Collection Management Committee Meeting: August 25, 2021

Zoom / Conference Call

Members attending: Chad Buckley (Illinois State University), Janice Derr (Eastern Illinois University), Keith Eiten, co-chair (Wheaton College), Lorene Kennard, (University of St. Francis), Jayna Leipart Guttilla (Illinois Valley Community College), Niamh McGuigan, (Loyola University Chicago), Scott Thomson (Rush University), Kris Veldheer (Catholic Theological Union)

Member absent: Dan Blewett, co-chair (College of DuPage),

CARLI Staff attending: Elizabeth Clarage, Jen Masciadrelli, Anne Craig, Nicole Ream-Sotomayor, Jenny Taylor

Board Liaisons: Taran Ley (Southern Illinois University School of Medicine)

Discovery Prime VE Task Force Liaison: Amy Killebrew (Columbia College Chicago)

E-Resources Management Task Force Liaison: Andrea Imre (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)

Decisions

• Elizabeth and Jen will send out a poll to help determine the best meeting time.
• The minute takers will be assigned according to alphabetical order, starting with Chad Buckley for the next meeting.
• May minutes were approved.
• June minutes were approved.
• Member announcements can be submitted in the chat and will be added to the minutes.
• We’ll do some review of the open access ebook work that has been done by CARLI and by this committee in the past.
• We’ll discuss possibilities for working on an Alma Analytics project at our next meeting.

Tasks Assigned

• Minutes taken by Niamh McGuigan.
• Members were encouraged to read the committee charge and the committee guidelines on the CARLI website.
• Jen will provide a list of open access ebook collections that are active in the Network Zone.

Announcements

• CARLI Announcements:
  • The Annual meeting will be held virtually on November 10.
  • Elizabeth sent our EBA purchase lists to Oxford and Wiley in July. Some of the Oxford titles are no longer available for purchase, so she’s continuing to work on this.
    • They are working to get records for these books in the catalog as soon as possible, hopefully to be completed by the end of September. All titles are available on their respective platforms now, with the exception of some Wiley textbooks. These books are the first priority for being added to the catalog.
    • The Oxford University Press Open Access ebook collection was activated in the community zone. There is a note about this in the CARLI newsletter, coming out this week.
    • In terms of ongoing options for funding these types of collection activity, we need to have a broader discussion of how CARLI will continue to use crowdfunding. This strategy worked well for the ebook project, and was very popular with CARLI members. CARLI is likely to keep using this model for ebooks for the time being.
    • There was a suggestion that it might be easier to increase membership dues, rather than ask for additional funds. This is a challenge, though, because many members have no margin for higher dues.
    • The role of crowdfunding in CARLI is also being discussed by the CARLI DEI Task Force.
    • Committee members discussed some of the other advantages of the crowdfunding model.
    • There was a question about publishers’ willingness to participate in consortial ebook purchases. CARLI put out a request for information to publishers last year, and learned that many publishers were interested, there were few that were willing to offer terms that were reasonable.

Discussion

• We discussed potential meeting days and noted that Thursday morning may be a good time for meetings, possibly starting at 9:00am
• Elizabeth and Jen shared a minutes template, to facilitate minute taking at each meeting.
• Elizabeth described the CARLI Collection & Content Group Email List, which anyone may choose to join and contribute to.
• Discussion of committee projects: Open Access Ebook Collection
  • Jen described the next steps:
    • Reviewed what’s active in the Network Zone (because of being carried over from SFX)
    • There may be new collections that CARLI staff would like to activate, and they will bring those to this Committee for approval.
    • This committee might also suggest collections to add, but it’s not a direct responsibility of the committee.
      • In the past, this used to be the work of a subcommittee of this committee.
    • Adding open access collections has taken a back seat in CARLI amid the transition to Alma/Primo.
    • Keith suggested that we might want to review and assess this program.
    • Jen can get a list of all the activated collections, and we could review them. She suspects that there may be a lot excess, but won’t know unless we do further study.
    • Keith is interested in learning more about the user experience for accessing these books, as well.
  • Discussion of committee project: Alma Analytics
    • This project was started a couple of years ago, with the goal of creating some support materials and continuing education for running reports in Alma Analytics to facilitate collection management.
    • We tabled this last year, because everyone was so new to Alma.
    • We will discuss this as a possibility at our next meeting.
  • Discussion of potential committee project: Weeding ebooks
    • Keith would like to do some additional work to flesh out the ebook weeding guidelines that the group worked on last year and approved at its June meeting.
  • Discussion of potential committee project: DEI audit
    • Explore ideas for how to analyze library collections for diversity

Next Meeting Dates and Deadlines

Committee Meetings: to be determined by poll following the meeting.

Deadlines: