Annual General Meeting (AGM), 9 April 03
CURL’s 10th AGM took place in Liverpool on 9 April 03. An election took place to fill the six vacancies on the Board. Four new members were elected: Clive Field (British Library), Chris Rusbridge (University of Glasgow), Michele Shoebridge (University of Birmingham) and Bill Simpson (University of Manchester). Tom Graham (University of Newcastle, Chair of the Board) and Jan Wilkinson (University of Leeds) were re-elected for a second term of office. A full membership list is available at http://www.curl.ac.uk/board/index.html .
A large part of the meeting was devoted to the activities of the Task Forces, which are updated in other sections of this newsletter.
It was noted that CURL had contributed £1,000 to the Ian Mowat Memorial Fund.
The Members thanked Emma Robinson (ULL) and Frances Thomson (Liverpool), who will be retiring before the next Members’ meeting, for all the work they have done for the Consortium over the years.
Review of the Strategic Plan Meeting, 10 April 03
The Members’ all-day meeting on 10 April 03 continued the process of reviewing the Strategic Plan that was initiated by the Board last autumn. CURL Directors, aided by the services of a professional facilitator, very successfully saw through a complete programme that touched on CURL’s vision, mission statement, objectives and priorities for the period 2003-2006.
The Members agreed a new wording of CURL’s mission which emphasises the Consortium’s commitment to enhancing research information provision for the research community as a whole, within and beyond its member institutions and across domains:
CURL’s mission is to increase the ability of research libraries to share resources for the benefit of the local, national and international research community. CURL will achieve this by:
The Members identified a number of broad areas of activity for the next three years:
The CURL Secretariat produced a paper summarising what was agreed by the Members, which was discussed at the Board meeting on 30 May 03 (see below).
Dates of Members’ meetings, 03-04
Dates are available at http://www.curl.ac.uk/about/Meetingdates.html .
The four new Board members who were elected by the Members at the AGM on 9 April 03 attended their first Board meeting on 30 May 03. It was agreed that a new Chair would be elected by the Board within the next two months.
Research Libraries Network (RLN)
A number of CURL Directors and the CURL Executive Secretary have been approached by the consultant who has been appointed by HEFCE to investigate the costing and governance rules of the RLN, the new body recommended by the Research Support Libraries Group (RSLG). The Chair of the Board and the Executive Secretary met the consultant on 3 June 03, as agreed by the Board, and have responding to the consultant’s interim paper in writing.
Monograph Inter-lending Consultancy Study
The Board at its meeting of the 30 May 2003 received and warmly welcomed the Final Report of the Monograph Inter-lending Consultancy Study, which CURL sponsored with the support of the British Library Co-operation and Partnership Programme (BL CPP). The Report is now available on the CURL web site and a further process of consultation with the community was approved by the Board, see Projects for details.
The Board discussed the document summarising what was agreed by the Members at their meeting on 10 April 03. It agreed the new mission as defined by the Members and decided to set up four new Task Forces to focus on objectives that were identified as priorities by the Members: RLN and enlargement, resource disclosure, digital content creation, communication & working methods. Deep collaboration, another objective identified by the Members, will be taken on by the existing Task Force on Resource Management.
Further work on the review of the Strategic Plan will take place at the next meeting of the Board, where outstanding issues, in particular the review of other existing Task Forces, will be tackled.
National Council of Archives and Regional Archives Councils
The Board agreed that CURL should be represented both at the national and regional levels, and that there is a need to review the list of CURL representatives in the regional councils, as a result, in particular, of a number of retirements.
Dates of Board meetings, 03-04
Dates are available at http://www.curl.ac.uk/about/Meetingdates.html
The Group met on 16 May 03.
MARC21 Project – Test Database
The first testing stage of the MARC 21 Project has recently been completed. Thanks to the concerted work by colleagues at MIMAS, an initial MARC 21 database system consisting of data-handling programs, a database and a Z39.50 target was made open to testing by CURL cataloguers on 19 May 03. This test database has benefited from the work done by MIMAS on the inclusion of both MARC-8 and Unicode UTF-8 encoded records, which means that the database already enables the searching, retrieval and display of some non-Roman script. Testing came to an end on 20 June 03. Many thanks go out to all those who helped to make this testing period productive.
MIMAS has been invited to prepare a costed proposal, to be submitted first to the RD&D SG and then to the Board in the Autumn 03, that will concentrate on the development of a web interface and of a clustering system for the display of search results.
Meanwhile, some collaboration will be taking place between CURL and RLG. Durham, as the principal CURL user of the Eureka MARC export facility, has very kindly agreed to act as the tester of the new RLG interface and to share its finding with MIMAS by the end of 03, in line with RLG’s own timeframe and testing. The point of the exercise is to find out to what extent the software developed by RLG can be adapted to the CURL MARC 21 database.
COPAC has since March this year been enhanced by several new developments. The British Library Map Catalogue was loaded onto COPAC in March 03. To improve access to this material, a new display of map scale information was added, as well as a new map search interface in COPAC V3. Also from the British Library, the Register of Preservation Microforms (soon to be known as the Register of Preservation Surrogates database) has also augmented COPAC since the last edition of curlnews. Web browser access to both resources is currently only available through COPAC.
