Continuing Resources Section (CRS) Committees
Acquisitions Committee
Acquisitions Committee members reviewed last minute details regarding the committee’s program, “Ending the Big Deal: Truth and Consequences” scheduled for Sunday, June 24, 2012. Those members who were able to attend the program agreed to help with the presentation by distributing the evaluations and taking a head count of the audience.
The committee then discussed programming ideas for next year’s Annual Conference in Chicago and settled on a theme involving consortia e-book purchasing in a Demand Drive Acquisitions (DDA) environment. The proposal was submitted online and a meeting was scheduled with the ALCTS Program Committee on Monday afternoon.
It also was decided that two members would conduct an ALCTS e-forum on a similar topic sometime during the early portion of 2013 to build momentum for the committee’s program at ALA Annual in Chicago. The designated members will contact the e-forum coordinator to work out the details.
Continuing Resources Cataloging Committee
First on our agenda was discussion of upcoming changes to Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee (MARBI) and its impact on our charge. We had submitted a revised charge which was rejected due to the disbanding of MARBI. Once the post-MARBI committee is finalized, we will resubmit our revised charge.
This topic led to a discussion about the planned changes in the schedule for Midwinter 2013.
Next, we discussed the webcast of our Update Forum on Monday during Annual. The chair was trained in the software and will be monitoring the webcast for problems as well as answering questions. We hope that this broadcast is successful and will continue in the future.
The chair reminded members about the SurveyMonkey survey for all ALCTS sessions.
With the announcement of a Resource Description and Access (RDA) preconference on RDA and Authority Work being planned for Annual 2013, there was discussion of how this committee could help, particularly in relation to series training. The next chair will pursue this opportunity.
As usual, we started to discuss ideas for our Midwinter Forum without settling on a topic as of yet.
Education, Research and Publications Coordinating Committee
The ALCTS CRS Education, Research and Publications Coordinating Committee is presently engaged in the revision of two syllabi, the Syllabus for Serials Cataloging and the Syllabus for Serials Collection Management and Acquisitions. Each of these syllabi is awaiting the final approval of recent edits for republication.
Our committee charge is satisfactory to our purposes. Our meeting at Annual, once the charge was approved, revolved around brainstorming program ideas for future action. In addition, we acknowledged the addition of a new (virtual) member, Nanako Kodaira Thomas, and were informed of an empty slot in our roster. Finally, regarding old business, the Guide to Managing Microforms was submitted to the committee and passed on to the ALCTS Publications Committee for parsing into publishable chapters.
Executive Committee
Highlights from the 2012 Annual Conference include:
Valerie Bross, Head of the Continuing Resources Cataloging Section at the UCLA Library Cataloging & Metadata Center, received this year’s Ulrich’s Serials Librarianship Award.
Beth Larkee Kumar of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs received this year’s First Step Award.
The College & Research Libraries Interest meeting at the Annual Conference consisted of a program of three short presentations addressing the topic of the “The Evolving Challenges of E-Resource Preservation.”
The Continuing Resource Cataloging Committee, for the first time, broadcast its popular Update Forum at the Annual Conference.
The Standards Committee’s Update Forum featured three speakers. Regina Romano Reynolds, Director of the US ISSN Center at the Library of Congress, spoke about ISSN, FRBR and RDA. Todd Carpenter of NISO reported on ResourceSync and John Hostage from Harvard Law School Library reported on IFLA standards.
The Holdings Information Committee sponsored a forum entitled “Quality Standards in Batch Records and Adventures in Cooperative Cataloging: Many Hands Make Light Work.” Jon Rothman spoke about HathiTrust records, and Les Hawkins updated attendees on the ongoing creation of records for DOAJ titles. Ted Fons, who was scheduled to attend and speak about OCLC initiatives, was unable to attend due to a work conflict, but he did submit a presentation.
Holdings Information Committee
The committee met on Saturday, June 23, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Anaheim, CA.
We discussed the logistics of our forum, “Quality Standards in Batch Records and Adventures in Cooperative Cataloging: Many Hands Make Light Work,” that was held the afternoon of Saturday, June 23 at the Hyatt Grand Ballroom. Jon Rothman spoke about HathiTrust records and Les Hawkins updated attendees on the ongoing creation of records for Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) titles. Ted Fons, who was scheduled to attend and speak about OCLC initiatives, was unable to attend due to a work conflict, but he did submit a presentation. About forty people attended the session and there were many thoughtful questions.
Per Meg Mehring’s (CRS Chair) request, we discussed the participation of virtual members. There was a consensus that current technology makes virtual representation a bit hit-or-miss; however, everyone felt that it was important to try to include such members. We believe it would be useful to develop guides for chairs who have virtual committee members, as well as participation guidelines for all members that includes a section on virtual participation.
