This Appendix lists a range of programmes and projects currently being undertaken which are relevant to, and overlap with, this proposal.
It should be recognised that, although most elements of the proposed centres have been tested somewhere, no-one has yet achieved national integration of print and electronic collections as a one-stop shop, nor national collaborative purchasing agreements on the scale proposed.
It can be seen that the restructuring of the higher education sector to enable it to work more closely together and take a national view of infrastructure development cannot be achieved in the short-term, but in order to achieve the ideal of a cost-effective sector, the stimulus must be applied now.
UNITED KINGDOM
The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has, over the past 5 years, coordinated and funded the establishment of 3 major electronic data centres, in Bath, Edinburgh, and Manchester, which have mounted and distributed major datasets, such as ISI’s citation indexes. These national centres are now developing plans to recoup the annual recurrent data costs from individual institutions. Funding of £ 19.7 million for networking and £8.32 million for electronic information has been provided in 1998/9 by the Higher Education Funding Councils to the JISC for electronic library projects and services.
The JISC is also supporting development of the International Research Library Support Strategy. The Anderson Task Force commissioned Coopers & Lybrand to analyse the costs to Higher Education Institutions of making their collections and services available directly to users not from their own institutions. Inter-library loans are not included in the study. C&L estimated the costs at between £ 6m and £ 10m per year, and recommended that the institutions with the heaviest load of external users be reimbursed either from central funding or by some impost on the other institutions. The IRLSS Management Committee met for the first time in July 1998. It has been allocated £19.8 million over 3 years.
The Research Library Programme which focuses on non-electronic resources will have four strands:
Instead applicants would be invited to bid for the costs of staff and associated expenses involved in establishing the pilots and in user assessment of them. Based on reports from the pilots, action plans would be developed (in year 4) for development of collection management networks in all appropriate discipline areas.
Committee on Electronic Information (CEI) Content Working Group produced the JISC Collections Policy in April 1998, which includes criteria for developing a Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). The policy identifies parameters for a national collection, policies for its development, and identifies areas for collaboration with data providers and data users. It identifies specific criteria for the selection, digitisation, retention and deselection of individual items and datasets.
Other developments in the UK:
The Center for Research Libraries in the US was established to be responsible for purchasing research materials which were too expensive for individual institutions but which were still extremely valuable for research. Voting membership is limited to those institutions who won more than 1.1 million volumes and who spend more than $1.7 million annually on acquisitions. The average annual cost of membership is $35,498.
The Pew Roundtable, sponsored by the US Association of Research Libraries and the Association of American Universities, was held in early 1998 and recommended a set of strategies to address the problems in the scholarly communications market. The strategies included "being smart shoppers" - US research libraries expend $680 million annually and the expansion of collaborative, consortial activities to broad-based national and international purchasing collectives can exert a powerful influence on the market for scholarly communication. The ARL, with the support of the AAU, has launched the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a partnership project to promote a more open and competitive market for scholarly dissemination through electronic publication and other means. The ARL Board has commissioned a study of the concept of establishing a Research Library Purchasing and Negotiating Center. (This was to be discussed further at the May 1998 ARL meeting.)
Other developments in North America:
USDigital Library 2 [DL2] initiatives - grant availability recently announced [see http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1998/nsf9863/nsf9863.htm]
California Digital Library - emphasising user needs. [http://diglib.stanford.edu/]
Canadian Initiatives on Digital Libraries - newly formed association of libraries, across all sectors, devoted to the common solutions of DL problems- eg. production/methodology for creating digital resources; organisational/access issues (metadata), and promotion/communications strategy. A more detailed agenda is available from: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/cidl/cidle.htm
EUROPE
Decomate II - international partners, heterogenous/hybrid collections, industry participation.
EU/National Science Foundation agreement to explore the issues of resource indexing and discovery, metadata, interoperability, rights management and associated economics, and multilingual access. PRIDE: http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/projects/pride.html
Send comments/suggestions/requests about this site ....