CONTENTS
1. ARL Board of Directors Meets
2. ARL Membership to Meet With CARL, May 23-25
in Toronto
3. ARL Receives NEH Grant for Knight Roundtable
4. Delmas & Mellon Foundations Support ARL
Collections Meeting
5. Library Associations File Brief in Tasini
Case
6. LCDP: Call for Nominations, Applications
7. British to Investigate Reed Elsevier/Harcourt
Deal
8. E-Metrics Project to Field Test Measures
9. LibQUAL+ Launches Survey at 45 Additional
Libraries
10. ARL/OCLC Strategic Issues Forum Held
11. Japan Project Completes Document Delivery Pilot
12. Latin American Journal TOC Database Expands
13. Digital South Asia Library Adds Language Dictionaries
14. GRP Secures Access to German Online Resources
15. ARL Statistics and Measurement Program Update
16. Douglas Jones Serving as Visiting Program Officer
17. NISO Forum on Performance Measures Held
18. Wisconsin Releases Data on Chemistry Journals
19. Mellon Awards Grants to Plan Digital Archives
20. Applications Now Available for Preservation Program
21. SPARC Announces New Partnerships and BioOne Reaches
40 Titles
22. Coalition for Networked Information Update
23. IFLA 2001 Boston Conference Organizers Issue
First Newsletter
24. Spring Seminar in Oxford, England Available
25. ARL Transitions
26. Other Transitions
27. Honors
28. Ben C. Bowman, 1913-2001
1. ARL Board of Directors Meets
The ARL Board of Directors held their annual meeting to review the ARL program and budget for 2001 in Washington, D.C. on February 8-9. At this meeting the Board took the following actions:
a. Adopted the Program Plan for 2001 and encouraged the ARL staff to distribute it to the entire membership. (Plans call for distribution to members in March.)
b. Approved a balanced budget for 2001 calling for general fund expenditures of $2,632,600.
c. Renewed the employment contract for the ARL Executive Director for a continuing three-year period.
d. Selected Philadelphia, PA for the site of the ARL Spring Membership Meeting in 2005.
e. Approved a statement of ARL Membership Principles proposed by the Membership Committee.
f. Approved draft revisions to the ARL Bylaws. The revisions recognize the ARL Membership Committee as a standing committee and make other updates. A proposal for adoption of the revised Bylaws will be on the agenda of the Business Meeting at the upcoming Membership Meeting.
g. Discussed a proposal from the ALA Ad Hoc Task Force on External Accreditation and decided not to signal ARL financial support for establishing a new entity external to ALA for accreditation of programs of professional education in library and information studies.
h. Approved minutes of the 134th Meeting of the ARL Board of Directors. (Plans call for electronic distribution to members shortly.)
2. ARL Membership to Meet With CARL May 23-25 in Toronto
The 138th Membership Meeting of the ARL will be hosted by the University of Toronto Libraries and held in collaboration with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. The meeting will take place May 20-25, 2001, at the Four Seasons Hotel, in Toronto, Canada. ARL President Shirley Baker will chair the program, titled "Creating the Digital Future." Members will receive an email alerting them when meeting details are available on the ARL website.
3. ARL Receives NEH Grant for Knight Roundtable
We are pleased to report that ARL has received an NEH Director's Grant of $30,000 to support ARL and NHA's co-sponsorship with the Knight Higher Education Collaborative of a Knight Roundtable on Sustaining Communities of Scholarly Communication in Higher Education. The Roundtable, which will take place 2-3 March in Philadelphia, will bring together 30 participants to seek strategies for ensuring a vigorous future for scholarly communication in the humanities and social sciences. The meeting will result in an essay to be published in Policy Perspectives, the major publication of the Knight Collaborative. The Roundtable grew out of discussions ARL has had with the humanities and social sciences communities in the context of the National Humanities Alliance's Committee on Libraries and Intellectual Property. For more information, contact Mary Case.
