I recently came upon the following passage in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, his first novel, written in 1980:

Muhammad (on whose name be peace, led me add; I don't want to offend anyone) heard a voice saying, `Recite' and thought he was going mad.

I'm sure you already see why I found this passage pregnant with suggestion about my role in today's endeavor. I thought I was going mad when that disembodied voice, with its mysterious North Carolina lilt not ordinarily associated with the voice of celestial command, asked me to come here and recite. And I do not wish to offend, preferring instead to stay with the solemn resolution the unfortunate Rushdie abandoned. I like achievable goals, and my goal for this afternoon is not to become the object of a fatwa in the Commonwealth.

I do take seriously the task of giving you an overview of the work of the Collections Committee over the last four years, of sharing with you a sense of how it works, what we think we have accomplished, and the principle challenges we think we face. I take that charge seriously because I am so impressed by the hard work and dedication I have seen from my colleagues that I would not want to misrepresent in any way what we have done. It has been a pleasureto have worked hard and long with people like Carol Pfeiffer, Kathy Perry, and perhaps twenty others who have been on the committee at one time or another. It's been a source of pleasure to see how quickly Connie has assumed a strong leadership role.

Let me begin by telling you briefly who we are. Then I would like to move on to a review of as much history as I think is essential to an understanding of the present; a brief description of how we do our work; a summary, necessarily somewhat subjective, of our key goals and the tradeoffs we face, and an invitation for broader input and participation.

Who We Are

The Collections Committee consists of the heads of collection development of the six doctoral institutions, who serve permanently, or as I have referred to it on bad days, a life sentence; and, on rotating appointments, three individuals from the four-year colleges, three from the community colleges, and one from an independent school. Currently serving are Connie McCarthy, chair, from William and Mary; Doris Archer, from Christopher Newport; Jim Deffenbaugh, from William and Mary; from James Madison, Sharon Gasser; Karen Hartman, Mary Washington; Chris Millson-Martula from Lynchburg, our representative from the privates; myself; Frank Moran, of Blue Ridge Community College; Old Dominion's Pam Morgan; Susanna Pathak from VCU; Jim Self from UVA; Ruth Stanton from Northern Virginia Community College; Janice Wade from Tidewater Community College; and George Mason's John Walsh. John Tombarge from Washington and Lee also serves with us because John has graciously agreed to head the CCM on business (more on CCM's later). Obviously given the rotating nature of the committee lots of other people have come and gone, and I am left with very pleasant memories of working with strong people like Laura Rein, Pat Howe, or Dave Hayes, who certainly made the long miles of Route 81 slip by faster.

A Bit of History

The Collections Committee's early history cannot be separated from that of the project itself. I won't dwell on pre-history except to note that VIVA itself seems to have sprung from the success of precursors like the Readi Project, from suggestions made by SCHEV and sympathetic members of the General Assembly, and principally from the pick it up and run with it initiative of a number of senior library leaders from around the state.

Very early on, before VIVA even had a name or a steering committee, a meeting was held in Charlottesville, where about 75 attendees brain-stormed and discussed possible priorities. The notes Suzanne Freeman took as recorder for the working group on collection development and acquisitions reflect the following axioms or principles:

1. Make all selections in close partnership with technical staff;
2. Look for early successes;
3. Serve a broad mixture of clientele; cover the basic needs first, possibly
including a full-text encyclopedia;
4. Gophers (yes, gophers) or World Wide Web resources should not duplicate existing resources.

The one handout I have given you is a somewhat dated "Principles and Selection Criteria," which still represents fairly well the goals we seek to achieve. This document was posted to the VIVA listserv several times as a call for comments. Carol also issued several general calls for suggestions and made sure that we acted on the best of those as funds became available.

Our key early purchases included the Chadwyck-Healey fulltext resources that grew out of some earlier cooperation among the doctorals, and which we bought in part because we wanted something we could own forever, should VIVA turn out to be a short-term mechanism for pooled funding of subscriptions, all of which would disappear with the next budget crisis; First Search, for broad coverage of lots of disciplines; and the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Right away with these we felt we made made good progress on our goals to achieve some sort of early success so as to build momentum and to provide good general bibliographic coverage.

