Coordinating Committees

Collections and Resource Sharing Coordinating Committee

Progress Report, Revised November 21, 2008

Since my July report to CUWL, the Collections and Resource Coordinating Committee has held three monthly conference calls to track progress in and provide the necessary support for reporting committees and other topics falling within our purview. This report highlights progress in several areas and also calls for action on the January 2009 SEC renewals.

Progress made during the summer by the ERM Working Group was suspended in September due to the resignation of its chair, Chris Kline, from the Madison staff. After considering several individuals to fill the chair/Madison representative slot(s), the CRS added two members to the committee last week. Kirsten Houtman, Member Services Librarian in WiLS, has agreed to chair the group, and Andy Osmond, Electronic Resources Librarian at the Ebling (Health Sciences) Library will serve as the new Madison representative. As a result of this recent hiatus, the target date for the committee’s report has been extended to April 2009.

The Library Dynamics Working Group developed a training document for presentation at the CDC October meeting. This was to give campuses a refresher on how to use the product in analysis of campus collections. The group has been meeting to arrive at methods to use Library Dynamics for analysis of UW System collections as a whole. Our goal has been to make recommendations regarding target numbers of copies of a title for purchase within the state based on past use patterns and number of copies. We are also working to identify areas that display higher levels of overlap and low use to recommend areas for possible weeding and where number of duplicate purchases could be reduced in the future. The vendor wishes to refresh its files for 2009 by doing a complete reload by the end of this year. Coordination of this effort is just getting underway.   Misrepresentations in current files are being identified with the aim of overcoming these problems in the reload. Target date for submitting the bibliographic/holdings/circulation data to LD is December 1.  

The Task Force appointed to review and update the Periodicals Vendor Bid document in order to create a current list of authorized UW System vendors has completed its work. The final draft was reviewed by the Collection Development Committee at the October 17th meeting. Thanks and recognition are in order to the Task Force members: Chris Chamness (Fox Valley), Jackie Crinion (Madison), Lisa Jewell (System), Mindy King (Stevens Point), Lori Taylor (System), and Judy Wurtzler (Platteville) who chaired the group. Vendors meeting all the requirements should be known by the end of this year. 

January renewals funded by the Shared Electronic Collection. The CRS has endorsed the recommendations of the Collection Development Committee for renewing these systemwide resources: ABI/Inform with Images; America: History & Life; American Chemical Society Archive; American Chemical Society Web Edition; American Mathematical Society MathSciNet; Biological Abstracts; Cinahl Plus; Congressional Quarterly Researcher; Gender Watch; ISI Web of Science; Mental Measurements Yearbook with Tests in Print; Nature; New England Journal of Medicine; and, Project Muse.

Criminal Justice Abstracts:  By a vote of 8-4 this product is being recommended for cancellation. 

Three other resources haven’t yet been finalized for renewal:  
BioOne (expires in March)
Emerald (renewal tabled pending further negotiations with publisher over new price model)
Institute of Physics (expires in February)

During the summer Ewa Barczyk surveyed CUWL soliciting information from the Colleges and Comprehensives regarding shelving capacity, projected growth of their physical collections and the possible need to transfer some portion of the materials to storage in the future. The compiled results were shared with this group in November.

The progress report of the Working Group on Document Delivery is appended below.

Submitted by Richard Reeb (Madison), CRSCC chair

Other CRS members are Ewa Barczyk (Milwaukee) Ron Hardy (Oshkosh), Karen Jander (Milwaukee), John Jax (La Crosse), Lisa Jewell (System), Dina Kaye (Parkside), Lee Konrad (Madison), Lisa Pillow (River Falls), Tom Reich (Stevens Point), Mary Rieder (Colleges), and Kathy Schneider (WiLS)

UW System Commercial Document Delivery Update

In July we approved two major changes to the commercial document delivery program - we expanded the users to include graduate students and upper level undergraduate students, and we began implementation of purchasing cards for each campus coordinated by WILS. The purchasing cards enabled campuses to expand available document delivery options to any source available instead of only Science Direct or Wiley Interscience.

The purchasing cards, once fully implemented in October 2008, have been used more in the first month than both Science Direct and Wiley in their first months of availability. The commercial services used with the p-cards include Ingenta, InfoTrieve, Springer-Link, Cambridge, Informaworld, Metapress, and AMA. The flexibility and expanded choice appear to make use of the p-cards for document delivery more appealing than the Science Direct and Wiley options.

Attached are spreadsheets with breakdowns by library for:

  • Science Direct and Wiley - March 08 thru June 08 (4 months)
    • Total: $2,134 (Avg. $533 per month)
  • Science Direct and Wiley - July 08 thru September 08 (3 months)
    • Total: $1,828 (Avg. $609 per month)
  • P-card use - October 08 (1 month)
    • Total: $1,180 (Avg. $1,180 per month)

Monthly use (Wiley, Science Direct, P-Card combined):
Mar08  Apr08  May08 June08 July08  Aug08 Sep08  Oct08
$528    $638    $440    $528    $749    $375    $726    $1,180* (Doesn’t include Oct. SD use)

Total use of special funding ($40,000) since start-up in March 08 is about $5,200. By comparison, use of the subsidized document delivery through the British Library and CISTI for the same period (March 08 - October 08) was approximately $30,000. It has been noted before that it took about one year for the British Library and CISTI services to grow to the use we see today, so we are anticipating the use of the new commercial document delivery program to increase.

The three new services (Science Direct, Wiley, P-card) are being used primarily by the comprehensives, less so by the colleges. In general, the biggest users are also those who also use the British Library and CISTI regularly and have a history of using outside commercial document delivery services.

We have found that the P-card option has been the easiest for ILL departments to integrate into their work flow and begin using immediately, although it did take several months to make all of the necessary arrangements between WILS, UW System, and the individual campuses. Science Direct was quick to set up but has not seen the expected use. Wiley Inter-Science has been very difficult to set up, they have been unable to provide us with detailed use figures, and we have a dispute with them over what they claim we have used ($4,500) versus what libraries have reported. (The use figures provided in the attached spreadsheets are based on library reports.) 

We believe that these new programs have improved services where they are being used, they have drawn attention to ILL and have encouraged libraries to examine workflow and procedures with an eye to speed. We anticipate use to increase throughout the academic year.

Ron Hardy (Chair, Working Group on Commercial Document Delivery)
Mary Williamson (WILS)