Collection Development Council
Minutes of the Meeting of October 13, 2005
SML 409
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.

Present: Christine de Vallet, Jo-Anne Giammattei, Haruko Nakamura, Tobin Nellhaus (Chair), George Miles, Kimberly Parker, Susanne Roberts, Marcia Romanansky, David Stern, Paul Stuehrenberg.

Absent: Cynthia Crooker, Gwyneth Crowley, Audrey Novak, Ann Okerson, Andrew Shimp, Martha Smalley, David Walls, Dorothy Woodson.

Also present: Curtis Orio, Susan Tucker (Acquisitions)

Guests: Gary Rautenstrauch, CEO, Blackwell's Book Services, Patricia Adams, Eastern District Sales Manager, Blackwell's Book Services

Recorder: Graziano Krätli

I. Announcements, Questions, Future Agenda Items

A. Marcia Romanansky reminded CDC members that there were still seats available in the seminar on Supplier Relationships, scheduled for Tuesday, October 18, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.

B. David Stern announced that starting on Monday, October 17, the Sciences Libraries will move to a partly "shelf-ready" book approval plan, although without the ability to input bibliographical records directly into the Sterling-Voyager load. One of the consequences is that titles in the history of science, such as biographies of physicists, will come directly to Kline and Sterling will receive a notification; until now, Sterling received the books and Kline the notification. This remark caused a brief exchange between David and Sue Roberts on the nature and classificatory consequences of the books in question and whether they should be considered as history or science and consequently shelved at Sterling or Kline.

C. In a separate announcement, David mentioned that Springer has informed Kline Science that Springer can provide electronic versions of some of their standing orders, although without MARC records for them.

II. Blackwell's Book Services

Chair Tobin Nellhaus then introduced Gary Rautenstrauch and Patricia Adams, CEO and Eastern District Sales Manager, respectively, of Blackwell's Book Services. Before joining Blackwell, Rautenstrauch was President and CEO of Baker & Taylor, where, according to a press release, he "instituted new vendor and customer solutions, such as an e-book service platform, customized library services and direct fulfillment capabilities."

Mr. Rautenstrauch thanked CDC for offering him this opportunity and mentioned how inspiring the morning meetings with various Library people had been, reminding him yet again why he, like other booksellers, loves this business, particularly working with libraries. He then expressed his interest in talking about the Library's expectations, concerns, and views about future developments in the industry, and how Blackwell's can best meet the Library's needs. In particular, he is interested in understanding what Blackwell's needs to do in order to improve services, what are the things they are not doing today but should be doing in the future, and what are the changes that we foresee as potentially affecting Blackwell's work and services in the future.

The first question came from David Stern, who asked whether Mr. Rautenstrauch had heard any conflicting or contradicting opinions, in regard to the topics above, among the Library people he had met in the morning. Not really, replied Mr. Rautenstrauch; to which Pat Adams added that she was struck instead by the consistency of the opinions conveyed to them.

David then asked if any "major themes" could be identified, to which Mr. Rautenstrauch replied that, more than major themes, he had taken note of unanswered questions about electronic materials.

Kimberly Parker asked whether Blackwell's had been doing any thinking about the fact that in the electronic world books become more like serials, and are treated as such? Mr. Rautenstrauch agreed and remarked how difficult it is to deal with such an issue. Blackwell's, in fact, has been looking for potential partners for e-book delivery, but without deciding on anyone in particular yet. It is, he repeated, a very difficult issue. David Stern added that, at this point, potential partners [for e-book delivery] are aggregators such as ebrary, NetLibrary, or 24/7, rather than individual publishers.

Tobin Nellhaus mentioned that in the past, if a book was accompanied by a videotape or a CD-ROM, as is often the case with performing arts materials, the latter was likely to be excluded. Pat Adams acknowledged the problem, adding that it is going to happen less and less since now, if a book is accompanied by a CD-ROM, there will be a notification slip. Expanding the topic, David Stern observed that, in many cases, libraries prefer to rely upon a platform capable of storing such supplementary materials, rather than having to store them themselves.

David's statement generated two questions. Tobin asked whether this implied that a vendor like Blackwell's should become a service provider, to which David replied affirmatively, as far as supplementary materials are concerned. Marcia inquired about any organization currently providing such platform services, and was answered that some scientific societies do it.

