Acquiring - Roles for defining collections for research and tenure/promotion

Acquiring - covers acquisitions and Faculty Promotion and Tenure

Mitchell Brown, UC Irvine (mcbrown@uci.edu)

The promotion and tenure process for faculty still requires peer-reviewed and print book length material, which they (ironically) don't use in their assignments -

• How do we justify their purchase with decreased use among the largest populations (i.e. undergraduates)?
  
• This affects our collecting because it contradicts our ability to reduce our reliance on expensive subscriptions.

How will libraries go about acquiring unique materials, assuming a UC one copy project, in order to create a collection for the entire UC system that makes material available to all campuses? Two of the larger campuses, Los Angeles and Berkeley, have been the campuses of last resort for expensive research material. As a system UC must address the questions of how much duplication on campuses is too acceptable and how catalogs (campus OPACS, Next Generation Melvyl) serve as discovery tools. For decades, UC has encouraged the acquisition of duplicate materials. Next Generation Tech Services groups are changing the way we manage collections. The "CDL Shared Print Steering Task Force Findings and Recommendations Report to CDC" is an attempt to find ways to make similar changes to how UC collects materials and take current collaborative projects to new levels. Linda Vida commented from the UCB Spring Assembly (April 21, 2010) on how each campus has an engineering program, necessitating an engineering collection. Should the system cut programs to save money? Campus planning needs to consider library funding when adding new programs; the library should be at the table when decisions to add are made. The UC campuses must cooperate with each other whenever possible and learn to cooperate even further. Another viewpoint is that UC librarians have worked out many cooperative agreements in the UC system, with Stanford and other research libraries, and this report might make honoring the terms of those agreements difficult or impossible.

Other questions for consideration of joint collections raise questions of electronic books and free resources.

• Is it time to have CDL negotiating consortial e-book licenses?
• What will be the role of open access material in building library collections?

“We must take care not to embrace mediocrity but continue the tradition of excellence.”
Posted by Linda Vida.
UCB Spring Assembly Discussion Topics Wednesday, April 21, 2010
http://laucassembly.blogspot.com/2010/04/ucb-spring-assembly-discussion-topics.html