afternoon discussion and Q&A

Moving to open discussion:

Schottlaender: how would we articulate the value proposition?

RS:The question of value is one that we face on a couple of different levels.
Print vs electronic:
* There's a bunch of questions now about whether we need to keep the print for preservation.
* For digital collections -- the idea that we're going to spend a lot of money keeping print for fixing errors in scans doesn't seem right; over many years
We might have changing digital file standards -- rescanning images to a new standard etc. But if we have reason to scientifically trust the digital systems that exist, then there's a question about whether preservation alone is a reason to retain print -- this seems speculative to me.

audience comment: what about google's efforts -- they claim they will be driving traffic to libraries. We don't yet know how digitization, leading to better finding aids and indexing, will actually increase usage of print.

ES: one of the major strides that is being made in the preservation world is focussing on the loss of content. There's a much higher risk for print journals that are print-only and have no electronic version.
Simulating outages: need to simulate an entire digital publisher outage.
Also: what about journals when the digital version & the print versions are different?

audience comment: I would suggest modeling a range of catastrophes -- will probably be more subtle than a total outage, such as losing access to a particular format. [Ed. note: I totally agree with this comment. PDF and the like are both relatively new standards and not entirely open ones; the danger of putting all our eggs in a proprietary-data basket seems pretty high].

JN: the speed of risk and recovery for print materials is very slow on both ends. The speed of onset of problems for digital materials is much faster, though recovery is also much faster.
And if we keep thinking about the issues -- most printed work today *started* life in a digital format. Do we preserve the surrogate or the original?

CM: Print & electronic deserve to be treated differently. Aggregate value over time will probably decline.
Most titles in JSTOR are held by hundreds of libraries; but for print-only journals, institutional holdings are very thin (and that means an entry in OCLC, not every issue!) Print-only journal holdings tend to be *very* spotty.

BS: so, people like Constance and Roger would do us all a big favor if you could do some research into what "print-only holdings need to be preserved" actually means.

ES: And when does it make sense to work on a network level? When does it make sense for libraries to participate in consortia? And when do we set up a "non-compete" agreement -- we don't have enough resources to do things twice over.

BS: this is all great, but individual circumstances at institutions can change rapidly. We might run out of money next year.

Audience comment: one thing that argues for UC as a system being useful as a node is our ability to act as a system.

BS: to continue to think of ourselves as a node on the network.

Some discussion amongst the CDL people in the room that I didn't catch.

Audience comment: the infrastructure to actually do cross-campus collective development is tough, ie. who bears the cost of selection tools, etc.
ES: Yes!

RS: A bit of history: the midwest print repository in the 1940s and 1950s, became the Center for Research Libraries. Has a completely different mission on the national level than it did at the regional level. So the notion that you can just agree on something and then it is stable is probably false.
(To the audience): what about duplication across the RLFs? Is the mission of the RLFs changing?

JN: what pulls resources somewhere? what creates a pull? The RLFs pull resources towards them.

BS: The other beauty of the network is it enables one to distribute responsibility over many players.

Audience comment: about the 1970 journals (that we might hypothetically toss the print of because they are all online): there are some things that are not really digitized commonly -- ads, covers, etc.

RS: that's true and we need to make sure that the digital scanning process is enough. some discussion follows about the historical record and a 1470 journal versus a 1970 journal.


The presenters discuss preservation issues. Photo by Min-Lin Fang.

BS: At the end of the day, we mainly need to make sure we *know* how people digitized things

Audience comment: what about lifecycle cost?
JN: the British library has done the best work on this -- i.e. you buy a manuscript, the cost is frontloaded; but when you buy a digital format you have to keep dealing with it.
But that is probably not quite right because the last period has been especially chaotic. Some digital formats are more stable than others (i.e., we've got ASCII text down). Over time preservation has meant preserving something in a media -- stone tablets, etc. We don't worry about the languages the content is in.
But in digital preservation it's reversed: the storage media is very cheap, but we worry a lot about how to interpret the data. The digital problem is "forgetting how to speak the language."

