Resources for Users Committee Meeting Minutes
February 21, 2014
Location: Small Library, University of Virginia
Present: Sharon Gasser (Chair), Beth Blanton-Kent, Karen Cary (recorder), Tara Cassidy,
Stephen Clark, Natalie Clewell, Cheri Duncan, Anne Elguindi, David Gibbs, Maureen Hady, Ed
Lener, Louveller Luster, Pam Morgan, Jane Penner, Kathy Perry, Jim Self, Robert Tench,
Announcements
Sharon welcomed Beth Blanton-Kent (UVA) to the RUC. Jane is leaving the Committee after
many years of excellent service.
Budget
Kathy shared the FY 2014 and FY 2015 budget spreadsheets. She explained the budget
coding/coloring for the benefit of new members. Funding for VIVA currently remains in the
proposed state budget.
Renewals
The products listed below were recommended for renewal by unanimous vote:
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Alexander Street Press American History in Video Access fee
Alexander Street Press Harpers Weekly Annual Access Fee
Annual Reviews (pending final negotiations)
APA PsycARTICLES
APA PsycBOOKS
APA PsycINFO
BioOne.1
EBSCOhost Collection
EBSCO CINAHL
Mergent
Nature
OCLC FirstSearch (pending final negotiations)
OED
Ovid LWW Total Access Collection
ProQuest Congressional
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses FT
ProQuest EconLit
ProQuest Factiva
ProQuest MLA
ProQuest Literature Online and FIAF
ProQuest PAIS International with Archive
ProQuest Safari Tech Books Online
Wiley 2015 Journal Package (Kathy/Sharon)
VIVA’s contract with Wiley ends 12/31/2014. The VIVA Central Office conducted a member
survey on Wiley. RUC approved a recommendation for the 2015 renewal based on the survey
results.
Ulrich’s International Periodicals (Stephen and Rob)
Usage remained constant for the past two fiscal years and current fiscal year to date. The
majority responding to a survey wanted to keep Ulrich’s. The Committee voted to recommend
renewal.
Responsibilities of Resource Managers Checklist
Sharon led a discussion about the responsibilities of resource managers. She suggested four
areas of responsibility: new products, renewals, analysis through the year, and transitioning to
a new resource manager. Committee members compiled the details below for each area of
responsibility:
1. New products:
a. Determine if the product is a good fit for VIVA
i. How many VIVA institutions currently subscribe?
ii. Where did the product idea originate?
iii. How does it relate to other VIVA products?
iv. Are there acceptable licensing terms, such as for ILL, course reserves, remote
access, unlimited simultaneous users, DRM?
b. Evaluate the product
i. Product reviews
ii. Comparison to competing products
iii. Overlap analysis to current VIVA products and to competing products
iv. Discuss the product with current customers
v. How do patrons find and access the information (MARC records, where indexed,
compatible with which discovery tools)?
vi. Additional materials offered by the same vendor that might be useful vii.
How
unique is the product? Would it be appropriate as a sole-source acquisition?
vii. Is there free trial access?
viii. Is there mobile access?
ix. Is it ADA compliant?
x. Are there reliable usage statistics made available in a timely way?
c. Evaluate the vendor
i. Experience working with consortia?
ii. Customer service responsiveness and quality
iii. Technical support responsiveness and quality
d. Cost and potential cost savings
i. Determine the cost for all of the public institutions together and the opt-in pricing
for the private institutions
ii. Level of savings: determine the consortial cost compared to what institutions
would pay on their own
2. Renewals
a. Manage contact with the vendor sales representative
i. Make sure you have the correct representative; if the contact has changed, alert
the VIVA central office
ii. Contact the representative well in advance of the renewal date for an initial quote
and let him or her know the deadline for a final price (such as two weeks before
RUC meets)
b. Analyze the price
i. Keep your own spreadsheet to track key trends
ii. Review cost per use
iii. Review usage trends over time
iv. Comparison to competing products
v. Were there problems over the past year and was the vendor responsive?
vi. Note any new content or functionality since the last renewal
c. The quote
i.
Make sure that the quote includes all of the correct institutions and the correct
groupings of institutions
ii. Structure the quote in the VIVA format and include a date that will print on the
quote
iii. Check the vendor’s math
iv. Does the quote fit the product’s contract terms?
d. Negotiating the best possible renewal
i. Apply the results of the analysis to make a case for a lower cost
ii. Get as low an increase as possible within the boundaries of the contract
iii. Go back again and again to get a lower price
e. Conclusion
i. Obtain the final title list and send it to VAVIRTUA-L for marketing and to the VIVA
central office for posting on the vendor page
ii. Get the list price for the public institutions’ shared products
3.
