Resource Liaisons Annual Meeting
Friday, April 20, 2007
Newport Beach Marriott

9:30-9:35 Welcome - Ivy Anderson, CDL

I'm delighted to welcome everyone to today's Resource Liaison program. In introducing today's session, I wanted to begin by mentioning some recent changes at CDL and how these affect the Resource Liaison program. As many of you may know, CDL underwent a reorganization last July, as a result of which we brought together a number of activities under a shared collections framework: including the Resource Liaison program. So I'm especially pleased to welcome you on behalf of the CDL Collection Development Program. With this reconfiguration have also come several personnel changes, including Heather Christenson's new role as the project manager for the Verde project within CDL Bibliographic Services. Heather couldn't continue in both roles and do each of them justice, and so the Resource Liaison program has had to bid her a fond farewell, although I know that she misses being here today and sends her regards and best wishes.

While CDL is in the process of recruiting a full time Resource Liaison Coordinator, we've been very fortunate to tap Bob Heyer-Gray of UC Davis to coordinate this program on an interim basis. Bob's very first job as interim Resource Liaison Coordinator was to coordinate today's program as well as the vendor report card survey, so we tasked him with a lot of work right out of the gate. We thank Bob for being willing to take this on and look forward to his excellent leadership.

Before I close, I'd like to say a few words about the importance of the Resource Liaison Program to the UC Libraries. As a system, we subscribe to some 300 databases and about 25,000 electronic journals. Clearly there is no way we could manage this large set of resources without the knowledge and expertise of the Resource Liaisons. It is critical to the effective management of e-resources at UC that we make full use of the skills, subject expertise, and close involvement with UC students and faculty that each of you contributes to our collective enterprise. The work that you do shapes and guides the activities of the CDL, whether in the form of renewal and retention decisions, ongoing work with vendors, or the selection of new resources. We want to hear from you …your insights and input are what make the system work.

Listen to Ivy's Welcome [MP3]*

9:35-10:00 Vendor Report Cards Report - Bob Heyer-Gray

How well are our vendors doing? Are UC users satisfied? Are there overall trends in functionality & services offered by our vendors that we should be aware of? Discussion of what we have learned from your reports.

Vendor Report Cards Report [PowerPoint Presentation]
Listen to Bob's Vendor Report Cards Report [MP3]*

10:00-10:45 How to Talk to Vendors - Moderator: Bob Heyer-Gray

Panel: Marion Peters (UCLA/SciFinder Scholar), Harold Colson (UCSD/LexisNexis Academic), Kuei Chiu (UCR/China Academic Journals)

How should you approach vendors/publishers in order to convince them to make needed changes? Success stories from UC Resource Liaisons.

Marion Peters (UCLA), SciFinder Scholar:

SciFinder Scholar is a huge database, over 27 million records and even more records for structures, 31 million and growing . When licensed by CDL in 1999 and launched for UC campuses, its arrival was significant because it was long expected and desired. CDL had been in negotiations with the publisher, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), for several years which resulted in a 19 page license plus 5 pages of amendments, including no walk-in use without appropriate signage restricting its use to UC users. It took a group of librarians across the United States, aka the "Gang of 34", sending a signed letter to CAS to move academic licensing along. The lesson to share from the CAS experience -- national connectivity greatly aids the ability to lobby vendors.

Chemistry librarians continue to lobby CAS at meetings where we gather, the Special Libraries Association (SLA) annual conference and the American Chemical Society (ACS) twice yearly meetings. At the CAS booths, 2 or 3 of us will converge on them.

There are several listservs where information about SciFinder Scholar is shared, including chminf-l, and another hosted by CAS, scholartalk, as well as the one maintained by the "gang". There is an additional CAS Website, password protected, for statistics and other SciFinder Scholar administrative issues. I started off early on finding out who my chemistry colleagues were on the various campuses. In addition, I have a whole network of contacts at CDL. Among them, in implementing UC e-links via the ChemPort connection on SciFinder Scholar, Margery Tibbetts at CDL was especially helpful.

SciFinder Scholar is a client-based resource . Users must have software installed on their machines to use this resource. One continuing item on the wish list is to have a web based product that does not require the use of proprietary software. CAS reports that this is now scheduled for 2008. Because of the issues with the client-distributed software, each campus must work closely with their IT department. CAS has been repeatedly requested not to roll out the software the first week of classes. The SciFinder Scholar 2007 release is scheduled for June 2007, so some progress has been made in this regard.