Audience comment: I'm wondering how you think the UC and CDL is an *impediment* to collection development. What does anyone from the CDL think of collaborating with the CSUs and comm colleges?
Ivy Anderson (CDL): Hathi trust is high level collab & we discovered 60% overlap
ES: there are facets to that question -- e.g. for government or regional information, collaboration makes a lot of sense. Also other libraries may want access to our collections.
As for backup print copies; we can't do that for the entire academic world, but we can do that for the UCs.

BS: The Hathi trust -- I was glad the UCs joined because I think we have much more expertise in digital preservation than they do.

JN: digital preservation is an area of expertise that we have that google, barnes & noble etc do not. And we have specific areas of expertise -- i.e. I sent wax cylinders for preservation from UCLA to UCSB. If we look around the UCs I think we'll find a lot of such areas of expertise where we can pool and share our resources.

LAUC morning program Q&A

Q: (for Constance): Circulation doesn't tell the whole story of how our collections are used, right? (reference, photocopying, etc).
A: (CM): yes, of course; but in our data we did make an effort to supress the non-circulating part of the collection.
A: (Jake Nalder): one of the things we're looking at in UCLA is use, and we can always find some indication of use -- whether it's scribbling in the margins or a digital marker. The number of pristine books are next to none.
At NYPL we did a condition survey, condition related to use -- and we couldn't get anything. If you put books in front of people, they all get use.
A: (CM): It's interesting how use varies across collections. The ARLs have the lowest circulation percentage.

Q: Uniqueness factor -- are we buying & preserving the wrong things? I.E. if smaller universities have materials that are unique, they are not being looked at for preservation as much. Are there efforts to do this?
A:(CM): we've found within the community that there is a kind of preservation mandate & infrastructure. The independent research universities have enormously rich research collections and they don't have infrastructure to do preservation, but they also don't feel a mandate to get rid of their print collections.
A:(JN): our conception of preservation as an institutional mission is very much out of scale with our resources to do that work or implement that policy. We are used to managing collections of durable objects that suffer damage very gracefully. "Books are just embarrassingly durable." But one of the concerns that comes up during shared print is "hot potato preservation" -- you wake up one morning & realize you're the institution with the last copy of something. And we are working on preserving some of the wrong things and not focussing on rare things, etc. But preservation continues unbeholden to faculty work, etc.

Q: I was astonished by some of the overlap between collections. Is this a historical phenomenon? I suspect that overlap is greater now than it used to be because of vendors. This is of particular concern given our low budgets for purchasing. I would say we should be very careful and think about consortial purchasing.
A:(CM): I would concur that approval plans have helped produce redundancy. They are convenient but also undercutting our ability to seek out uniqueness. That has certainly been the case in Ohiolink, where even trying to do cooperative collection development. But we have also learned is that seeking out unique items is a lot of work and in an age of streamlining workflows difficult to do.
A:(JN): we spend a lot of effort on redundant materials but not enough on unique materials -- ie. on cataloging records for the same item from two UCs, but not on unique foreign language newspapers.

Q:(for Roger): in the faculty surveys, were results age-related? Do younger faculty support getting rid of print more?
A: we all expect that, but broadly speaking no. By contrast, the biggest differences we see are by discipline -- humanities vs science etc.

Q: (for Emily): At UCSD I've had the experience of talking about shared print with collegues, and we are talking about entirely different things -- so there is a large need to pin down definitions and goals.
A:(ES): We mean very different things when we use the same terms, but also when we're doing the work (is a lack of covers ok?) Ultimately those standards will lead to a definition of what we trust. In other words, once we've built that archive, will the remaining campuses weed their copies because they trust the archive enough? E.G., physical condition and completeness are very different metrics, but are often conflated.

Comment: and campuses may be feeling different pressures -- i.e. one campus may be running out of room.
ES: and doing shared print work costs money and implies incremental space savings, but space crises tend to come very quickly.

Committee reports

Next up is committee reports. Note: all of the reports from last year have been posted on the website

* Sam Dunlap reported for Research & Professional Development:
* special charge for streamlined research funds
* RPD developed a minigrant program and submitted it to Gary Lawrence; the report outlines the convoluted process of how this proposal is making its way through the bureaucracy of UCOP.

* Sam also reported for the Nominations committee, on behalf of Bob Heyer-Gray: the committee is now formed.

* Shannon Supple reported for Resource Sharing -- their report is online, and please contact Shannon with any questions.