Analysis throughout the year
a. Respond in timely manner to questions from colleagues
b. Be familiar with the title list and the product platform
c. Subscribe to the vendor newsletter or listserv
d. Meet with the vendor when you have the opportunity
e. Determine if training is necessary for the product, such as if there are product
changes
f. Review usage statistics on a regular basis
g. Review the vendor page on the VIVA website and help keep it up to date
4. Transition to a new resource manager
a. Share your product documents with the new resource manager
b. Discuss the contract terms for the product
c. Discuss the product and its history
d. Introduce the new resource manager to the vendor sales representative
e. Explain what the responsibilities are for resource managers
After final review, the list will be posted on the VIVA Resources for Users Committee page on
the web. It was suggested that a similar checklist could be created for vendors at a future
meeting. It was also decided that a VIVA-RUC listserv would be created to facilitate
communication.
DDA and Publisher Package E-books (Cheri, Tara, Anne, Anna)
Anne presented an analysis of the use of the e-books. Among Springer, Elsevier, and EBL,
Springer had the most usage and the most titles. The Behavioral Sciences package gets the
most use out of each title (and has the lowest cost per use) and Earth and Environmental
Science gets the least (and has the highest cost per use). The highest level of usage within
EBL was in science, followed by medicine and technology. For Elsevier, the highest use was in
engineering, followed by computer science and biochemistry/genetics. When the proportion of
available titles used by subject is put in order, no one vendor is the obvious leader. Vendors are
similar in the proportion of available titles used. There are great differences among the vendors
when it comes to cost per use. EBL’s DDA program use is not easily compared to the perpetual
access, DRM-free purchases from Springer and Elsevier.
After reviewing the budget for the EBL DDA pilot, RUC voted to recommend the use of local
institutional contributions to extend the pilot through the end of the fiscal year.
There was discussion about the possibly enlarging the pool of titles to include humanities or
social sciences titles. More discussion on this topic, along with parameters for the DDA program
and user satisfaction will take place at the next RUC meeting.
Collection Analysis Projects (Anne)
The Video Last Copy task force met on February 10th. They are working on ideas for preserving
unique titles, mostly focused on the VHS format. They expect the number of these titles to range
between 5,000 and 10,000. They are assessing lists of titles. This kind of preservation is
expensive. They are developing a proposal, which will involve letters of support. They are also
working on obtaining pricing. They plan to come to RUC with a proposal for streaming of titles
from vendors that are the most heavily used, possibly in October 2014. RUC recommends the
development of grant applications to fund the preservation and digitization of unique media
content.
The Monograph Collection Analysis Task Force met with Rick Lugg and Ruth Fischer via
webinar on February 14 and in-person with Ruth Fischer on February 18 at the University of
Virginia. Anne went over the goals of the Monographic Collection Analysis project and
presented the group summary developed by SCS. There are two major parts of the summary:
collection development and protected books/sustainable weeding. Some overarching points:
as a whole, the pilot group had a very low rate of titles with no circulation (possibly influenced by
UVA’s participation in the Google project), every school had unique items, 3,000 titles were held
by all twelve schools in the pilot, the data will be affected by ongoing large weeding projects at
some schools.
In the area of collection development, RUC will need to consider the identification of subjects
within the unique items in order to find commonalities and individual institutional strengths,
identify titles that can be sent to the ProQuest Title Matching Fast service in order to inform
future e-book purchases, the importance of the HathiTrust to VIVA, examine the recorded use
trends by median values, with an added focus on the sciences, and investigate the data on
publisher, starting with Elsevier and Springer.
In the area of protected books/sustainable weeding, RUC recommends approval for a
collaborative retention agreement among the participating members for protecting unique,
“worthy” titles identified through this project. The initial list of titles includes those that are
unique in Virginia (any edition) and held by fewer than 10 libraries in the US (any edition).
Participating institutions are currently reviewing their lists of these titles, and task force members
will develop a set of parameters or best practices for the retention agreement. It was suggested
that the ASERL journal retention project could serve as a possible policy model.
Cataloging Training Update (Natalie)
Natalie reported that the webinar format generally worked well, although there were a few
issues with the audio. It was suggested that future trainings focus on real-world, practical
problems.
New Resources
Nature Communications, JoVE, Browzine, GeoScience World, PsycTESTS and APA
Handbooks, and Medcom Nursing/Allied Health streaming videos were all considered, but there
was general consensus that these products were not viable for VIVA at this time. Kathy will
investigate Communication Source as a possible alternative to Communications & Mass Media
Complete. Karen will investigate the Rittenhouse R2 Digital Library DDA program.
Next RUC meetings: Friday, June 20, 2014 and Friday, August 22, 2014