By the end of June 03, the Hub contained ca. 13,500 EAD files. The JISC has confirmed another 3-year tranche of funding for the Archives Hub service. This funding is allied to a new ‘call for content’, which for the first time will be open to both FE and HE institutions. Further details of the ‘call for content’ can be read on the JISC website .
Britain in Print is now preparing an application for Phase II funding, in order to secure the financial foundation for the retroconversion element of the project and expand the online educational tool developed in Phase I. In conjunction with CURL’s recent commitment to broaden and deepen collaboration with research information providers beyond HE, the project management team will seek to invite some large municipal public libraries to join in.
At its meeting of 16 May 03, the RD&D SG agreed to explore the possibility of entering a quid pro quo arrangement with the Cathedral Libraries, whereby CURL would grant the Cathedral Libraries free access to its record retrieval database in return for their records. Imminent also is a return to collaboration with the Conservatoire libraries, whose records will once again be made available to CURL members in exchange for the formers’ access to the CURL record retrieval database.
The RSLP Revelation and Pamphlets & Polemics records from the University of Wales, Lampeter, and the University of St. Andrews are scheduled to augment COPAC at the end of July 03.
These latest developments show CURL’s commitment to opening up its resource discovery tools to non-members in spite of the financial and operational limitations of the current set-up. Many thanks go out to the CURL and COPAC teams at MIMAS for gracefully absorbing this additional work
The RD&D SG has asked the Secretariat to negotiate the new deal with RLG taking account of the wishes recently expressed by the Members in the course of an electronic discussion devoted to this subject. It was pointed out in particular that a majority of Members (a) would prefer an element of choice for the reference packages; (b) accept that the unit cost should be lower for bigger users.
The CURL Database Officer has asked the Members to provide him with search estimates for 03-04 and will begin negotiations with RLG in July 03.
The Task Force met on 12 May 03.
Monograph Inter-lending Consultancy Study
The Final Report, which was released on 7 April 03, was discussed both at the meeting of the Task Force on 12 May 03 and at the Board meeting of 30 May 03. The Report was well received by the Board and comment is now invited on the report by the CURL Membership and other stakeholders. See Final Report (pdf) – please send your comments to the Executive Secretary of CURL, Marie-Pierre Détraz, by 31 July 03.
The CURL-CoFoR project is making good progress: all the major players have agreed to participate in the project and the project’s first partners’ meeting will take place on 11 July 03 at the University of Birmingham.
It was agreed that, in spite of the mixed results of the CURL/RSLP iCAS project, there was a need to persevere with the automated approach, as quantitative collection mapping remains necessary to underpin a UK-wide inter-lending system and to inform collaborative collection management. The Executive Secretary was asked to approach OCLC/Lacey with a view to exploring the possibility of commissioning them to carry out a second project. The project will need to be very precisely costed before the Board can take a view on this.
The Task Force’s Digitisation sub-group will now be scaled up to a Task Force in its own right.
The Task Force met on 29 May 03.
David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe, has agreed to attend the meetings of the Task Force by invitation and to report on the work done by SPARC Europe. At the meeting of 29 May, David said that from now on SPARC would place less emphasis on alternative publishing, as this title by title approach is a very slow process, and will focus instead on open access e-print repositories.
Project SHERPA is making good progress. The work plan was submitted to the JISC by 30 May 03, as required. CURL Members who are not already partners in the project will have the opportunity to tender for becoming associate partners (there will be 7 associate partners in all) between the end of August and beginning of November 03.
The Elsevier Board has refused to back the deal agreed between CURL and their sales staff. The two main bones of contention are:
The JISC, who has recently appointed an agent to negotiate with a number of large publishers including Elsevier, has been informed of this development.
The Content Group of the HE/NHS Forum commissioned a scoping study of issues that bar effective knowledge access for the NHS & HE. A draft report on these issues was made available on the CURL web site for consultation (See draft report). The Group will now approach the funding councils and the NHS to ask them whether they would be prepared to fund a series of projects to test the recommendations of the report
No annual report was published for the year August 2000 – July 2001, as a result of major changes in staffing in 2001. A report covering two years, August 2000 – July 2002, was published by the new team in April 03. The report is available online at http://www.curl.ac.uk/about/Annualrep.html . Should you wish some hard copies, please do not hesitate to contact the Secretariat.
The next Annual Report, covering the year 2002-2003, will be produced in the Autumn 03.
Since March 03, the Executive Secretary and her Deputy have visited three CURL Members - Cambridge, UCL and Liverpool - which brings to seven the number of CURL libraries visited by the new team since February 02. The other visits were at Bristol, the BL (St Pancras), Durham and Leeds.
The Secretariat places a great deal of importance on these visits, as it gives its team the opportunity to discuss the work done by CURL with a wide range of CURL staff. If you haven’t had a CURL visit yet and would like one, please tell your Librarian!
Since May 2002, CURL has welcomed six new customers, i.e. non-CURL libraries which purchase access to the CURL database, bringing the total up to 24. The new customer institutions are: the Bolton Institute; Cranfield University; Edgehill College; Falmouth College of Art; St. George's Hospital Medical School and University of Wales, Lampeter.
