January 8, 2010, 10:30am, Room 1864.

Michell Wilde-Coll Nat Sci

Karen Worzel, North State U

Are citation databases still necessary? SCOAP3/arXiv, free sources (Indexing and Abstracting), 22 in attendance.

Ben Wagner’s (SUNY Buffalo) article—open questioning of purpose of “A&I, full text and open access-prophecy from the trenches” Most patrons care most if they get article, or are concerned that they may get asked for money. We need to know what we can live without—and that’s A&I. Purchasing power will collapse; finding aid gain mindshare. Worldcat.org constantly improving. Budget cuts etc will nip off finding tools. The content, which is used, we’ll keep. But they use free finding aids.

Questions: Are non-full text DB necessary? Will they die out? SciFinder/WoS—do they offer value commensurate with cost? Will super-discoverabilty/one-search be nail in coffin—ProQuest Summon, etc. These are different than federated—they license the data & host it. So it’s not individual queries going out and coming back. Possibility of data w/o interface? Can DB maintain value-added indexing? arXiv & SPIRES—how could these be incorporated?

How will we deal with non-indexed full text? How will we deal with these preprints depository material?

Intros-curious how to keep up with this? How to deal with need for comprehensive search?  How to teach good research—get people working thoroughly? How do you manage w/data, integrating? Custom data? [But how do we justify buying data?] Suggestion that A&I can manage to get to data vending—working to be sure full text (Scopus) is available.  Structure vs. speed. Small school—costs. Move toward full text—for users—that’s what they want.  Extremely specialized A&I—vulnerable but essential, and usage only supports full text, tho A&I is what’s unique. Does the scholarly tradition fall apart as we move to quicker, easier ways of access? How do we match DB w/user as Ranganathan? M Oxnam—Tech report lit—indexing wanted badly. PAM sciences are needing historical idexes—the full text DBs then cannot help.

Difficulty making decisions—since metrics are impossible to compare. How to deal with tracking use, when use goes up but so does not number of people tracking.

Problems of users who want to use only one source. Difficulty recognizing new contexts, need for new sources in particular context. Understand business of search—that there are different interfaces to get to similar info. Address this from an instructional source? Comments of how many post docs have never heard of indexed databases such as Web of Science. Concerns around the table were shared that as more people are graduating with a masters or doctorate, and have not utilized library databases in their research, how likely are they to direct their students to do so?

M Oxnam-can’t overlap less than 30%; used be less than 20%. M.Oxnam—does individual side by side comparisons to deal with overlap, as well.

Difficulties—more specialized institutions aren’t able to use consortial relationships as well for specialized sources like SciFinder. Hard tho to get people to give up material that they’re used to, even if it’s not particularly new. Funding means double purchasing isn’t OK.

A&I as a way of addressing journal cuts—at least they know it’s out there and can move to an article-choice/infotrieve/PPV model. How fast do you go through the money?

[Biol abst. Abt 10% unique content. A prob]

A key is consortial agreements which can give you a lot more freedom. A Consortia of libraries seem to have more power to negotiate with vendors.  When a consortia walks away because prices are too high, vendors will negotiate. Economic times have libraries strapped and vendors area aware of this.  Instead of losing all of their clients, they will work to fit that library or consortia of library’s economic package. Having ILL option or an choice info-free option (such as I-Tunes model), is very helpful.

Check out options about open access, it appears to be much more respected. PLoS Journals http://www.plos.org/journals/  and DOAJ http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=home are Open Access. Sources such are these are helpful, however, the development of open access databases are still new, so many articles that were published over five years can not be found as free, full-text articles.  It was also discussed that some open access publishers can be later bought out, and turned into regular sources again.  However, once something as been submitted as open access, it will remain open access.

Clear that something will be giving. What makes us keep an A& I database?

            -Multidisciplinary (useful to multiple—e.g. SciFinder)

            -Unique content

            -Value-added, so it gives something unique and not findable on GoogleScholar

List price problem—no searches, but still a high price. Pay per search would be more manageable. Is there a way to convince them to bring that back? To lower a fee if searches decline. Isn’t it better for pay by use. ProQuest rep—says we should ask. ‘They understand…’ But they do want us to know that sometimes people can have things managed. Go to the rep. Go to the vendor that developed the database and ask them to drop their prices.  Something has to give; databases or journals. Is it viable to pay for a vender database or to pay by the article? Is this the time to merge libraries and databases?

Can we work with vendors, as we did when databases were coming online, to build and merge strategic databases—why 3 ENVR DB? Why not 1?

Serve on advisory boards, so you have some input to the vendors. Tell them what’s important, what you most need and want.

Get involved with faculty governance and administrations—because pressure to decide on metrics comes from data-backed decision making. But we need to be in a position to responsively make it clear when that’s not the appropriate measure or decision-making tool.

ENVR researcher—they aren’t prepared for the real world; they don’t know what is OK to cite, and not to cite, for example, they cite ePodunk.com, not the census bureau. Need the realization that there are, in fact, major research situations in the real world.

Takeaways:

-A&I essential now, which is often hard for students/admin to understand. But the future is more cloudy.

-So what about a cnet dabatase for databases? So they find a good review of DB.

-Evaluate databases constantly and strive for a balance of needed topics.

-Faculty need to be reminded that papers require proper citations, and good examples of resources to teach students how to cite properly are Site Finder and Lib Guides.

-Metrics calculate usages differently so aim at what data you need to collect in order to determine what databases you can keep.