* Chimene Tucker reported from the Diversity committee
* Diversity was charged with figuring out recruitment and retention issues. This charge was problematic, because it was part of the bylaws that were never approved, so the ULs wondered if we really had the right to ask questions about it.
* In the end, the diversity committee was not able to get any information or complete their survey.

Questions: (all about the diversity committee's report)

Q: wasn't recruitment and retention a concern for the ULs?
A: At some point it may have been... but in between then & the committee working on the charge, it turned into a non-issue for the ULs.

Q: what's the new plan for the committee?
A: depends on the charge from the new LAUC President.

Sam notes that the survey (and past charge) is very much wrapped up in the bylaws issue, which he will discuss in his presidential report.

Q: we have done surveys before, right?
A: (from Sam): we have done many surveys before, and they always show the same issues: cost of housing & higher salaries elsewhere affect recruitment & retention.
A: (from Shannon): those surveys were of the members; this survey was meant to be of administration information

Comment: part of it was that many of these factors are already known; but we don't know the next step.

Q: isn't doing exit interviews part of our contract, but this hasn't been consistently done
A:(from Sam): that's a good question, we can discuss it.

The attendees in the Lange Room. Photo by Min-Lin Fang.

Questions for Brian

Note: I didn't get good notes on all of the recommendations (controversial and not) that he mentioned; but it would be worthwhile looking at the slides after they get posted.

questions for Brian...

q) As much as Google was involved, did they focus on things that were not text?

a) They actually focussed a lot on text, particularly the implications of millions of digitized texts (google books)

It was really OCLC that was pushing the non-textual issue


q) Regardless of LC's approach, are there any implications for local or UC actions?

a) taking fuller and earlier advantage of acquisitions vendors biblibliographic info (e.g. onix data). How do we produce native XML?

Integrating acquisitions and cataloging depts more is natural; and parsing the overall responsbility for particular kinds of materials is something we've flirted with but never really done well. SCP might help us with that.

q) could you comment on the recommendation to strengthen the LIS profession via library schools?

a) the head of the committee was an LIS professor... we went back and forth about recommendations on teaching cataloging; the ALA office of accreditation included a requirement that "information organization" broadly construed be a requirement for accreditation. Also: wouldn't it be nice if we worked with the LIS researchers to work on research projects that were actually helpful in the working library world?

more quesitons re: oclc

questions

question: who's it going to tax?
SD: it's going to tax OCLC, not CDL, for performance

q: why do there have to be ten interfaces for each campus plus a central one? It seems like deciding on a single interface would be good.

PM: If you come in from UCI the system will know via IP, and the UCI results will come to the top. BUT the basic interface will look the same. Branding will be within a framework, maybe color etc.

q: The ILL usage for UW was interesting -- I wonder if b/c there are sometimes dup records -- were people making ILL requests that UW actually had?
BJ: there's a small amount of that, but not a lot.

BHG: seems like including articles would prompt a lot of ILLs too.

q) will there be an alerts feature in local worldcat? LIke SDI?
PM: don't know. BJ doesn't recall hearing about it.

q) have you been noticing a decline in the usage of databases because of this?
bj) we'll been seeing decline for years -- I don't think it's affected that.

q) will this force us to choose the OCLC / firstsearch platform in order to integrate those databases into the product?
BJ: we don't have any firstsearch dbs so i don't think so

q) what about the functionality for the researchers i.e. the faculty? where do the researchers go when they actually need an advanced catalog? they don't need to go to google.

pm: we're not trying to compete w/ googe, much more interesting in local stuff. Where do the users go? interesting question. The other thing is this is only a replacement for melvly so we are keepin gthe local opacs etc.

bj: a great researcher anectdote -- we got a note from someone who had found an arabic lang video in worldcat local. He said "I've been looking for this for years -- I found the record once and could never find it again. Now, you can get it for me."