4. Delmas & Mellon Foundations Support ARL Collections Meeting
ARL has received two grants in support of the upcoming symposium Building on Strength: Developing an ARL Agenda for Special Collections. The symposium will be held June 27-29 at Brown University. The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation awarded ARL $12,500 and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded ARL $25,000. Both grants will be used to cover symposium expenses negating the need to charge a registration fee and encouraging participation in this important gathering. A portion of the Mellon grant will also be used to offset costs of publishing a survey on the state of special collections. The survey will be published in March. Information about the symposium is available on the ARL website at http://www.arl/org/special; space at the symposium is limited to 100 participants with preference given to those coming in a team from the same institution; a waiting list is also being maintained.
5. Library Associations File Brief in Tasini Case
On February 16th the American Library Association and ARL filed an amici curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in the copyright lawsuit, The New York Times v. Tasini.
This case involves the New York Times and other plaintiff publishers
who are asking the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling
by the Federal Appeals Court for the Second Circuit that is in favor
of freelance authors whose works were published in
periodicals and newspapers, and then are licensed by the publishers
to vendors of electronic databases. ALA and ARL filed
this brief in support of the freelance authors and to help the Court
understand the practical effect of the issues at stake in this case.
The Second Circuit held that the Copyright Act does not give commercial
electronic database publishers the privilege of
reproducing and distributing the copyrighted works of freelance authors
in and through certain online electronic databases and
CD-ROM products. The court said that unless the publishers had
obtained the authors' permission, providing the articles for
inclusion in full-text databases was an infringement of the authors'
copyrights.
ALA and ARL support the appeals court ruling that calls for compensation
to freelance writers for the use of their work.
However, this ruling presents significant challenges to libraries:
because older works currently reside in electronic databases for which
seeking retroactive permission may be difficult, incomplete archival databases
may be a possibility. The brief argues there are constructive ways
for the Court to address the remedial phase of this case without requiring
the removal of articles a solution that would be fair to commercial
database publishers, freelance authors, and database users. It suggests
an equitable system of payment to freelance writers could be devised that
would result in a complete historical record in available formats.
The amici curiae brief can be found at: http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/tasini.html.
6. LCDP: Call for Nominations, Applications
The third ARL Leadership and Career Development (LCD) Program
will launch this spring with applications due on April 6, 2001. ARL's
LCD Program is designed to increase the number of librarians from underrepresented
racial and ethnic groups in
positions of influence and leadership in research libraries by helping
them develop the skills needed to be more competitive in
the promotion process. The year-long LCD Program consists of several
components: an organizing meeting, two five-day
leadership development Institutes, a mentoring relationship with a
director of a research library, development of a research
project that contributes to the body of knowledge available to the
professional community, and participation in three web-based courses offered
through the ARL/OLMS Online Lyceum.
The application criteria for the program consists of the following:
+ Over five years of professional library experience.
+ Member of an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.
+ Demonstrated and potential leadership ability.
+ Interest in pursuing leadership opportunities and positions
in
academic and research libraries.
+ Letter from home institution supporting participation in the
Program.
+ One-page research project description.
Successful candidates will be notified by the end of May and the
program will be conducted between June 2001 and June 2002. Nominations
and applications are encouraged. For more information see the ARL
Diversity Program website
or contact DeEtta Jones.
7. British to Investigate Reed Elsevier/Harcourt Deal
Britain's Office of Fair Trading announced last week that it was referring the proposed acquisition of Harcourt General by Reed Elsevier to the Competition Commission for investigation. Kim Howells, UK competition and consumer affairs minister, indicated that concerns about the deal centered on the group's potential market power in the scientific, technical and medical sector in the UK. The UK's investigation will delay the deal by three months. The Financial Times (Feb. 21 online) quoted a Reed spokesperson as "surprised and disappointed" by the decision.