The CURL Office has now augmented its web presence by securing its own domain-name email addresses. From April, the Secretariat switched to the following email addresses:
Executive Secretary: Dr Marie-Pierre Détraz
Email: mp.detraz@curl.ac.uk
Database Officer & Deputy Executive Secretary: Dr Mike Mertens
Email: mike.mertens@curl.ac.uk
Administrative Assistant: Joy West
Email: j.a.west@curl.ac.uk
A new email address for CURL queries has also been set up at helpdesk@curl.ac.uk
CURL has continued to give its support to the Legal Deposit Libraries Bill, the purpose of which is to extend legal deposit to non-print materials. More information on the Bill can be found here.
Re:source’s Designation Scheme
At the end of March 03, Re:source published a consultation document on the extension of its Designation Scheme for Museums to archives and libraries. In its response CURL welcomed the proposal and put forward a number of suggestions to make the scheme truly cross-domain. Information on the original Re:source scheme can be found on their website. See CURL's response . It is expected that Re:source will report back on the feedback it has received by the end of July 03.
The SCONUL Research Extra Scheme (SRX)
In May 03, SCONUL launched its Research Extra Scheme (SRX), designed to allow academics and research postgraduate students borrowing rights in institutions which are not their own but have agreed to participate in the scheme. So far 18 CURL members/partners are participants in the scheme: University of Aberdeen, University of Birmingham, University of Bristol, University of Durham, University of Edinburgh, Glasgow University, Imperial College, King's College London, University of Leeds, University of Liverpool, University of Manchester, University of Newcastle, University of Nottingham, School of Advanced Study, University of London, University of Sheffield, University of Southampton, University College London. Further information on the scheme can be found on the SCONUL website, and a list of all participating institutions may be read.
Electronic Reference: QuestionPoint developments
Seven CURL libraries (British Library, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, National Library of Scotland, Nottingham) continue to test the OCLC QuestionPoint electronic reference system. The product moved out of beta in June 2002, and we have subscriptions running until the end of 2003.
There are now 800 member libraries globally, and there have been over 80 000 enquiries. Interestingly, 40% of member libraries are outside the USA.
QuestionPoint is an electronic reference system akin to a call management system (often used by IT departments) but targeted at the library community. It provides an infrastructure for enquiries to be sent over the web and received into a web-based management system where they can be routed, answered and stored. At its heart is the notion of cooperation, so QP member libraries can share enquiries, both as part of a consortium and as part of the whole global network.
QuestionPoint provides functionality for both real-time and asynchronous enquiries. CURL libraries have concentrated on the asynchronous web-form model, rather than the real-time ‘chat’ system. However, the ‘enhanced’ QP product now offers sophisticated real-time functionality; in addition to the ability to chat, librarians can ‘push web pages to the user, and even take over remote database sessions using an ‘application-sharing’ system. Edinburgh University Library is currently trialing QuestionPoint Enhanced.
The CURL group met in May 2003 at the National Library of Scotland for its second meeting. Representatives attended from OCLC PICA, and we were very fortunate to have the QuestionPoint Manager, Jeff Penka, attend from OCLC in the US. The day was an excellent opportunity to discuss problems, ask questions and make enhancement suggestions. OCLC demonstrated the Enhanced system, using two data projectors to show user and librarian screens simultaneously.
The general feel of the day was very positive. Libraries have discovered that getting this sort of system up and running can be time-consuming, but we have all been very pleased at the level of support from OCLC, and their responsiveness, in terms of addressing problems and suggestions. A formal report will be made to the CURL Board in the Autumn, regarding the future of CURL use of QP after subscriptions expire at the end of this year.
Simon Bains (CURL QuestionPoint Group administrator)
Edinburgh University Library
Chinese Holdings on Leeds OPAC – Michael Emly
Leeds has now incorporated its holdings of items in Chinese script into the main OPAC. The catalogue home page http://lib.leeds.ac.uk now offers a link to view Chinese/Japanese/Arabic script in records which contain such data. This reconnects to our Innopac system on a Unicode port and it is possible to input a search in either Chinese characters or in romanisation.
Leeds holds about 40,000 titles in Chinese script, of which some 33,000 were recorded - complete with Chinese script - in our previous Allegro database. These records are being converted to MARC21 format and transferred into Innopac. Format conversion is always a bit risky(!), but the results in this case are generally acceptable, and some 26,000 titles have been loaded to date. For current cataloguing, we are downloading records from RLIN where available, although we are looking forward to the time when the CURL database will also provide a source of records.
Leeds also holds some 10,000 titles in Japanese and Arabic. At present, most of these are in the OPAC, but in romanised form only. In future, we intend to hold the original script for these also.
I would like to thank all who have helped us achieve this success, and particularly colleagues at the Bodleian without whose assistance the task would have been so much greater.
Michael Emly
Collection Management Services, Leeds University Library
email: m.emly@leeds.ac.uk
curlnews 11 will be published 30 September 03. Contact the curlnews editor, with your views and contributions, by Tuesday 16 September 03