I was the individual assigned to giving FirstSearch extensive research, gathering comments, and bringing a recommendation to the committee. Ultimately -- this is late `94, early `95 -- we decided to recommend twenty simultaneous accounts providing access to the base package (WorldCat, ArticleFirst, ContentsFirst, ERIC, GPO, and Medline), MLA, Periodicals Abstracts, Biological and Agricultural Index, Applied Science and Technology Index, and ABI-INFORM. At the time MLA was a bargain price of $18,750. ABI-INFORM was already a stretch at $67,320. We ran some pretty extensive "battle of the database" comparisons of hypothetical searches to weigh Periodicals Abstracts off against the sum of the various Wilson data bases, Biological and Agricultural Index against Biology Digest, and Applied Sci/Tech against Concise Engineering Index. Our original approach to FirstSearch in general was to buy ports and subscriptions, which seemed to spread our dollars in a more predictable and equitable manner than the purchase of large blocks of searches. With no idea of what the volume would be, I doubt we would have had the courage to start off with search blocks.

Because I was less involved personally with the Encyclopedia Brittanica and InfoTrac procurements I remember them less well, but clearly they helped to fulfill important aspects of our original goals. Between IAC and FirstSearch we pretty well had something there for everyone, sometimes with full text behind the citation, on services that were relatively reliable and that we didn't need to mount ourselves. Obviously as soon as we were able to start getting the InfoTrac products we no longer needed Periodicals Abstracts, so we cancelled it on FirstSearch. This is notable as a precedent.

During 1996/97, Carol asked Walter Newsome as the coordinator of a regular meeting of documents librarians within the state to develop a prioritized list of the resources they would like us to buy. We did buy their top two candidates: STAT-USA and CIS Congressional Compass.

I really can no longer reconstruct a chronological sequence for our other key acquisitions, but that's not critical. Let me comment briefly on a few. IDEAL came about because Academic had an attractive package it was shopping among consortia, ours being one of the first, for cost-effective access to electronic journals. We all knew this would be the future, and felt we could best enter it together. The first pricing approach gave us actual disincentives for cancelling, but now we have fine-tuned to something that allows us to pay a little more for both print and electronic, or a little less than before for print only. We realize Ideal has introduced something of a hassle in terms of understanding the package and implementing its implications for financial transfers between VIVA and its member institutions.

Project Muse was chosen not only as a complement to IDEAL, but because it came from a university press. Though not addressed within our original criteria, we have all been concerned that universities and scholarly societies regain control of the intellectual property we generate, and other things being approximately equal we will always prefer to encourage such endeavors rather than to feed the growing Elsevier-Reed-North-Holland-Pergamon-CIS-Engineering Information-Beilstein octopus. MathSciNet was chosen in part because it came from a scientific society trying to do the right thing, and partly because it was a neat and useful product at a fair price. After a great deal of price negotiation we decided that Cambridge Scientific gave us bibliographic access we lacked on the life science side. The choice of PCI grew out of our past successes with Chadwyck-Healey and out of the desire to do something useful to humanists with an interest in the past. The various Gale resources extended our reference collections into important areas not really addressed by the encyclopedia.

As I have mentioned the reasons for many of these acquisitions, a number of implicit criteria have emerged. Let's make them a little more explicit. A rough balance among disciplines is certainly one of them. As already indicated, a desire to be not only a player but in a small way a shaper of emerging non-commercial modes of scholarly and scientific communication is another. We should also mention opportunism. It's very fine to describe the set of resources that the ideal consortia for Virginia would acquire, but suppose they don't exist? Suppose progress across academic disciplines or kinds of publication is very uneven? Suppose some products are outrageously overpriced, while others are a bargain? Who among us hasn't gone into a store intending to buy pants, and emerged very satisfied with two shirts instead? In all of this I really have to emphasize the importance of price. Those who use VIVA resources, either at the reference desk or as end-users in dorms or faculty offices, will naturally see the benefit side and emphasize it. The committee has worked to stretch very finite dollars and must necessarily stress the entire cost-benefit equation.