No updates as yet on reducing port restrictions as CAS has been moving at a glacial pace in adding new ports without additional costs. The UCs started with 18 ports, then moved to 21, and so on to 28. At the 2007 license renewal time Terry Vrable, CDL, requested 3 additional ports at no cost upon my suggestion, and CAS agreed to add 2 in March, so now we're up to 30. Back in 1999, I predicted we would need at least 27 ports. There is more work to be done-- additional ports are needed to minimize turnaways and promote SciFinder Scholar as a database "not just for chemists".

ACS/CAS and NIH/NLM PubChem controversy: Without going into details…when your vendor gets into a controversy with NIH/NLM, everyone is watching.

Harold Colson (UCSD), LexisNexis Academic:

The slant I want to take is looking at ways Resource Liaisons can magnify their influence with vendors, beyond being a RL working solo or through UC groups. Many liaisons gain extra influence by working through national subject or area studies associations. I've had some experience dealing with a national vendor advisory group.

LexisNexis Academic came out to most UC campuses in 1998. The national Solinet consortium contract included a provision that an advisory board sponsored by ICOLC be created. I've been on that board ever since. The group consists of about 12 librarians from around the country, different regions, different types of libraries. We meet with LexisNexis representatives at ALA mid-winter, ALA annual and we have conference calls in between.

Although we're an internal group that has been appointed, we've pressed LexisNexis management on a lot of issues over the years. These efforts, along with input received from separate LexisNexis focus groups and from their sales and support representatives, have improved the product step by step over the years. And a major system overhaul (Beta) has just been released.

Early on, UMI pulled hundreds of titles sourced to LexisNexis from the product. LexisNexis management had to deal with the reputation of changing or unstable content ever since, although figures now show that recent content adds and deletes have been relatively minor and the additions have outpaced the losses. As a content aggregator, LexisNexis is really at the whim of the publishers in terms of content feeds; "takedowns" can occur without much warning.

Early on, a member of the advisory board asked that specific content relating to GATT/WTO be added and LexisNexis complied promptly. Some of the accounting literature had been removed from the resource. LexisNexis has worked to replace that literature, and has also sought more international sources at the suggestion of the board.

When the product first came out in 1998, there was no way to search all the content at once. This "content Balkanization" was by design. The board has encouraged them to collapse the search categories. They've also worked hard on issues of source list problems, helping with navigational issues, and impressed the importance of branding (which LexisNexis was one of the first vendors to provide). We've gone after them on issues of exporting as well, as users can only download/print/email one full-text article at a time. We've worked with them on federated searching, OpenURL, and other features supported by database services subscribed within the academic community.

In the beginning, the resource was a prisoner of old architecture, and began to fall behind competing services in its features base. They have revamped this and the new version has just been released as Beta. The Beta version includes several of the issues this team has worked on.

In many ways, being on this particular body has been useful for users across the country in addition to the University of California. Not all vendors or products have official advisory boards like this one, so UC resource liaisons will need to look around or ask to find one of these great opportunities.

Kuei Chiu (UCR), China Academic Journals:

This is the first Chinese database (Tier 1 license). The China Academic Journals (CAJ) database is offered by Tsinghua Tongfang Optical Disc Company (TTOD), and associated with Tsinghua University campus in Beijing, China. This is like a conglomerate. For the US operation, marketing…the vendor is East View Information Services of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

China Academic Journals is like the Chinese version of Expanded Academic ASAP. There is a rival product called China Online Journals (COJ). For UC, 6 campuses also have COJ. COJ is strong on dissertations and statistics.

CAJ includes many subjects; we have the social sciences and humanities portion of it. Like many resources, we have some problems. The problem with CAJ…we've identified 43 core journals…the past 3 or 4 years, only 3 have been added. The vendors are trying to extend their base of offerings. The ones we are pushing for, they are very slow to add.

Also, there are huge gaps in some titles. For example, "Cultural Relics" only has 4 years of contents for the past 13 years (1994 and after), and there is no indexing for the missing years. They are also very slow to update the information. You cannot access the most recent issues. Sometimes, we have access problems.