For Midwinter 2013, we spoke to the Continuing Resources Cataloging Committee about joining forces for a forum at Midwinter with a topic about linked data. We are considering one speaker on holdings aspects of the eXtensible Catalog, then two or three practical examples of using linked data. Selina talked about a project at her university. Our idea would be that attendees would leave with the practical knowledge of how to make a small but meaningful foray into linked data. We will share ideas by e-mail later in the summer and hold a call before summer is over.
Policy and Planning Committee
Between Midwinter and Annual, the Policy and Planning Committee worked on reviewing charges for CRS committees. Each committee chair was asked to work with their committee to evaluate the committee charge and report back to the Policy and Planning Committee about any changes that needed to be made. Additionally, the Policy and Planning Committee has been working on reviewing the ALCTS Strategic Plan to brainstorm about activities that CRS could undertake to reach the goals outlined in the Strategic Plan. The Policy and Planning Committee hopes to evaluate ideas and recommend actions to the section chair by ALA’s Midwinter Meeting.
Standards Committee
The Continuing Resource Update Forum will be held on Sunday, June 24 from 10:30am-12:00pm at Hyatt-Grand Ballroom B. The program includes three presentations and a panel discussion after the presentations. Regina Romano Reynolds, Director of the United States ISSN Center at the Library of Congress, will speak on “ISSN, FRBR and RDA: harmonies and dissonances.”
Program description: Can RDA, ISSN, ISBD make beautiful music together? Learn about “harmonizing” discordant notes so there’s one ISSN per bibliographic record and one record per ISSN. Regina Reynolds will discuss steps being considered to resolve or mitigate the areas currently not harmonized. Todd Carpenter, NISO and co-chair of ResourceSync, will report on ResourceSync. ResourceSync will research, develop, prototype, test, and deploy mechanisms for the large-scale synchronization of web resources, and which is a joint project of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) team. John Hostage, Authorities and Database Integrity Librarian of the Harvard Law School Library, will talk about how the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) is working to bring together the various standards that have been developed by its sections and is preparing them for an environment marked by linked data and the semantic web.
Per the request of CRS Policy & Planning Committee, our committee members reviewed the charge of our committee in this meeting. Evidently, we are fulfilling the programming piece—to hold the Update Forum twice a year—but we are not actively providing input on the creation and revision of CRS-related standards. We discussed different approaches to improve in this area in the future. For example, the chair may want to review notices coming through and identify relevant standards. There is not a reason we cannot communicate online and put together a group comment, even if it is tangential. We could routinize the organizing of committee comments to be sure we are participating in the process. That way, we could begin to achieve recognition as a potential targeted source for both comment and for membership on relevant standard groups. On the other hand, our concern is that the new ALCTS Standards Task Force’s report could have an impact on the future of the CRS Standards Committee so we want to wait until that group reports next year at Annual to review and, possibly, recommend changes to our charge.
The Cataloging Committee was going to be streaming their Update Forum. They are one of the first to do so and ALCTS and the committee is excited about the possibilities. A suggestion was made for us to consider volunteering to have our forum streamed as well. The committee will need to discuss whether they want to do that and to contact ALCTS if there is interest.
Lastly, we were asked for comments on virtual participation and virtual meetings and whether that was something we had discussed and how successful our virtual members have been. We discussed the challenges of virtual membership--how the success of the virtual member may hinge on their past experience, or lack thereof, as a member on other committees. Also, if the appointment was not a good match, the virtual member may not be comfortable contributing if they don’t feel they have the expertise in the area covered by the committee.
Continuing Resources (CRS) Interest Groups
Access to Continuing Resources Interest Group
Three speakers, Ada Emmett, Julie Bobay, and Jim Gilden, presented “Opening Access for a New Era of Scholarly Publishing.” Ada Emmett reported on the progress of University of Kansas’ (KU) open access policy. Julie Bobay from Indiana University Libraries presented a history of the open access resource Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and its current funding status. Jim Gilden from SAGE Publications spoke about the publisher’s new journal, SAGE Open, which publishes open access articles in the social sciences and humanities. It was a small but engaged session.
College & Research Libraries Interest Group
The College & Research Libraries Interest Group meeting at the ALA Annual Conference consisted of a program with three short presentations addressing the topic of the “The Evolving Challenges of E-Resource Preservation.” The first presenter, Ken Difiore, Portico, discussed how Portico can function as a solution enabling libraries to retain ongoing access to subscribed e-resource content. Next, Regina Koury from Idaho State University gave a presentation discussing how her library used its participation in the LOCKSS Alliance to retain ongoing access to cancelled e-journals; the presentation also discussed her efforts to attempt to convince additional publishers to join LOCKSS. The third presentation, by Stanford University’s James Jacobs, took a closer look at how the LOCKSS e-resource preservation model works. Following the presentations there was a good discussion and question and answer period in which the challenges of e-resource preservation were addressed in additional detail. Presentations are available in ALA Connect, http://connect.ala.org/node/179070.