8. E-Metrics Project to Field Test Measures
The ARL E-Metrics project study team has received comments from participating members and is developing a revised description and definition of the baseline statistics and measures that will be used for the initial field testing. A guide to accompany the statistics and measures for the field test is also being prepared. Fourteen member libraries have agreed to participate in the field test. The baseline measures field test is scheduled to occur during a one-month period, March 15 - April 15. Following the initial round of testing, two additional rounds will cover vendor statistics (May-June) and outcome framework and measures (early fall).
The E-metrics study team will provide a project briefing at CNI Task Force meeting in April in Washington, D.C. That briefing will focus on the study team's work on an outcomes framework and linkage between the baseline and vendor measures to institutional outcomes.
9. LibQUAL+ Launches Survey at 45 Additional Libraries
Representatives from the 45 academic and research libraries participating
in the spring 2001 LibQUAL+ activities met on 13
January in Washington, D.C. The LibQUAL+ team updated participating
libraries on the timeline and procedures for the coming months and answered
questions from the group. See a detailed summary of the meeting on
the Web at: http://www.arl.org/libqual/procedure/13jan2001sum.html.
Over the past month, the survey design team finalized the most
significant change in the survey (as compared to the instrument
used in spring 2000): the testing of a self-reliance dimension
of service quality, i.e., the library enabling self-directed use of its
services and resources. Ten new questions included in the survey
administered this spring will test the existence of a self-reliance dimension
of service library quality.
The 45 participating libraries will launch the survey on their
campuses on dates spread over the next month and a half. Additional
institutions interested in participating in the project in future years
should contact Kaylyn Hipps, ARL Web
Developer and Analyst.
10. ARL/OCLC Strategic Issues Forum Held
The 2nd ARL/OCLC Strategic Issues Forum was held 16-18 February 2001 in Tempe, AZ, with 104 academic and research library leaders in attendance. The focus of this forum was "Toward Rethinking Academic Library Performance in the Digital Age," and provided an opportunity to discuss some of the performance issues facing academic libraries as well as to examine the "Balanced Scorecard," a contemporary management model. ARL and OCLC will be planning another institute in the future that will again address a topic of particular interest to academic and research library leaders.
11. Japan Project Completes Document Delivery Pilot
Five representatives of the Japan Journal Access Project and nearly
20 Japanese university librarians participated in the
Conference on Improvement of Academic Information Access between the
U.S. and Japan in Tokyo on January 31 and February 1, 2001. The conference
was designed to evaluate the results of the Pilot Project for Improving
Document Delivery Services between Japan and the United States. The project's
bi-national evaluation determined that the project was highly successful
and recommended that all efforts be made to move forward to full implementation
of global interlibrary loan (ILL) and document delivery (DD) services based
on the ISO ILL Protocol. The National Institute of Informatics (NII) is
implementing the ISO ILL Protocol, which will allow Japan's NACSIS ILL
system to communicate with other Protocol-compliant systems used by North
American libraries. NII is aiming for a fall implementation of the
Protocol.
During this interim phase, U.S. and Japanese representatives agreed
to encourage "regular ILL" services. This means that
libraries are able to send requests via whatever method is appropriate
(e-mail, fax, Ariel, etc.). Libraries may charge their normal lending
fees and payments may be by whatever method the borrower and lender agree
upon. Libraries are also able to
borrow and lend books, but it will be up to the owning library to determine
if and how the item is loaned. For additional
information, contact Mary Jackson.
12.Latin American Journal TOC Database Expands
The Latin Americanist Research Resources Project's journal table of contents database, LAPTOC, achieved rapid growth in 2000. With the support of U.S. Department of Education grant funds, two Latin American partner libraries--the Biblioteca Inca in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica (CIRMA) in Antigua, Guatemala--augmented the database with 106 Andean and Central American journal titles. LAPTOC now includes more than 600 journals, representing access to over 108,900 articles from 15 Latin American countries. The 45 member institutions may electronically request document delivery of the indexed articles from the database. Links to the project journals' websites also have been added to the project website. For more information about the Latin American partnerships, LAPTOC, and other project initiatives, visit: http://www.lanic.utexas.edu/project/arl/.