How We Work

We meet nine or ten times a year in Charlottesville. Typically we start at 10:00, work straight through lunch, and leave a little after 2:00. We work from an agenda, and we rotate the secretarial responsibility. Typically Kathy hands out an up-to-the-moment running inventory of our budgetary commitments (expenditures, encumbrances, potential costs of gleams in the eye) and a current calendar of significant dates including renewals. Almost every one of us is also a member of a CCM, or Coordinated Collection Management Committee. These are specialized subcommittees in business (chaired by John Tombarge), science and technology (which I just took over from Sharon), or allied health (chaired by Chris). The CCM's allow us to focus energies on areas in which the committee as a whole might not have great expertise, and each CCM has brought in some people who are not on the Collections Committee itself. Many of our key purchases have represented initiatives and research that began with a CCM.

Anyone is free to suggest that a new product deserves a look. Not anyone within VIVA -- anyone at all. We are completely open to suggestions, which can be given to any member of the committee or to Kathy. The job of learning more about the potential new product, arranging for a possible trial, and conducting preliminary negotiations with the vendor, is assigned to someone. As you all know from your local experience, innovative suggestion is generally punished via committee assignment, so frequently the person who brought up the idea is asked to run with it. We try early on to coordinate with the Technical Issues Committee, so that competence is built in up front for questions of machine compatibility, response time, etc. More recently we have started to think of this relationship as a trio, involving also a person from the User Services Committee. It's also important for established products that we keep up a trio, or Resource Management Team, representing Collections, User Services, and Tech Issues. Thinking in these terms is a new habit and I confess we haven't completely got it yet.

If we get serious about a product, we establish a trial and go out on the listserv asking that people try it and send us their comments. As you all know, "everybody's business is nobody's business," and to get around this we have occasionally asked that specific people be identified to give the product a hard workout and send us a full review. As we get more serious about a product we increasingly make sure the Steering Committee is aware of our interest, and with their blessing we start earnest negotiations with the vendor. We take the best and final offer to the Steering Committee, and if they endorse it a slow transfer of responsibility begins, with the role of the Collections Committee giving way to the work of Kathy Perry and of Iris Moubray of JMU, who works as our purchasing agent. Naturally the User Services Committee starts to take on more responsibility for documentation, publicity and training, though we no longer conceive that our role in this is complete at the point of purchase, and we stand ready to help as needed.

In general I would say we are seeing a shift in the balance of time spent on new potential products versus time devoted to negotiations, complaints, trials of improved or wannabe improved versions, and discussion of renewal for established products. The current RFP is an enormous undertaking for the people on that special committee. Certainly the Cost Savings, Value Added Survey, which has been critical in explaining to the General Assembly the value of VIVA, has been another example of the work load that piles up just to maintain what you have already done.

As you can see, between the meetings of the committee itself, the CCM's, the homework assignments, the special projects like this RFP or the cost savings survey, the feelers from vendors, and the daily e-mail, the total time investment starts to become a significant fraction of one's total job. Time management, time away from the home institution, frustration, stress and burnout are legitimate worries for this least staffed of all successful consortia, and a lot of people are concerned about it.




Key Issues and Tradeoffs in the Present and Near Future

Let me try to identify some of the key considerations that I think will occupy our thinking over the next year or so. It's hard to do this solely from the perspective of the Collections Committee because the really big issues seem to cut across resources, technology, and use. Keeping all this together is the job of the Steering Committee, and they do it very well. They can't do it at all though if each committee has tunnel vision, so we all have to think somewhat globally.

One key issue is to retain a strong relationship with the privates, who educate a significant share of Virginia's young people. So far we have succeeded in leveraging them into the FTE-based efficiencies and economies we have achieved, and we need to continue to do that. Vendors are aware that they have to offer large price breaks to large groups, and by negotiating on behalf of the independent institutions, VIVA can expand the range of beneficiaries, while increasing our overall leverage.

Another key issue is statistics. We have made a lot of progress in this area. It's always going to be difficult, especially in a stateless Web environment where the identity of the user is not constantly maintained, and where the question of what exactly to count has no obvious answer. If we are going to make cost-effective decisions, we need to continue to press on this front. Recently Kathy has been working on a password-protected statistics section on the home page.

