbis council meeting.

The user will not be aware of the system searching Summit or WorldCat. It will just be done automatically. The new URL for Summit will be http://summit.worldcat.org/

Authors Rights and Scholarly Communication

JQ Johnson, Director, Scholarly Communications and Instructional Support (SCIS), gave an overview of responsibilities within his department and how they relate to author rights and scholarly publishing. These topics have been discussed at length by the ULC in the past several years. He distributed two brochures:

Open Access
Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum to secure your rights as the author of a journal article.

Two primary factors have contributed to concerns within scholarly publishing. Libraries, faced with shrinking budgets and escalating publisher costs. are being forced to cancel subscriptions. Faculty members are becoming more involved with publishing in open access journals and by providing author addendums to subscription-based publishers to allow them to retain copyrights. An example of an addendum that authors typically use can be found at http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/ . This is an important step in getting publishers to keep the costs down on journals.

Another issue that the campus needs to address is collecting data on what faculty are publishing. There is no resource available to show who is publishing, how many use author addendums, or who publishes in open access journals.

Deb added it is important for the library to broaden conversations on scholarly publishing on campus and to find out about authors' experiences. Suggestions for accomplishing this included:

asking subject specialists to give presentations to the departments they represent
maintain a scholarly communications web page see http://libweb.uoregon.edu/scis
library to provide training sessions for interested faculty, graduate and doctoral students

There was agreement that the library/ULC should try to formulate and implement a communications plan. It is important to find out from faculty what the most important journals are in their fields and then look into the practices of those publishers.

Academic Plan - Big Ideas/Proposals

Deb discussed briefly the academic plan process currently taking place on campus. The deadline to submit "big ideas" has been extended to February 15. There has been some discussion on scientific literacy, and on a broader scope, information literacy - the ability to understand what information is reliable and what is not. Deb asked the committee their thoughts on whether the library should collaborate with other academic units on putting forward a big idea related to information literacy. We provide instruction in the library, but there isn't a great deal of exposure to undergraduates on information literacy.

Barbara Jenkins distributed a handout describing the "UC-Berkeley Undergraduate Research Initiative." This was a five-year project, supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, dedicated to enhancing undergraduate education, leveraging campus-wide resources to support and sustain curricular transformation, and strengthening the community of faculty focused on teaching and learning. Cal-Berkeley did not make it a required class, but rather included instruction on information literacy/research into basic 100 and 200 level introductory courses taught by faculty from the sciences, social sciences, humanities and interdisciplinary studies. Everyone agreed that all students in their first two years should be given the opportunity to develop their information literacy and research skills. It would benefit their academic and professional careers. Gordon suggested that Deb put together a proposal for the ULC to review. Deb added that it would be very helpful to put forth this proposal with the ULC's endorsement.

The meeting adjourned at 4:25 p.m.

Submitted by Sheila Gray

Maintained by: Sheila Gray, skgray@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 09/18/2009