13. Digital South Asia Library Adds Language Dictionaries
The project Selection Panel has recommended dictionaries for conversion and addition to the Digital South Asia Library (DSAL) site in the following languages: Baluchi, English, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Tamil, and Urdu. The lexical resources in these languages will be appearing on the site over the next few months. The DSAL website is located at http://wwwcrl.uchicago.edu/dsal/index.html.
The Digital South Asia Library web pages are now compliant with
the 1998 Rehabilitation Act, intended to make electronic and information
technology accessible to people with disabilities. The site follows the
access guidelines developed by the Web
Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
14. GRP Secures Access to German Online Resources
Through May 1, members of the German Resources Project have free
trial access to a suite of reference databases served by
Xipolis.net, a German data provider in Munich. Among the trial databases
is the electronic version of the full 24-volume
Brockhaus encyclopedia and the 20-volume Kindlers encyclopedia of world
literature. If the trial is successful, GRP members will be able to subscribe
at a 60% discount to the full palette of 20 Xipolis databases, which includes
the 10-volume Duden German dictionary as well as other standard reference
works in medicine, sci-tech, the humanities, and social sciences. It is
hoped that this will be the first of many GRP collaborations to provide
access to German electronic products at substantially discounted rates.
The Centro de Informacion Cientifico-Tecnica of the Universidad de Ciego de Avila (UNICA) in Cuba has joined the German Resources Project as an affiliate member.
The Collection Development Working Group has put in place American
and German contact partners for specific subject areas derived from the
conspectus of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. To date, 16 subjects
exist for which our Working Group has appointed partners on both sides
of the Atlantic. They are: Theology, Economics, Social Sciences,
Classics, the Middle East, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, North America
(history, literature, and German-Americana), Latin America, Jewish Studies,
History, Art, Mathematics, Library and Information Science, German Language
and Literature, and Philosophy. German partners are in place for Cultural
Anthropology, Geography, Engineering, and Maps. This project,
outlined in useful subject-based tables, can be viewed at, http://www.library.northwestern.edu/grp/.
Questions or comments
regarding the project should be sent to Tom
Kilton.
15. ARL Statistics and Measurement Program Update
(a) ARL is currently collecting data for the following surveys:
+ ARL Statistics 1999-2000 (received 120)(Please try to resolve our data verification inquiries as soon as possible preliminary results will be posted shortly);
+ ARL Academic Law Library Statistics 1999-2000 (received 66);
+ ARL Medical Library Statistics 1999-2000 (received 58);
+ ARL Supplementary Statistics 1999-2000 (received 103);
+ ARL Preservation Statistics 1999-2000 (received 80);
+ We are editing the data from "Library Expenditures as a Percent of University Expenditures, 1997-98 and 1998-99; and
+ ARL Annual Salary Survey 2000-2001 is at the printer (You can
download tables from the following location till the final
printed publication reaches your desk: ftp://www.arl.org/stat/ss00pub/);
(b) In production are the following surveys from data collected in prior years
+ ARL Academic Law and Medical Library Statistics 1998-99;
+ ARL Preservation Statistics 1998-99; and
+ ARL Preservation Statistics 1997-98.
If you need data and files that are not yet publicly available, please contact Martha Kyrillidou.
16. Douglas Jones to Serve as Visiting Program Officer
Douglas Jones, University of Arizona, has been appointed
a Visiting Program Officer for the Association of Research
Libraries to identify issues and explore possible outcome measures
that demonstrate the role of the library in support of the university research
mission. Mr. Jones will be conducting his investigation during his sabbatical
period February -- July 2001.
17. NISO Forum on Performance Measures Held
A NISO invitational forum on statistics and performance measures
was held on February 15-16 to explore directions and possible parameters
of the five-year review for the Z39.7 Library Statistics standard.
70 representatives of academic, public,
school, special libraries, as well as, representatives from vendors
attended a highly interactive meeting that aimed at identifying areas of
common ground where a standard is needed. Please let Martha
Kyrillidou know in what way you would like to see performance measures
and statistics evolve at the standards level. The Forum web site
is located at: http://www.niso.org/stats.html.
