Present: Bill Hook, Janice Adlington, Mary Beth Blalock, Eileen Crawford, Sue Davis, Lee Ann Lannom, Mary Prince, Carlin Sappenfield, Kathy Smith, Holling Smith-Borne Mary Ellen Wilson, Roberta Winjum.
Absent: Deborah Broadwater, Deborah Brooks
Agenda 1. Electronic Book funds update 2. Pre-payment of invoices 3. Scholarly Stats
1. Electronic Book funds - Mary Ellen reported that Order services is working on lists of non-periodical electronic subscriptions that have been sent by several of the libraries. Lists from Management, Peabody and Divinity are done, they are working on Central's currently. If they finish those before receiving lists from all of the libraries, they will start working on the e-journals transfers.
Most of the libraries seem comfortable with Order services migrating the subscriptions from the vendor invoices Mary Ellen distributed. Finding 'outliers' that aren't covered by those may be time consuming. Mary Beth indicated she was working through all of their titles subject by subject, and finding some that were missed on the big invoices.
Roberta asked if Order services will be moving the orders to the e-journal records, or simply changing the funds on the existing records. Mary Ellen indicated that the orders would be moved, though that is a time-consuming process and that move may not occur immediately. They are still developing the workflow for the fund changes.
2. Pre-payment of major vendor invoices -
Roberta spoke about the prospect of pre-paying major vendor invoices, which does save a bit of money (1/2% - 1%), though it also introduces some complications. This arose in a conversation with Central and Science about how to try to clear invoices earlier in the fiscal year than was possible this year.
Pre-payment would be problematic if any of the libraries were contemplating subscription cancellations, which was the other reason we wanted to discuss it in the committee. No one indicated that their library was anticipating cancelling subscriptions this fall.
After discussion of the pros and cons, the proposal is to seek to do some pre-payments, perhaps on the invoices expected to clear in the October November period; since prepaying all of them might result in having a significant amount of money stuck in the "invoiced" but not paid state in ACORN, a status relatively inaccessible to reporting.
3. Scholarly Stats Janice reported that we received our first monthly reports from our new Scholarly Stats subscription. This was initiated as a trial of the service, selecting 9 of our major vendors to be included, it is NOT intended at this point to be comprehensive by any means. Janice reported that in this first report 7 of the 9 were represented, as they evidently had difficulty accessing some of the collections we requested.
Janice is able to create user accounts for any of the committee members who wish to review these reports. Email her to ask for an account, including (as requested by Scholarly Stats for user verification purposes) the month and day of your birthdate.
The question was asked how long the data remains available in this service. Janice indicated that it should stay there as long as we subscribe, reminding us that the usefulness of these sorts of statistics grows the longer the data is recorded, hopefully illumnating patterns, and changing use patterns over time.
The meeting adjourned at 2:30.