Minutes of the Meeting of the University

The meeting was held in the Administrative Conference Room of the D.H. Hill Library of North Carolina State University. It began at 1:40 PM with the following in attendance:

Chairman Jim Kuhlman began with the topic of an update on fines. He asked if anyone knew if a cost recovery statement or proposal had been forthcoming from the Office of the President; no one had any information. Jim said he would be sending forward to members a questionnaire about the NCSU model to find out if it had been implemented anywhere else and how it was working.

ScienceDirect was the next topic. Bill Kirwan provided an update on contract negotiations. He explained that there are two separate contracts, one with TRLN libraries (Duke, UNC CH, and NCSU), and one with ten other libraries in the UNC System.

Note: For purposes of further clarification, attached is a detailed summary of ScienceDirect negotiations provided by Bill Kirwan 10/14/02.

At a meeting in Greensboro he had received two possible choices or proposals from the vendor.

One involved renewal of the present agreement with TRLN and would allow sharing among all TRLN and other UNC System ScienceDirect customers. There would be a 5% increase for the subscriptions and a sharing fee of 12%. The titles that could be shared would be frozen.

The other involved the same price increases. All ten libraries in the consortium would have access to all Elsevier journals. At the end of one year all journals subscribed to only by TRLN would be excluded from the sharing list.

Carroll Varner said there was a third option, to accept neither of the two options described by Bill Kirwan.

Bill said he has asked three people, Dana Sally of UNC G, Diana Astle of ECU, and Deanna Thomas of WSSU to serve as an advisory group to present to directors of the ten libraries and make a recommendation. Carroll suggested adding Chuck Hamaker of UNC C.

Carroll also said he thinks ISI and Elsevier are trying to gouge libraries and that he thinks having two contracts is crazy. He wants the Office of the President involved, a UNC approach.

Jim Kuhlman said at this point having the Office of the President as the negotiator would be a mistake.

Carroll Varner said Joyner Library would probably withdraw because they have access to the medical library titles. But this will hurt the other nine libraries.

Bill Kirwan then discussed his plans for future involvement with vendor negotiations. He has told Betsy Brown he would continue working with existing contracts (Web of Science, ScienceDirect, Kluwer, and HarpWeek) but no new ones. He thinks the person who is in the job should be a full-time professional librarian who understands public services implications as well as collection development concerns.

Jim Kuhlman reminded everyone that a full-time position of this type is in the system-level expansion budget. Discussion of the position could be an agenda item at the next meeting. Mary Reichel suggested putting on the agenda strategies for getting this position established.

Jim Kuhlman said he'd look into November 22 as the next meeting date, in Chapel Hill.

The meeting was adjourned at 3:10 PM.

Written by Elinor Folger Foster

September 27, 2002