Also present at the meeting were members of the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee. staff, CAUL executive members Ray Choate and Evelyn Woodberry, and the CAUL Executive Officer.
John Shipp's presentation covered the challenges faced by university libraries in the current economic, political and technological environment.
He referred to:
He also encouraged all universities to submit a remuneration notice for electronic reserve collections, even if they didn't require it yet, to help the AV-CC to put some pressure on the Copyright Agency Limited.
Colin Steele's presentation addressed the changes to be expected in scholarly communication in the short and medium terms.
In response to a question on the impact of innovative services on research output, Colin reported that research undertaken by the Academies in 1987 was unable to relate cancellation of journals with research output, and similar research had also found difficulty relating input of resources/services to output of research.
The Capetown Calico Project was mentioned as a good example of collaboration by Prof Andrew Glenn, Murdoch University. The Cape Library Cooperative grew out of the Library Cooperative Project involving The University of Cape Town, Western Cape, Stellenbosch and the Cape and Peninsula Technikons. The purpose of the initiative is to have a single Cape Library Collection housed in different locations and using the resources of the various institutions. Ray Choate responded to this with information about the various collecting agreements already in place in Australian universities. It was also reiterated that cooperation amongst libraries depended heavily on the cooperation of the academic community in this area.
Other questions from the DVCs addressed the measurement of library quality and the relationship between the library collection/service and research output of the university.
(A recently published report (1) on research performance looks briefly at "environmental factors" but concludes that "although variation between different studies in the definition and measurement of resources (which may include funding, equipment, laboratory space, technical support, etc) and in the extent to which these are differentiated from the influence of other factors (in particular collegial support and reinforcement), make it difficult to determine what exactly the role of resources is and which of its possible components may have the most significant effects. This seems to indicate that there is still room for investigation into the relationship between library resources and services and the research output of the university, and the DEET EIP may be an appropriate avenue in which to pursue this.)
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(1) Evaluation of research performance: a review of selected input and output characteristics, by Russell D. Linke. Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service, 1995. (A report funded under the Evaluations and Investigations Program of the Department of Employment, Education and Training, 95/10, June 1995)