The Virtual Library of Virginia


VIVA Steering Committee
Thursday, September 15, 2005
University of Mary Washington
Fredericksburg, VA

MINUTES

Attendance: Present: Ralph Alberico, Robin Benke, Gene Damon, Dave Hayes, John Jaffe, Mary Mayer-Hennelly, Connie McCarthy, Virginia O'Herron, Kathy Perry, Don Samdahl, John Ulmschneider, and John Zenelis. Also Present: Don Kenney (Virginia Tech) and Eric Rector (VIVA). Absent: Eileen Hitchingham, Elsie Stephens Weatherington, and Karin Wittenborg.

I. MINUTES
The June 9, 2005 meeting minutes were reviewed.
ACTION: The June 9, 2005 meeting minutes were approved.

II. PROJECT UPDATE

A. CHAIR'S REPORT (Connie McCarthy)

1. Connie welcomed Robin Benke back to the Steering Committee and welcomed Eric Rector to the VIVA staff.

2. Connie reported that she had joined the Advocacy Committee for meetings in Richmond on August 19. She also reported that Fran Bradford will take a leave of absence from the College of William and Mary to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Education with Peter Blake for the remaining months of the Governor's term. John Ulmschneider reported that the proposal for the 2006-08 biennium had been approved by the State Council of Higher Education at their meeting on Tuesday, September 13. The only question that arose in the SCHEV meeting concerned the role of licensed databases in a world with Google. The Steering Committee addressed the issue and the need to respond to the State Council and to institutional administrators with enough information to clear up any misconceptions people might have on this subject.
ACTION: The Steering Committee will respond to the State Council's question about the relevance of acquiring new digital resources in Google world. The Advocacy Committee will work with library directors to help them work with their campus leaders to get institutional support for the VIVA proposal.

3. Connie reported on the Steering Committee Retreat, held July 14-15 at Wintergreen.

  1. Cost-Sharing: The Resources for Users Committee is pursuing the issue of cost sharing and will come back to the Steering Committee with appropriate acquisitions candidates for the Steering Committee's consideration.
  2. Cooperative Print and Storage: Dave and Connie will bring information about Cooperative Print Collections to the December Steering Committee.
  3. Access: The issue of access will be discussed at the December Steering Committee, with the possible outcome being the development of an information sharing workshop in the spring or summer of 2006.
  4. The issue of digitization and institutional repositories had not generated any action items for the VIVA Steering Committee.
  5. The issue of multimedia collections had generated quite a bit of enthusiasm and Ralph Alberico had agreed to chair a task force to follow up on the possible acquisition.

4. Ralph led a discussion of his draft report on the Technical Issues Task Force on Multimedia Collections. The Steering Committee agreed that the project goal is to provide secure, reliable online access to VIVA multimedia collections for VIVA member institutions by July 1, 2006. The Steering Committee affirmed that the project would allow some schools to begin service of the PBS titles incrementally, rather than wait for all schools to be ready to distribute the streamed content. It was also agreed that the project would focus efforts only on the distribution of the digital format and not spend VIVA money or time on providing a physical copy of the content to less technically advanced schools. Instead, the overall goal is to assist schools in streaming the content. The committee discussed various scenarios describing different possible outcomes. The task force and the Steering Committee will keep their options open. The scenarios included:

a. VIVA license, vendor hosts.
b. VIVA purchases and centrally hosts the content.
c. VIVA outsources hosting to some or all of our members.
d. Each school hosts its own and VIVA provides technical support and training.
e. VIVA outsources hosting to an outside firm.

The Steering Committee agreed that the most probable outcome initially was that each school would host their own streaming content and VIVA would provide technical support and training to assist in achieving this goal.

5. Connie reported on several changes to committees:

  1. a. Robin Benke was welcomed back to the Steering Committee following his election to a 2-year term (July 1, 2005 - June 30, 2007) by the 4-year schools.
  2. Frank Moran (Blue Ridge Community College) replaced Sherle Abramson (Rappahannock Community College) on the Resources for Users Committee.
  3. Connie appointed John Euliano (GMU) to replace Ruth Kifer (GMU) for the remainder of her term on the Resource Sharing Committee.
  4. Connie appointed Cyril Oberlander (UVA) to be UVA's replacement for Jean Cooper as one of the top 4 lenders in the state.
  5. Connie reported that John Jaffe will step down as chair of the Virginia Heritage Task Force. Connie thanked John Jaffe for his long service to the task force and reported that Dave Hayes has agreed to chair this Task Force. Jaffe and Hayes will work together over the next several months to ensure a smooth transition.

6. John Zenelis reported that he has started the Director's annual review process with the Personnel Committee. He expects the process to be completed in the next week or two.

B. PROJECT DIRECTOR'S REPORT (Kathy Perry)

1. Kathy reported on three electronic votes handled in this quarter:

  1. Vote on June 2, 2005: RFP for general databases CINAHL, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, ERIC, and Medline awarded to EBSCO.
  2. Vote on June 30, 2005: New Acquisition of Oxford English Dictionary.
  3. Vote on July 15, 2005: Renewal of BioOne journals.

