Collection Development Working Group
ALA Annual Meeting
26 June 2005
Chicago, IL

Present:
Jim Niessen (Rutgers University) (Chair); Helene Baumann (Duke University); Elizabeth Darocha Berenz (Center for Research Libraries); Nancy Boerner (Indiana University-Bloomington); Sam Dunlap (University of California-San Diego); Jeffrey Garrett (Northwestern University); John Jentz (Marquette University); Don Panzera (Library of Congress); Barbara Walden (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

1. Approval of agenda
The agenda was approved, with an amendment to discuss GNARP’s current collections portfolio (item 4).

2. Approval of previous minutes (distributed electronically)
The minutes from the Annual meeting in Orlando (June 26, 2004) and Midwinter meeting in Boston (January 15, 2005) were approved. They are online at http://www.crl.edu/grn/gnarp/CDWG_15jan05.asp and http://www.crl.edu/grn/gnarp/CDWG_26june04.asp .

3. Report from the GNARP Steering Committee
Jeffrey Garrett, chair of the GNARP Steering Committee, presented summaries of the working group reports from the Steering Committee meeting on June 24:

1. Roger Brisson, chair of the Bibliographic Control Working Group reported in his absence that progress is being made on the Harrassowitz catalog records. The cataloging is being outsourced and will include bibliographic access with subject headings to produce quality records.
2. The Digital Libraries Working Group, led by Dick Hacken, has been active in several projects. The German dissertation project is being regarded as a possible activity for DLWG.
3. Lynn Wiley, the chair of the Document Delivery Working Group, has announced her resignation from that position. She has served the working group for two years, despite many difficulties with the document delivery aspect of GNARP. Lynn implemented a successful trans-Atlantic interlibrary loan system (GBVdirekt) for 18 months, which was stopped when Elsevere threatened legal action. A separate issue was the Subito lawsuit, initiated by German publishers against the inter-German ILL and document delivery system.
4. The Collection Development Working Group, led by Jim Niessen, reports more activity in collection than in any other area. Jeff Garrett took the lead in negotiating several licenses.
5. Jeffrey Garrett announced an election in May 2006 for a new chair of GNARP. There will also be working group elections at that time.

There was discussion regarding whether the working groups should continue to be structured in the same way. Jeff suggested an alternative format of task groups being created on a per-project basis. The project chairs would convene at the Steering Committee meeting. The overlapping nature of the current working groups suggests this may work more efficiently. Individuals would initiate projects and form task-oriented committees. The Steering Committee would consist of a chair, vice-chair, CRL representatives, and ARL representatives. The existing CRL infrastructure would serve to strengthen GNARP’s structure. This proposed change will be discussed further with the Steering Committee and membership.

4. GNARP’s current collections portfolio
The tentative consortium proposal for pricing on Luther’s works from Proquest has been rejected. The pricing was too steep – around $40,000. GNARP expected the same discount as on Deutsche Klassiker Verlag or DKV , which was more than 50%. The discount Proquest offered is inadequate. Chadwyck-Healey offered a package of 5 German-language products that were not of interest to the membership. Chadwyck-Healey proposed a price of $1500 plus a $400 access fee. Jeff is interested in asking Chadwyck-Healey to offer a 55% discount on DKV early in 2006. Three institutions have said they’d be interested in DKV with MARC records at that price. Jeff will check with Chadwyck-Healey about whether DKV can be broken into sections that can be purchased individually.

GNARP’s current collections portfolio contains full-text material with DKV, a reference package with xipolis.net, and a bibliographic database with BDSL-online. Deborah Rose-Lefman is leading efforts to catalog the content of xipolis.net at Northwestern. Other possible collections for GNARP to consider include a German historical database, which UC-San Diego subscribed to several years ago. UC-San Diego ending up canceling their subscription after having access problems, but Berkeley and UCLA have continued their subscriptions.

5. Followup to the German Dissertations discussion on Saturday
Austin McLean of ProQuest spoke with members of GNARP on June 25 regarding CRL’s collection of German dissertations. McLean had been involved with EEBO and the full-text search capability of the project known as EEBO-TCP. There are approximately 200,000 German dissertations in CRL’s collections. There are some misgivings in GNARP about placing a paid access gateway in front of this content. The discussion revealed McLean didn’t insist on the notion of complete digitization of the material. The original idea for the project had been to include the records of CRL’s dissertations with ProQuest’s Digital Dissertations database in order to add extra bibliographic exposure to the resources. There are several other significant collections of German dissertations in the United States, including those at Yale and UC-Berkeley. Yale’s collection is primarily from the eighteenth-century and of questionable scholarly value. There are also questions about the market for this product, as well as what German digitization projects are already in effect. Dick Hacken will investigate what dissertation digitization is already happening in Germany. CRL will provide information regarding requests of German dissertations since they have been cataloged. The working group stated that there is more interest in supporting CRL’s cataloging efforts than supporting the ProQuest initiative.

6. DigiZeitschriften
DigiZeitschriften is a consortial endeavor, similar to Jstor. DigiZeitschriften contains 59 important scholarly German journals in a range a disciplines and a long range of years for selected journals. Dr. Elmar Mittler spoke to GNARP in Munich and San Diego about DigiZeitschriften, which is already a gated, licensed resource in Germany. 18 GNARP libraries participated in a free trial, which is ongoing. Some of the libraries, such as Indiana, now report access problems. Since the trial period began the content has improved significantly and is now reportedly at 95%. There is a search capability of author, title, journal title, and issue browsing, but no full-text searching is possible. Approximately half of the journals are in the humanities, they are available for printing as PDFs, and approximately 10-20% of the content is in English. The texts are not downloadable and cannot be emailed. There is also no guarantee of continued access to content once an institution ends their subscription. Jim Niessen asked whether CRL could consider “persistent access” to DigiZeitschriften as part of the E-CRL plan. The fee DigiZeitschriften proposed is $1500 per year, per institution, with no separate access fee.

Three scenarios for alternative pricing schemes were discussed:

1. Determining numbers of users within each institution by counting the number of German majors or the number of German professors. This scenario was determined to be flawed based on the members of other departments, such as history and philosophy, who would find this resource valuable.
2. A flat per-institution price for access to DigiZeitschriften, determined by GNARP, for all of the membership, as we did with BDSL and xipolis.net
3. A pay-per-use fee system, similar to that which is in place for Vascota. We employed this system previously with xipolis, and found it difficult to administer. Several partner institutions had difficulty with the requisite prepayment into a deposit account.

Elmar Mittler reported to Jim that the heaviest users of DigiZeitschriften were UC-Berkeley, Brown, Rutgers, Yale, and UIUC. Jim will propose to Elmar Mittler that the free trial continues throughout 2005. The group appreciates the dramatic increase in available full text content, and believes that openly advertising a free trial at our institutions may elicit greater interest than was the case in 2004. He will also enumerate the group’s continued misgivings with those flows of DigiZeitschriften that undermine its attractiveness for a potential license, and will encourage DigiZeitschriften to facilitate the implementation of Open URL. Such implementation has greatly increased the usefulness and use levels of other licensed products.

7. CRL and Collection Sharing
The Document Delivery Working Group is interested in gathering data from CRL about what German resources are being borrowed, and which requests go unfilled. The GNARP tour of CRL for June 28 was announced.

Submitted by Elizabeth Darocha Berenz and revised by Jim Niessen 6/27/05