The issue of whether at some point we should start hosting key databases is going to be very important. The Database Strategies Committee and TIC have worked to make sure, minimally, that we don't pass up any important efficiencies that might be possible in this arena. This is quintessentially an issue in which every committee must be an active player, and we know that we will be.

An important consideration for the collections committee is whether to continue to pursue union listing activities, with an eye to coordinating future cancellations so that at least one copy of each important title survives somewhere in the state. Our own CCM's are reaching somewhat different conclusions about whether it's better to continue this effort or to focus more energy on the conversion to digital resources.

I have saved for last the two issues I see as much the biggest challenges we face.

One is cost sharing. The citizens of Virginia have made some political choices that place tax relief relatively high on the agenda, and new funding for higher education relatively low. The less I hear about new funding in the state of North Carolina the less depressed I get, so please don't tell me what color the grass is elsewhere. At some point, and it may be very soon, we will be lucky if the VIVA collections budget grows in proportion to inflation. What then about everything else on our wish lists? What about the thought that we could get a really powerful search engine to give us a single interface to badly needed databases like Compendex, PsycLit, ABI-INFORM, and MLA? What about the incredible new power of the Web of Science? Are we to continue to say that institutions can either afford these on their own or do without, or are we about to move into a new mode whereby we establish an equitable cost-sharing mechanism and seek to expand our group purchasing power beyond what is made possible by VIVA-appropriated dollars? This is going to be a very big issue, one that I think we will be facing as soon as we know the budget for the next biennium.

The final question I want to address is stability. There are legitimate reasons to wish that as little would change as possible. We produce extensive documentation, we give user training sessions, we learn all the nuances of complex resources, and then we occasionally withdraw from a service. Our fixed costs in any resource are large, and I know there are people in this audience who are frustrated that we have made relatively major changes for reasons that seemed obscure. I think we all agree that continuity is very important, but also that we can't achieve it by keeping in perpetuity the products that looked best in 1995.

Sometimes when we have cancelled a resource the reason has been, plain and simple, price. You will recall that we started off with MLA for $18,750. Now it would cost us over $100,000. When John Walsh tried to get a quote on behalf of the community colleges alone, the figure was $75,000. This is simply too much. Yes, we want to support scholarly societies, but we want to support them when they behave like the American Mathematical Society, and not when they behave like Elsevier.

Sometimes our cancellations have related to redundancy, or near redundancy. I already cited our withdrawal of the subscription for Periodicals Abstracts once we went with InfoTrac. As you all know, redundancy is rarely total. There's usually some unique value in each competing resource. Our cancellation of ABI-INFORM is an instance of this kind of ambiguity. We cancelled in part because it was already pricey and had only gone up. And we cancelled in part because with Business and Industry on FirstSearch and the General Business File on InfoTrac, we had the business literature pretty well covered. Admittedly, ABI covers management better. But in the late days of our usage of ABI, per search costs were well over a dollar, as compared to 55 cents for most of our other FirstSearch usage.

I want to assure everyone here that we will not abandon IAC for trivial or capricious reasons. We could have renewed the IAC contract, but we chose not to because this is a highly dynamic marketplace, and we owe it to our users to explore all the options. We also felt that even if we end up keeping IAC, they would quote us a much lower price in a competitive situation than with a simple renewal. Project Confidence, still another project we undertook, lets us see that the overlap between IAC and its competitors is large.We are going to listen very hard to your comments, and I hope you will give us thoughtful feedback based on extended trials of all three vendors you will see tomorrow. Our decisions will be based on product, price, and yes, a desire not to change anything unless there is a good reason.

Where You Fit In

In a minute I am going to turn things over to Connie, and after that we will take questions. I hope that other members of the committee who are here will feel welcome to help answer those questions. But let me close by indicating some areas where I think all of you could help us out.

You can help us by:

* participating actively and thoughtfully in trials
* suggesting new products
* volunteering to work on VIVA committees
* making sure that the documentation and updates we send out reach end users
* mentioning VIVA's successes to those who have influence on our campuses or in the General Assembly.

I hope that you will do each of these things. VIVA's strength comes from the active engagement of the entire Virginia library community. Thanks very much, and now I will turn things back over to Connie, the voice of Celestial Command.

3/16/98