BHG: note that we don't know where they are starting NOW. Usability studies are needed.
PM: Felicia Poe has done some research on this -- she found that a lot of people actually started at Amazon.

q) have reuqests for in-process materials gone down since those things aren't recognized in OCLC?

bJ) don't know.

q) why did OCLC strip out a bunch fo fields/content from the records?
BJ) from a belief that a lot of the record was meaningless to for end users. Might not be true for different populations ... e.g. searching for Harry Potter is different from searching for academic music scores.

q) assessment of FRBRization -- did that come up as one of the assessment criteria?
bj) sort of -- the usability didn't really cover it.

q) why the test b/f request / elinks is not ready? why not wait?
pm) we are impatient. We wanted to get used to things not being perfect, we didn't want to wait, and we wanted to see what a major upgrade in the middle of a pilot worked. WE didn't want to delay beyond april.

q) when the pilot goes live -- does old melvyl disappear? if not, then how do we know if people are going to actually use the pilot?
sd/pm) no, but we don't know exactly what will happen. Local rollouts may disappear.

Pm) I'm planning on running melvyl for at least another two years.

q) which campuses are running the pilot?
a) it'll be all the campuses. trying to get all the ils's wroked out, at least. -- B, SD, UCLA

q) is there a name for the pilot.
sd) right now -- "next generation melvyl" we want to keep that branding/idea

suggestion: MELVYL II
("son of Melvyl" -- ed?)

q) if melvyl goes for two years, ok -- but what if this doesn't fly? What happens if it doesn't work?
a) we assume that UC would come together and decide what we want to do next.

Also: part of the motivation is that Aleph won't do what we want
PM: takes a lot of work to upgrade Aleph/Melvyl....

q) some of the BSTF reports talked about how data might not be well represented in OCLC? Are we going to continute to work to improve access to that kind of data in the pilot? Ie is the BSTF work going to be continuing despite the fact that we have a pilot up now as well?

SD) I don't know -- there is a group that's looking to see if Map/GIS data will work well in local worldcat.. .
PM) the exec team was very clear that we can't do everything that was brought up in the bSTF, so they said that they will focus on the front end discovery tool (i.e. the open catalog).

followup: it'd be nice to know what recommendations of the BSTF got adopted and what went off to die...

q) on some of the quesitons, are there programs about what is going on at some of the campuses? Are there campuses that are having a horse & pony show about this?

pm) we come and present when we're invited by your ULs.

q) is there a deadline (to submit commetns via the survey).
SD: no special deadline... word was origianlly supposed to be distributed by the ULs so it might have gone out on different campuses at different times.

bj) the original idea OCLC wanted was that there would be one place to go for online access. But for print material, there was one place to go right up front. So we moved the request button down there whehre people are looking... so two interface design issues and then a more serious thing, FRBR.

q) is there any good guesstimate of how much of our stuff wont' be in the pilot? significant?
sd: they are matching on OCLC #s -- so if it doesn't match it won't go in. That's up to 50%... so there's some question of whether we want that included at all.
LIsa from missing records team) -- i.e. in process records etc.

q) is online holdings information going to be in the pilot verison? i.e. which campuses have links to online info -- whcich isn't always right...
sd) yes, but it'll have the world cat frame on top mostly for navigation purposes

q) I found it intriguing that article records are included... does it seem possible that we would expand database access via melvyl in teh future?
bj) OCLC has expressed interest in expanding their access -- obviously that would all have to be negotiated with the vendors etc.

q) are people using the worldcat.org web 2.0 tools (reviews etc?)
BJ) very little use. There's not critical mass yet, i.e. of the reviews.

BHG: I'm impressed by how fast it is!

q) what are your plans for special collections?
bj: we are still arguing with them about how much of the record to display. I'd like to see them just turn it all on..

q) is there a perception thqat OCLC will lose revenue if they display the full record?
bj: I don't think so they are mostly just coming out of the worldcat environment...

q) do you have transaction log analysis
bj: not yet...

done at 11am

Questions about OCLC Worldcat

-- answered by Bill Jordan, Patricia Martin and Sara Davidson


Should UCs be worried about the numbers of ILL requests skyrocketing?
There are 3 request silos. Local opac to summit requesting at one click. But for ILL you had to go to another system. They were losing them between local and summit and most to the hop to ILL.


Interlocation information: 94707 - is that a zip code? Will students have to know their own location zip codes?
It defaults to local zip code by plugging in the zip code associated with your IP address.


WorldCat will have articles from Eric and the 3 others. But will this preclude students from going to databases not covered by WorldCat?
It's something that's already happening and it's not really affecting it much.


