Collection Development Working Group
ALA Annual Meeting
25 June 2006
New Orleans, LA

Present: Jim Niessen (Rutgers); Beth Remak (UCSC); Dick Hacken (BYU); Kate Brooks (Indiana University); James Simon (CRL)

1. Steering Committee Update

Jim Niessen summarized the Steering Committee outcomes. Some notable outcomes:
- Staff transition at CRL. The new GRN Coordinator is Judy Eckoff, assistant is James Hill.
- CRL's strategic planning in digital delivery, direction for GRN and Area Studies projects, and newspaper digitization. GNARP/CDWG can have an input in proposing projects, including collaboration with institutions in Germany.
- GNARP 6th Scientific Symposium Frankfurt (October 5-7, 2006) – jointly planned with the University of Frankfurt. See http://www.crl.edu/grn/gnarp/frankfurt2006.pdf for more details. This will be a great opportunity to meet one-on-one with our colleagues in Germany. Of note to this group are the sessions on "Area Studies: Comparative Views and the Prospects for Transatlantic Cooperation."
- The Document Delivery working group has been suspended until further notice.

2. Xipolis update (Simon)

As yet, Vittorio Klostermann has been unable to convince Metzler to restore access to the Kindlers Neue Literaturlexicon. Negotiations continue, but with little progress. Two institutions discontinued membership for FY06/07. We should consider whether we want to pursue a grassroots campaign to urge Metzler to reconsider.

3. Bibliography of Linguistic Literature (BLLDB) (Niessen/Simon)

Jeff Garrett arranged for a trial of this product, and 13 institutions are seriously interested in subscribing. It is being offered at a very reasonable rate through Semantics, the same provider of BDSL. Other institutions interested in the trial and/or subscribing should contact CRL.

An assessment of overlap with other linguistic databases showed considerable unique titles within this product. Is there a print equivalent to the BLLDB? Is there any relationship to Frankfurt?

Kate Brooks inquired whether this was handled at our institutions by the German selector or the Linguistics selector. Responses vary by institution – the collection is appropriate for general linguistics. Currently the interface is currently German-only, but they are working on English interface.

4. DigiZeitschriften update (Niessen)

Jim Niessen's discussions with Ralf Stockmann in Dresden in March helped complete the deal. It seems Ralf is the primary contact, though it is still not completely clear how authority within DigiZeitschriften is distributed.

The license negotiation was unsuccessful on Interlibrary Loan, and this deterred a few institutions from joining. It seems possible that we may revisit the interlending of DigiZeitschriften articles after the court decisions are made in Germany. There are considerable amounts of open access material in DZ that can be shared, regardless of the restrictions in the contract.

In an e-mail update from Ralf Stockmann:
- The technical contact at DZ is Klaus Kannwischer. He reports subscriptions are going fine so far.
- Content is still being added. Jim distributed a list of journals in production bringing the prospective title list from 58 to around 90 titles. Lots of good content in the humanities, but also in the sciences as well (math, science). New titles add materials in pedagogy, history of science, and more.
- OpenURL is close to going public.
- There has been some progress on the move to full-text search capability, possibly by the Fall.
- DZ intends to expose its metadata to OAI harvesting.

Institutions are taking different approaches to cataloging these materials. Chicago holds most of them in print already and is adding 856 links to the records. Wisconsin and Michigan are in process of doing something similar.

Are DZ titles available in the EZB list? Evelinde Hutzler's presentation at the Germanist Discussion Group focused on this resource and its efforts to provide a non-commercial alternative to the link resolver organizations. Jim will follow up. [Update, June 28: DZ titles are in EZB.]

5. Contact Partnerships

The contact partnerships will be a discussion topic at the Frankfurt symposium, and this working group seems to be the most logical place to help prepare the discussion. What are our expectations for these partnerships? Given the lack of activity, do they have a future?

In Göttingen in 1999, participants in the GRP working groups explored ways we could cooperate and learn from each other. The CDWG recommended we establish a grid that corresponded to the SSG system, and identify librarians in North American librarians that might interlink with the German SSG institution. These partnerships would allow for stronger cooperation among subject specialists and provide a conduit for information and reference for researchers and institutions in the US. It was also envisioned that the partnerships would provide opportunities for highlighting shared strengths of collections and even facilitate collection development.

The partnerships have not generally accomplished the desired outcome. Partnerships that have worked are ones that existed naturally before the GNARP effort. What might we do to energize the activity of these partnerships? Have we exhausted the possibilities? Is there still interest from both sides?

We have not had much active participation from our German partners in meetings or e-mail. Ongoing efforts to host meetings in Germany are admirable, but German participation is still low. Other factors may be limiting participation: the culture of library organization, budgetary constraints, others. We cannot be sure of the reasons.

James Simon suggested we have not exhausted the possibilities, in part because we have not been active in pushing an agenda on this in a while. Committee minutes show that no attention or direction has been given this element of the program since 2001.

The working group discussed a number of ideas and activities that GNARP might encourage among the partnerships. These include:
- Encouraging meetings of partners or joint conference presentations at venues outside of ALA (e.g., Music Librarians Association, African Studies Association)
- Establishing a more robust agenda for the partnerships, suggesting activities they might pursue. Some "blue sky" ideas:
o Exchanging acquisition lists to assist in collection development
o Developing duplicate exchanges with each other
o Pursuing joint digital projects in their subject area
o Engaging in joint training programs or internships at each respective institution or in GNARP libraries regardless of subject specialty. A session at the Bibliothekartag in Dresden in March revealed great German interest in foreign internship opportunities.
- Suggesting that working partnerships communicate their "best practices" to the others (possible article for GRN newsletter?)
- Inviting the area studies presenters at the October conference in Frankfurt (German, Jewish, South Asian, African, and North American studies) to explore possibilities of the contact partnerships.

The committee is encouraged to think about this further and communicate ideas over e-mail. Beth Remak will explore internship ideas.

6. New Business

A future possible agenda item for the working group: consortial purchase of subject collections of CD-ROMs in the Digitale Bibliothek collections (DirektMedia). These full-text resources cover a wide variety of topics, including German literature, world literature, philosophy, reference, special topics in history, art, music, media, religion, language, and reference resources. Northwestern has purchased various CDs and cataloged them, providing links to online tables of contents where available.

The North American distributor, Stephen Wolff, is interested in broader dissemination, and may be open to GNARP coordinating purchases. We could perhaps focus on subject collections, to make specific libraries more interested. The materials are not expensive, but coordinating multiple purchases might leverage discounts.

Members inquired whether these could be hosted on a server, rather than circulating by CD. Niessen was doubtful this was a possibility, given they are priced for end users.

Jim concluded his tenure as Chair of the Collection Development Working Group and handed over responsibility to Dick Hacken. The committee thanked Jim for his hard work on the committee.

Submitted by James Simon 6/26/06