According to the CAJ classification, Library Science is technology. Many of the articles are classified and are only available to domestic producers.

Other East Asian librarians report their problems to me and I work with East View to try to resolve these issues.

The marketing people know about the product, but they can't speak to technical issues. The programmers know about the technical issues but they don't speak English…language is always a problem.

Support has come from CDL (Wendy Parfrey). The guys from East View are nice guys and sweet talkers…they have like 700 libraries in China, but over here, we are a very small portion of their business. So, they don't take us seriously. CDL is very helpful to strong-arm our case.

Also, in 2003, the Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) is very helpful; you have a living document.

It is very challenging…when you pick a database to be Resource Liaison, try to pick a good one.

Listen to the panel discussion [MP3]*

Questions?

Marion, you mentioned speaking with the providers of the chemical society, does it help if faculty speak? Yes. The American Chemical Society needs to hear from faculty because they are not only providers of content, but users of the SciFinder Scholar database. Yes, it was the "Gang of 34" that wrote the letter, but the Vice-Chair of UCLA's Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry addressed a letter to chemistry department chairs across the U. S. regarding the November 1999 meeting of librarians with CAS in Columbus, Ohio. A number of chairs did write CAS's CEO in support our concerns.

Harold, in working with LexisNexis, did you get feedback from librarians in addition to faculty, students? A lot of what has happened thus far is not obvious, being more of incremental changes over the years. The major impact and the best chance for a big splashy response is when the Beta gets used. In fact, they are rolling out the Beta now specifically to solicit additional input from users. I would encourage you to do so.

Has there been much pressure put on LexisNexis now that Factiva is available? One of the things that the committee has done is to compare LexisNexis Academic with similar products. One of the things that rivets company attention is comparing LexisNexis Academic features sets with competing products from Factiva, Proquest, Newsbank, and such.

What is the long term strategy when there is selected content only? As an aggregator, they are prisoners to what the publishers provide. The feed that they get from the publishers is often not a full feed, only a selected feed. They are sensitive to the issue that many of their products are not complete full text.

Add more of the full (legal) version to LexisNexis Academic? This has been an ongoing issue since the product debuted in 1998. The publisher licenses specify that certain content is not allowed in the Academic version as opposed to the legal version. With the new Beta product, there will be some new features and content that previously were not available in the academic product: expanded legal citation coverage, collapsed search libraries, multiple full-text exporting, clickable internal controlled vocabulary, results clustering, company dossier, country analysis, and more. Even then, there are still things (EIU) that are excluded and are only available in the commercial product.

11:00-11:30 CDL Technical Requirements - Ellen Meltzer/Margery Tibbetts, CDL

A discussion of requirements for both database providers and e-journal publishers, with a focus on more recent changes to the documents and new format related issues.

Technical Requirements: Why We Love 'Em [PowerPoint Presentation]
Technical Requirements: Highlights of the New Sections plus an "old friend" [PowerPoint Presentation]
Listen to Ellen's Technical Requirements presentation [MP3]*

11:30-12:00 BSTF Next Phase: UC/OCLC Partnership - Patti Martin, CDL

Preliminary discussion of the explorations of UC/OCLC partnership.

BSTF Next Steps, UC-OCLC Exploration [PowerPoint Presentation]
Listen to Patti's UC-OCLC Exploration presentation [MP3]*

Questions?

The Washington roll-out…have they merged their records? Don't know…we'll get back to you. [Note: Patti is contacting her sources and will respond to Yvonne Wilson's inquiry as soon as possible.]

Will users have a choice of old Melvyl or this? Old Melvyl is not going away.

Will the evaluation of the pilot be by users or librarians? Everyone. We're working on the evaluation plan now.

Becky Culbertson: Just to show how fast OCLC is growing, they have over 112 million records.

Comment from attendee: How are they searching…one of the veterinary faculty says "WorldCat, I love it. I can see what we have and what others have."

Will we be able to see the search statements of all campuses at once? I think no because it is done dynamically. I would not say "never", but a least for the pilot, everything is not there on day one.

Ellen said that sound and audio are being added to the Technical Requirements documents…many of us have products that incorporate this…can we see these specs before hand? Margery's PowerPoint presentation will show these sections and how they've been edited.