18. Wisconsin Releases Data on Chemistry Journals
The University of Wisconsin Chemistry Library conducted a detailed cost study of 157 chemistry journals last fall. The data is presented in five reports: (1) Alphabetical by Title; (2) Cost per 1000 Characters; (3) Cost per use; (4) Cost per ISI Impact Factor; (5) Cost per page. The fourth in a series of journal cost studies conducted at Wisconsin, the chemistry study confirms the relative cost-effectiveness of society journals over commercial titles. The following link will take you to a brief introduction to the study that concludes with links to the reports: http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/Chemistry/cost.htm.
19. Mellon Awards Grants to Plan Digital Archives
Seven ARL member libraries were recently awarded grants from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support planning processes to establish
digital repositories for scholarly journals. Grant recipients include
Cornell, Harvard, MIT, New York Public Library, University of Pennsylvania,
Stanford and Yale. Most of the projects will seek to determine, among other
questions, whether the archive will be "living" or "dark", whether a single
or multiple formats will be used, how content will be migrated, whether
there will be multiple copies in different locations, and who will pay.
Cornell's project will focus on agricultural journals. The New York
Public Library's project will also be specific discipline oriented.
MIT will address issues involved in archiving dynamic e-journals.
Yale has announced its year-long planning process to create a digital archive
for the
1,100 electronic journals published by Elsevier Science. While
negotiations are still in process, Harvard and the University of
Pennsylvania will be working with other publishers. Stanford will be
developing specific archiving software tools. The projects
are an outgrowth of discussions convened by CLIR, DLF, and CNI in 1999.
20. Applications Now Available for Preservation Program
The National Park Service recently announced the availability
of guidelines and application forms for the 2001 Save America's
Treasures Grants. Save America's Treasures is a federal grant program
administered by the National Park Service in partnership with the National
Endowment for the Arts that has provided over $95 million since 1999 to
support the preservation and conservation of our irreplaceable cultural
legacy. Grants are available for preservation and/or conservation work
on nationally significant intellectual and cultural artifacts and nationally
significant historic structures and sites. Each grant requires a non-Federal
match. The average award in 2000 was $319,000. More information and
forms can be found at
http://www2.cr.nps.gov/treasures/.
The application deadline is April 11, 2001.
21. SPARC Announces New Partnerships and BioOne Reaches 40 Titles
SPARC has announced its partnerships with Algebraic & Geometric Topology (AGT) and Documenta Mathematica, two Web-based, peer-reviewed math journals hosted by universities and available free of charge. AGT is hosted by the University of Warwick (U.K.) mathematics department. In addition to the free Web edition, AGT will offer annual printed editions containing papers that were published online during the preceding year. AGT can be found on the web at: www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt.
Documenta Mathematica, which is open to important contributions from all mathematical fields, has been published continuously since 1996. It is hosted by the mathematics faculty at the University of Bielefeld (Germany) and mirrored by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is available free on the Web at www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/documenta and www.math.uiuc.edu/documenta. As with AGT, a printed edition is published at the end of each year.
Authors retain copyright to articles published in AGT and Documenta
Mathematica and institutional users are authorized to
locally store and provide access to electronic versions of articles
for purposes of data archiving. Documenta Mathematica is
archived at the University of Goettingen, Germany's national archive
of mathematical literature; the European Math society
servers; and libraries throughout the U.S. and Europe. All AGT papers
are deposited in arXiv, the e-print archive maintained at
Los Alamos National Laboratories.
SPARC has received word that BioOne has licensed its 40th journal,
thus achieving a goal we set out when BioOne was first
conceived. This comes at an appropriate time, because as of March 1,
you may access the BioOne database
for a free trial subscription. (Please note that the web site is
not quite ready for prime time, and you may still encounter glitches that
will soon be fixed.)
