Present: Kathy Adams, Tom Bolze (recording), Daniel Lovins (chair), Britta Santamauro.
Absent: Youn Noh, Becky Slitt.

Action items in green.

Meeting began at 2:10 p.m. in SML Spoon.

1. ALA Report

Britta reported on the ALCTS Scholarly Committee Discussion Group meeting that she attended during ALA Annual the past week. The group’s program was entitled “The Role of Technical Services in Institutional Repositories,” with presentations from individuals representing 5 institutions: the University of Oregon, University of Minnesota, Notre Dame, Rutgers, and Ohio State. Each institution had a different approach to implementing an institutional repository and used a different infrastructure, but some common points emerged, such as:

• The importance of marketing within the institution, so that all players (esp. faculty) will support Technical Services’ role in developing the repository;
• The need to have good metadata guidelines in place before project is begun;
• The importance of adhering to standards, such as the Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol, for obtaining records with minimum effort.

Britta noted that several panelists made reference to Jane Greenberg of the University of North Carolina and her work on the AMeGA project; Dr. Greenberg is apparently an expert on metadata harvesting.

Daniel noted that the implementation of FEDORA at Yale is not yet complete, a symptom (he believes) of the endemic slowness of large bureaucracies. One area of concern for institutional repositories, again esp. for faculty, is the issue of licensing and copyrights, an area in which Yale possesses considerable expertise (particularly in the persons of Ann Okerson and Kim Parker). Britta expressed the opinion, based on the ALCTS meeting, that more catalogers should be involved in the implementation of an institutional repository at Yale, especially since experiences at other institutions suggest that repositories fail if there is little or no cataloger input. Action Item: Britta will draft ALCTS meeting summary and recommendations, for Joan's review, on possible role of Technical Services in institutional digital repository at Yale.

2. University of Rochester eXtensible Catalog “XC”

Daniel led discussion of a the University of Rochester's open-source eXtensible Catalog (XC) project, the planning of which is now being supported through a Mellon grant. Jennifer Bowen, head of cataloging at Rochester, hopes that XC will exploit MARC more fully than any current systems can. Outreach to other academic institutions is a major element of Rochester’s project, and Daniel suggested that Yale should consider becoming a partner. Action Item: Daniel will conslut with Matthew and Joan, and then possibly Jennifer Bowen at Rochester re possible Yale involvement in XC. Daniel will also explore potential involvement of Yale’s PIC (Public Interfaces Committee)

Britta noted that ExLibris is implementing Primo, a kind of federated search engine, at the Vanderbilt University library. Primo aims to provide the same type of enhanced functionality as XC, but whereas XC is open source, Primo uses proprietary code. Britta also suggested that, in light of her and Tom’s efforts to bring in a German librarian through the International Associates Program, one possible assignment for this librarian could be working on XC (should Yale becomes a development partner).

3. LC & Series Authorities

General discussion of LC’s decision to discontinue creation of Series Authority Records, which was a major topic of discussion at ALA. This decision has generated a lot of anger in the library community; however, the ARL has endorsed LC’s decision. Daniel noted that ARL’s endorsement suggests that top administrators in major university research libraries (including Yale) don’t fully appreciate the value of expert cataloging, and that we need to do a better job explaining our role in mediating between readers and collections. While we should not blindly resist all changes in our responsibilities, even ones that we believe may potentially compromise user access, we must insist that such changes occur within an overall context of improving library services.

Perhaps more disturbing than the decision on SARs was what appears to be LC’s implicit decision to forgo consultation with the library community on major decisions, despite a rhetorical commitment to the model of cooperative cataloging. If this is the case, and if the library community continues to follow LC's lead, then the entire cooperative model could break down.

Adjourn: 3:00 p.m.

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