1:00-2:00 OCLC/RLG Merger - Bruce Crocco, OCLC

What does this mean in the grand scheme of things? What does the OCLC/RLG merger mean for the RLG and OCLC resources to which we subscribe, for the Resource Liaisons?

RLG - OCLC Merger Update [PDF]
Listen to Bruce's RLG - OCLC Merger Update presentation [MP3]*

Questions?

In your conversions, do you break down what is driving most traffic? I still think Yahoo is the lead in this. Yahoo was typically leading the edge on this.

Growth? We've added new partners and as they get more of their records added, you get more growth. Also, WorldCat.org is driving growth. We're also starting an advertising (via Google links, etc.) campaign for WorldCat.org. This is what we're trying to do, drive traffic.

Has there been any consideration about buying Ariel back? Ummm, there are lots of possibilities out there. A possible solution you might want to consider is a document delivery system called Odyssey (there is no cost).

2:00-2:20 Usage Statisitics - Chan Li, CDL

CDL's New and Improved Usage Statistics [PowerPoint presentation]
Listen to Chan's Improved Usage Statistics presentation [MP3]*

Questions?

Is Scholarly Stats the entity responsible for negotiating with publishers? They put up a list of partners on their web site. If there is a platform you want them to include, you can work with them to do so.

Is there any interest in bringing in ILL data with electronic use data? One of the reasons we decided to go with Scholarly Stats is that they go out and gather the data. We're hoping as this system makes us more efficient, we'll be able to focus more on analyzing data such as the ILL data.

Are we putting pressure on vendors to have more granularity in statistics, e.g. statistics by publication year that separates usage of front and backfile? One of the downsides of standardization is that COUNTER does not support that functionality. I've had some discussions with COUNTER, and they are aware of this desire. But you can see the complexity of this data…the size of the resulting matrix.

2:20-2:50 Yearly Licensing Roundup -- Wendy Parfrey, CDL

Roundup of the newly added resources and a peek at what is in the works.

Highlights of CDL Licensing and Negotiation, 2007 [PowerPoint presentation] (password-protected)
Listen to Wendy's 2007 Licensing Highlights presentation [MP3]* (password-protected)

Questions?

Could you talk about the eBook task force? This is a new CDC task force just being put into place. The focus is not on product evaluation but on developing principles for licensing ebooks, whether systemwide or campus-based. CDL will wait for the task force to complete its work before entering into any significant systemwide ebook licenses.

Related to that…I was talking to our Wiley rep about ebook options, including book by book purchasing…do you advise we hold back on this? I don't think it's our place to constrain what campuses do, but you may want to wait for the CDC task force results to see if that is going to lead to systemwide approaches that are more economical.

In addition to the other negotiation, has anyone brought up DRM becoming a larger issue? Suzanne has told me this morning about AnthroPlus watermarking their content. We are seeing this as a trend although not a huge trend.

I notice that LEA (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) was missing from future negotiations...I was told that one of the titles was coming along? We've been trying to get Taylor & Francis to estimate when these titles could be brought into the platform. They aren't ready to do this yet and we haven't been given a response. Maybe 2008.

Just wanted to mention that I had talked to a ProQuest rep that Digital Dissertations with full text isn't as expensive as we thought. We might want to look into this as our ILL units are paying a lot to get these dissertations.

Are there any plans of getting a print archive for Taylor & Francis? Obtaining a shared print archive was a major negotiation issue with Taylor & Francis. We did negotiate pretty good terms on this beginning in 2008 as an option if we want to exercise it. CDC is discussing this issue and a decision will be made soon.

2:50-3:00 Wrap up - Bob Heyer-Gray

What Web 2.0 tools (YouTube, podcasts, social networking, wikis, blogs, screencasting, etc.) are you using to make licensed e-content more visible? Something to consider sharing with fellow Resource Liaisons.

Wrap up: Web 2.0 or maybe just Web 1.97? [PowerPoint presentation]
Listen to Bob's Wrap Up/Web 2.0 presentation [MP3]*

Teri Vogel has been teaching a series of Web 2.0 concepts for the last several months. It would be nice to put these things some place.

Thanks to Rosario, Pat, Diane and Bobbi at CDL who did a lot of the logistics work on bringing this together.

---

* If you experience any problems listening to the MP3 recordings, download the recordings to your workstation first and then open the MP3 files.