Is there an option to keep including more databases in worldcat? Yes. OCLC is looking into it. They are competing with Google and Google Scholar.


Ease of use and functionality for our users - students and faculty. We can send anyone to Google but the research functionality is what we can add to searching. What will be doing that Google can not do?
We're interested in doing things that Google can not do. Where will researchers go is what we'll find out in user testing. We'll have to find out if researchers dislike OCLC and if they do, why. OCLC is only replacing Melvyl, not local OPACs available where researchers may wind up going.

At UW, a researcher stumbled upon a Ayurvedic video in WorldCat, can you get this for me? He was pretty happy. He found it once a long time ago and was never able to find it again until he tried WorldCat so perhaps WorldCat can be a big win. It's not going to work for every researcher but there will be researchers who will be able to use WorldCat.

One of the questions we need to find out is where they start right now in their research. Do they go to Melvyl? Do they go to their local OPACs? Quite a few people seem to go to Amazon according to one survey at Merced? Humanities and Soc Sci are more likely to start in catalog as opposed to the Science faculty. Most seem to also start more in Google Scholar as opposed to OPACs.

We also need to look at special collections and music collections in terms of the needs of our researchers.

How has the level of requests for on order and in process materials changed since they no longer are in local OPAC at UW.
Bill doesn't know but Jackie can tell you.


What are the implications of OCLC deciding not to publish certain information in records.
The broad universe of users found that info is not useful. Some of the bibliographic details are important to faculty and researchers. OCLC is trying to balance this still.

In the assessment of FRBRization it came up in passing in a usability test but the test was created badly. They thought they would search by title but searched by date instead and their item came right up. In Frbr, the local info doesn't go to the top which makes it confusing in searching for specific edition.


Why the implementation before the UC eLinks are ready? It goes to trying a new perpetual data and getting used to not having a perfect product. We've delayed the pilot several times and if we kept delaying, we'd never get there. There was an executive decision made. There is a backdoor way of requesting that looks totally different but there will be a way to request items.


Will Melvyl go away once WorldCat pilot goes live?
No. And we're assuming that all campuses place WorldCat will be placed on the front page and Melvyl hidden somewhere else so that people will be more likely to use WorldCat and we'll be able to get more feedback about it. Melvyl as it exists now will be run for another 2 years after WorldCat pilot goes live.


Which campuses will go live first?
UCSD and UCLA will go first but every single campus will have a local view and then there will be a UC-wide view.


What if WorldCat doesn't fly after 2 years. The consensus is we aren't getting everything we wanted in the BSTF report. Has there been discussion about a Plan B?
We can always go back to the Aleph platform. We'll keep Melvyl up and running and we'll proceed from there. We can go back to Melvyl or find another project. CDL keeps their eye on other new interesting projects that come up - Georgia Pines or Indeca and other projects - and we'll still have a Melvyl team and UC will come back together and decide what to do next.

There was never a promise that we'd get everything we wanted in the BSTF report. There is also not a product out there that would give us everything we wanted.

Aleph is also limited in terms of what we want it to do and that is why there is so much exploration going on right now.


Bill mentioned materials that are not going to be in WorldCat pilot. What percentage of stuff isn't going to be in the pilot?
15% of our records do not have an OCLC record number. That's quite a significant amount of record clean ups.


Frequently I have students where we go into databases with UCeLinks. If it says the article is not available online but we do have online access to this journal, often I will tell them to go to Melvyl to go look for it. Will that kind of linking information going to be available in the pilot?

You will see that screen that will tell you if it's available online. The functionalities will be the same. The screens might not look exactly the same but you will be able to link through t the article.


Has OCLC been able to provide data about just how much the tools are being used?
Some of the Web 2.0 stuff isn't being used. It'll be interesting to see what will happen when one person posts a review and then others feel more comfortable to do use it.


What are your plans for special collections and archival materials.
It's still very much in discussion. They're still tinkering with the tags available for records. It's be nice to see them turn it all on, and most users won't go down that far anyway, and some will. Right now we're telling them to use our local catalog because it's better.


Looking into a transactional log of the WorldCat catalog and see how people are doing searches. Can you give us details about how people are doing their searches and their successes/failures?
No.