Library Committee Meeting

Room 224 of the Lane Library

Minutes, January 21, 2011

Present: Caroline Hopkinson, Beth Howells, Doug Frazier, and Jennifer Zettler

CALL TO ORDER. The meeting was called to order at 10:15 a.m.

AGENDA

I.  Jennifer Zettler announced that the committee’s student representative, Kristyna Booth, had resigned from Student Government and would no longer serve.

II.  Doug Frazier gave an update of the planned expansion of the Lane Library. The renovation of the Memorial Annex is on hold until funding is secured.

III.  Doug Frazier also reported that the library will be searching for two replacement positions. One position is for the head of reference and the other is for a technical services librarian.

IV.  The Library Committee discussed the following charge from the Faculty Senate:

On November 15, 2010, the Faculty Senate sent the charge below to the Library Committee. Please consider it at your earliest convenience.

The following is background information that was considered prior to charging the Library Committee. From a Senator:

"Professional Publication Subscriptions. I am sure we are all aware of the budget issues and limited library funds for professional publications/periodicals. However, the university (and CST in particular) are "ratcheting" up scholarship expectations while not providing the most basic of resources to support scholarship. How can we be expected to stay current, submit grants, and write papers without access to professional publications? Perhaps I should clarify "access". Currently, the library carries only slightly more than a dozen journals in biology! What is worse, some of the major journals, e.g. Science and Nature, we only have access to physical copies for the current year and do not have electronic access to the current issues. As much as I might miss handling physical copies of journals, today's scholarship requires easy and immediate access to PDF's of articles. Interlibrary loan, while useful, is limited: you are not assured to receive electronic (PDF) copies; it adds a lag of days or weeks to read an article; and it limits the number of articles we can access. For a typical NSF grant, I use hundreds of references. Surely ILL is not meant to process that volume of requests for each faculty member? What I would like to know is why the UGA system is not a shared/pooled system for online access to professional publications. For example, I previously worked at Villanova University, a small private institution. They do not have the same buying power as UGA. However, they could offer a large selection of electronic and hard copy professional periodicals because they belonged to a consortium of private universities that pooled their purchasing power and provided equal access to all member institutions. This has implications for both teaching and scholarship."

The charge to the Library Committee:

1) Consider the perspective provided above.

2) Address this perspective in whatever way you feel is best. All options in addressing the concerns above ought to be considered possible at this stage, including simply outlining what is available and leaving it at that, or going as far as suggesting a new system or structure to ameliorate any problems.

Please understand that it is not your responsibility to answer every senator's questions on publications and subscriptions. However, the Senate Steering Committee believed this perspective may be more widespread than one senator.

This charge is not time-urgent. However, please leave enough time such that the Senate can act on any report or proposal this academic year.

The committee asked Doug Frazier to investigate the questions raised by the senator and to report back to the committee.

V.  The committee established timelines for the call for nominations (Friday, February 4, 2011) and application deadline (Friday, March 11, 2011) for the Brockmeier award. The committee plans to meet next during the last week in February.

Meeting adjourned at 10:45 a.m.

Submitted by,

Jennifer Zettler