Sue Roberts expressed her wish to see a more dynamic interaction between the US and the UK offices, at which Marcia wondered whether she referred to any specific distribution glitches, such as titles published in the UK and never distributed across the Atlantic. Pat Adams noted that some disjoinedness (i.e., titles falling through the cracks) may occur when a publisher is covered by one (UK) Approval Program and not the other (North America).

David Stern expressed his concerns about the fact that some publishers unscrupulously issue books that are de facto reprints of journal issues, but priced at as high as $250 a copy. He asked if there is any way, for Blackwell's to identify and check this frustrating phenomenon. Gary Rautenstrauch said that he is aware of this issue, and they are screening titles to this purpose.

Tobin wondered if there was a way to introduce a more fine-grained distinction between suitable and unsuitable books for approval (e.g., Jane Fonda's autobiography). Sue Roberts mentioned the fine distinction between Popular Collection and Popular Culture, and Marcia noted that one of the things that people ask for is profiling by academic affiliation, asking if there is any reason we should do that. Pat Adams replied that currently additional information such as academic affiliation is provided through the Table of Contents Enrichment Service, which allows libraries to send Blackwell's their MARC records and receive back enhanced, chapter-level information for each title.

Marcia then invited CDC members to imagine, if Gary returned in five years, what they would like to hear that he has done in the mean time. Immediate replies were Collection Manager 3.5 (from Marcia), books on demand (from Kim Parker), and some kind of direct communication with authors (from David Stern), while Tobin asked to explain how and to what extent Blackwell's responds to the issue of the emergence of new fields of scholarship. Pat Adams observed that a large part of Blackwell's response to issues of this kind is customer-driven, and since Blackwell's controls its thesaurus, they can add new cross-disciplinary topics, such as biogeochemistry, if need be.

Marcia then brought back the issue of Jane Fonda's autobiography, to point out that the approval plan implies the vendor's capability to know what a library needs, which is not always true, while libraries in general want to be able to identify and state what they need.

David Stern asked Pat and Gary if there are any changes in the industry that they see, or foresee, and librarians don't. Pat said it is difficult to answer since they are not industry experts, although they hire consultants to provide that kind of insight.

Sue Roberts asked what is going to be the next step / priority in system integration. Gary replied that, while the first step had to do necessarily with infrastructure, the next will deal with customer-facing solutions. Sue then asked if they had any particular structure in mind, and David if they were considering advisory groups of users. Pat replied that they invited and are still inviting customer input.

George Miles asked is there is a way to ensure that the data that Blackwell's intends to make available are offered in a standardized format that is easy to access and manipulate, so to avoid heavy involvement of IT staff. Gary replied that one fundamental questions facing vendors who develop a database product has always been whether to build it "open or closed." And, historically, the approach has been to build it closed. More recently, however, vendors like Blackwell's tend to move away from the proprietary idea, because there are so many things to include that make the proprietary approach difficult to implement.

George pointed out that the Beinecke Library, dealing mostly with antique and rare materials, doesn't do a lot of business with a vendor like Blackwell's, but some of the contemporary items that BRBL could acquire from Blackwell's include poetry books published by small independent presses. How would Blackwell's identify non-academic publishers of this kind or is this too hard to do? Pat Adams replied that Blackwell's could include desired titles in the approval plan, but their publishers need to meet the program's requirement (one of them being that the publisher has to be covered by a distributor who accepts returns).

Marcia Romanansky observed that small independent presses are usually a nightmare for vendors, since they are out of the mainstream of bibliographic control and libraries interested in purchasing their titles are better off with services like Book People. In her experience, the best approach is to match library needs and vendor strengths. David Stern, noting that Blackwell's holds proprietary information about its client libraries, suggested that it would be useful to know what are the titles that only Yale buys or doesn't buy. According to Marcia, that is the kind of information provided by a collection analysis tool and perhaps will be offered by Collection Manager 2.5.

Pat Adams replied that Blackwell's could periodically generate such a report, if needed, while George Miles observed that, at the collection level, a bibliographic utility like OCLC or RLIN is better, but at the title level a vendor's report might be more helpful to identify titles that nobody has.

David Stern said that a happy story, five years from now, would be open access for many scholarly journals, which would help to reduce the ridiculously inflated prices of serials today.

Next meeting: October 27