2. Kathy presented the VIVA Central Office budget for review and requested approval to hire a full-time administrative assistant. Although this will bring the central office staff to three full-time people for the first time in VIVA's history, the total administrative cost for the 2005-06 year is just 4% and the total administrative cost for the 2004-06 biennium is estimated to be 3.63%, actually less than the 3.9% of the 2004-04 biennium.
ACTION: The Steering Committee approved the VIVA central budget and approved the job search for a full-time classified Assistant to the Director.

3. The Interlibrary Loan letters for the document delivery allocations were mailed to the library directors at the public institutions on September 12, 2005.

4. The VIVA bookmarks were mailed to all VIVA members on September 2, 2005. Library Directors are encouraged to work with their ILL departmental staff to distribute the bookmarks within books loaned to other VIVA libraries.

5. There will be two important meetings in October:

  1. Eric and Kathy will meet with the Virginia Independent College and University Library Association (VICULA) on Friday, October 14, 2005 at Ferrum College.
  2. The VIVA Users Group will meet on Thursday, October 20, 2005 at the Virginia Library Association in Williamsburg.

III. COMMITTEES

A. RESOURCE SHARING COMMITTEE (Don Kenney for Eileen Hitchingham)

1. The ILL Community Forum was held on Friday, July 15, at Sweet Briar. The forum papers are posted on the RSC website. The Resource Sharing Committee thanked the ILL Subcommittee for planning and organizing the well attended event.

2. The Committee reported on their membership updates.

3. Committee business for 2005-06 will include a review of the need for an ILL Subcommittee, a review of the ILL Guidelines, discussion of the Resource Sharing web site, and a review of Ariel 4 implementation by VIVA members.

B. RESOURCES FOR USERS COMMITTEE (Gene Damon)

1. Renewals: The Resources for Users Committee recommended 10 renewals for the 2005-06 year
ACTION: The Steering Committee approved the following renewals:

a. American Mathematical Journals
b. AMS MathSciNet database
c. American Chemical Society Journals
d. Association of Computing Machinery
e. Cambridge Scientific Abstracts
f. CIAO
g. CRC Handbook & EngNetBase
h. Galenet and LRC
i. LexisNexis Congressional
j. Proquest Factiva

2. New Acquisition: The Resources for Users Committee recommended the addition of 4 titles to the IOP current journals subscription.
ACTION: The Steering Committee approved the Resources for Users Committee's recommendation to acquire 4 new titles in the Institute of Physics Journals:

a. Journal of Geophysics and Engineering,
b. Journal of Neural Engineering,
c. Physical Biology, and
d. Physica Scripta.

3. Cancellation: The Resources for Users Committee recommended cancellation of the Stat-USA subscription, effective April 30, 2006. The Steering Committee discussed the background to this decision, including the extraordinarily high increase in price, the lack of a consortial discount, and the availability of the information on government web sites.
ACTION: The Steering Committee approved the Resources for Users recommendation to cancel Stat-USA at the end of the subscription period, April 30, 2005.

4. Training Sessions: Two training fairs were held on August 3 at William & Mary and August 5 at Radford. Five VIVA vendors were invited to participate in the fair: Thomson Gale presented Gale PowerSearch and Literature Resource Center; Ebsco presented PsycInfo, PsycArticles, and CINAHL; Proquest presented Factiva; Oxford Online presented the Oxford English Dictionary; and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts presented EconLit and PAIS. Local arrangements were made by Pat Van Zandt at William and Mary and Gerald Gordon at Radford. Gale and ProQuest provided lunches and CSA and EBSCO provided breaks. The Steering Committee expressed their thanks for the committee's work.

C. OUTREACH COMMITTEE (John Ulmschneider)

1. The Outreach Committee met in Charlottesville on June 13 where the committee continued its work on the VIVA website. The Committee will work on the custodian mechanism for the VIVA Web pages and will also complete its work on content development. John Duke (VCU) and Eric Rector (VIVA) have worked closely together to bring the design into reality with a strong technical infrastructure.

2. The VIVA central office mailed VIVA bookmarks to all VIVA members as part of the Outreach Committee's awareness program. The Committee is still working on the branding initiative and will assess their work at the September 23 meeting.

D. VIRGINIA HERITAGE PROJECT TASK FORCE (John Jaffe)

1. John Jaffe thanked Dave Hayes for agreeing to chair the Virginia Heritage Project Task Force. The Task Force will focus on getting a grant proposal drafted in the next few months.

2. The UVA student encoder working on the VIVA project has spent 502 hours encoding 200 guides for 6 institutions (UVA, LVA, WM, VCU, VT, and Wytheville Community College). The cost/guide has actually decreased this year. Edward Gaynor has estimated that the rough cost per page of encoding is approximately $1.25.


IV. NEW BUSINESS
The next VIVA Steering Committee meeting is scheduled to take place on Thursday, December 8, 2005, at Blue Ridge Community College.

Steering Committee Minutes

Contact: Kathy Perry, VIVA Director
Last Updated 11/2/2005