22. Coalition for Networked Information Update
CNI helped to formulate new directions for the Open Archives Initiative, which under CNI co-sponsorship held two forums, one in Washington in January and one in Berlin in February to discuss newly released standards.
CNI is a co-sponsor of the ETD 2001 conference for electronic
theses and dissertations, to be held on the Cal Tech campus in Pasadena
on March 22-24. A session on assessment and statistics for etd's
will feature Sherry Schmidt discussing the ARL
e-metrics project. Information on the conference is available
at http://library.caltech.edu/etd/.
CNI's Spring Task Force meeting will be held at the Washington
DC. Hilton & Towers on April 9 and 10. The EDUCAUSE
Networking 2001 meeting will be held immediately after CNI in the same
hotel. See CNI's website for additional information and a link to
the Networking conference. Separate registration for each meeting
is required.
23. IFLA 2001 Boston Conference Organizers Issue First Newsletter
As announced earlier, the 67th IFLA Conference, will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, from 16-25 August, 2001. The National Organizing Committee for this conference published the first issue of the pre-conference "IFLA Express 2001." The IFLA Express serves as a newsletter for the conference and is produced by the NOC in collaboration with the IFLA Secretariat and the various IFLA Divisions and Sections. The IFLA Express will be issued twice in advance of the conference and daily during the conference. It provides the most current information on changes in the program or logistics for the conference. The newsletter is available at: http://www.congrex.nl/ifla/express1/. The second edition of the pre-conference IFLA Express will appear in June.
24. Spring Seminar in Oxford, England Available
Participants are being sought for a two-week seminar entitled: "Libraries and Librarianship: Past, Present and Future." This seminar provides a chance to study the history of librarianship at England's world-renowned Bodleian Library, one of the greatest research centers in the world. The program is sponsored by the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science and the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library. The seminar is scheduled for May 20 - June 2 and more information is available at: www.ils.unc.edu/ils/continuing_ed/oxford or contact David MacDonald, at the University of North Carolina.
+ UC-Berkeley: Thomas C. Leonard was named University Librarian. He served as Associate Dean of the Berkeley School of Journalism until he was named Interim University Librarian last year.
+ Cincinnati: David Kohl will resign as Dean and University Librarian effective June 2001.
+ Minnesota: Thomas Shaughnessy, University Librarian for the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus Libraries since 1989, recently announced his retirement effective September 30, 2001.
+ Texas Tech: Dale Cluff, Dean of Libraries for Texas Tech
University, announced his intention to retire effective August
31, 2001.
+ Modern Language Association: Phyllis Franklin announced
publicly that she will retire as Executive Director of the MLA
when her current term expires in August 2002. She has led the
MLS since 1985 and is a significant leader in the ongoing dialogs between
the humanities community and research libraries.
+ The University of Arizona Library will receive the Excellence in University Libraries Award by ACRL.
+ Larry Hardesty, College Librarian at Austin College, was named Academic/Research Librarian of the Year Award by ACRL.
+ William Gray Potter, University Librarian at the University
of Georgia, was named to a three-year term as editor of College
and Research Libraries.
+ Mary Jackson's article, "Meeting the Challenges of International
Lending and Document Supply: Learning from the Global Resources Program"
was named Outstanding Paper by MCB University. The article summarized
the six projects of the
AAU/ARL Global Resources Program and highlighted eight challenges relating
to interlibrary loan and document delivery activities within the various
projects. The article was published in the journal, "Interlending
and Document Supply," vol. 28, no. 2 (2000), pp. 79-85.
Ben C. Bowman died on February 1, 2001 in his home in Topsham,
Maine. He is described as one of the generation of
"bookmen-librarians" that led research libraries during their time
of greatest growth in the decades following World War II.
For 16 years he served in the Newberry Library. Subsequently he directed
the libraries of the University of Vermont, Hunter
College, and the University of Rochester from which he retired in 1976.
Following retirement, he spent three years at Johns Hopkins organizing
rare books and special collections. Memorial contributions may be
made to the Rockport Public Library,
Rockport, Maine, 04856.
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