Minutes
 Fall Meeting
Friday, November 20, 2009
Bobst Library, New York University

Members attending:  Patricia Figueroa (Brown),   Daisy Dominguez (CCNY Libraries, CUNY),   Pamela Graham (Columbia),   Miguel Valladares (Dartmouth University),   Sarah Aponte (Dominican Studies Institute),   Lynn Shirey (Harvard), María Vazquez Estevez (Instituto Cervantes),   Denise A. Hibay (New York Public Library),   Angela Carreno (New York University),   Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez (Princeton), Melissa Gasparotto (Rutgers University),   Jesus Alonso-Regalado ( SUNY, Albany),   Marisol Ramos (University of Connecticut), Joseph Holub ( Univ. of Pennsylvania),   Martha E. Mantilla (University of Pittsburgh),   Cesar Rodriguez (Yale University).

Guests:  Jennifer Vinopal, Librarian for Digital Scholarship Initiatives at NYU’s Bobst Library and the Digital Studio.

The participants introduced themselves.  The agenda for the day and the minutes for the Spring meeting were approved.  LANE members distributed the topics of the agenda among themselves in order to take notes for the minutes. 

 

  1. Presentation on the collaborative agreement between Brown University - Patricia Figueroa and Miguel Valladares - Dartmouth University.  

Miguel Valladares presented a detailed report entitled  “Latin American & Iberian Library Collections  at LANE Institutions:  1999‐2009.   10 years of Comparative Data With Historical Information Since 1966”.  He gave a detailed explanation of how he produced the report.   He said that eventhough the report is not 100% realistic since the data was taken from OCLC, which is an incomplete database,  this report  will help us to formulate good collaborative collection development among LANE institutions.

He explained the section of the report where he shows the search strings he used to get the data included.  He says that anyone can reuse these strings or can invent new strings to analyze collections in a very different way.  He also mentioned that one important thing to take into consideration is that OCLC is a 'live' database, this means that records are being included every single day.  Numbers today will be less than tomorrow. (This is the reason why he included the dates on which he searched OCLC database).   A new page in the LANE web page was set up to include this report.

 

2.  Cooperative collection development - Open discussion  

 

During lunch: 
Presentation on the work NYU Libraries has done in collaboration with the Hemispheric Institute:  The Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL) - Jennifer Vinopal, Librarian for Digital Scholarship Initiatives at NYU’s Bobst Library and the Digital Studio.
Jennifer Vinopal made a presentation of the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL).  This is a collaboration between New York University Libraries and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics which brings together in one place materials that have been available only in small, little-known archives that are inaccessible to scholars and that lack the resources to properly care for and provide access to these extraordinary cultural documents. Our trilingual Artist Profiles provide additional context to the videos and ensure wide accessibility to audiences around the Americas.   More info. can be found at: 
http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/about-the-digital-video-library

 

3.      Workshop on cooperation at the regional level in the area of collection
development.   Facilitator: Patricia Figueroa
There was not time to discuss this item during the meeting. 

 

4.      Workshop on public services:  library instruction, creation of subject and
course-related guides, and specialized reference.  Facilitators: Jesus Alonso &
David Murray.
                There was not time to discuss this item during the meeting.  It was agreed to include
                this topic in the Fall 2010 meeting.           

 

5.       Cooperative collection development projects involving e-books. Facilitator:
Jesus Alonso.   Notes recorded by Marisol Ramos

Jesus opened up the discussion asking about MyiLibrary (an Ingram Coutts product) demo at SUNY which he attended. He reported that list was a mix bag of materials with a lot of open access content and some Spanish materials, including materials from Digitalia. He mentioned too that the disparity in prices is quite pronounced with books that are in print.

Jesus brought several questions to the table:

  1. Can ebooks be loan through ILL?
  2. How that will affect regional cooperative agreements among libraries if you choose an ebook over a traditional print book?
  3. Are ebooks a replacement for print books or are they bought as complimentary material?
  4. How to deal with platforms that are proprietary?”
  5. If Latin American publishers enter this trend, what type of books will be produced that way?
  6. How many libraries are duplicating ebooks so far?

Discussion:
Someone mentioned that CLACSO has some ebooks. Angela mentioned the project RECAST (an onsite repository) as a possible place to place ebooks for preservation and access?

The discussion then turned into the case of Digitalia and what is the experience so far with some of the LANE members that has acquired or in process to acquire materials through Digitalia. What were the pricing models and other issues regarding Digitalia so far?

List of LANE libraries that have contracts with Digitalia:

  1. Dartmouth University ($20,000: one year subscription to access everything in the database?)
  2. New York University ($25,000: will buy content at the end of the contract year)
  3. Columbia University ($10,000: purchase specific journal titles and books)
  4. Instituto Cervantes ($10,000: one year subscription but that include giving access to all their libraries around the world)

Libraries under negotiations:

  1. Univ. of Connecticut: current offer $4,000 annual subscription to books and journals, maybe less if we add an approval plan for print books and movies.

When reporting their experience with Digitalia each university and institute has a very different experience. Because Digitalia is such a new service, it is open to negotiation and each library has different approaches to it. Most libraries have agreements to buy specific content inside Digitalia and are reluctant to go into a subscription model with them. If they buy material it has to be CORE material.

Major issues still in place:

  1. There are not MARC records for any of the titles in Digitalia;
  2. There are not IP restrictions—they used a plug-in and license system for each library accessing Digitalia, which was not a good system for e.g. Columbia U, who still is waiting to find a different way to access the database since there IT can’t handle individual downloading of plug-in in the system.
  3. SFX still not implemented
  4. There is not full-text search for all digital content. Search is limited to their metadata for the titles.

Note: so far Digitalia has said that they will have MARC records, IP restrictions system and SFX will be available in a year.

Conclusions:
Ebooks in Spanish is still new and there are very few companies working on this. Pricing models are still flexible because of the newest of the business. It is a good time to negotiate terms before a pricing model is picked and set. Digitalia is very open to have these kinds of discussions and negotiations now and it is still a product with a lot of potential. There are still some issues that need to be resolved besides the ones discussed above, such as selection. Can we select books or journals by titles, instead of buying packages? Can we work on getting consortium prices in the future? Who else is going to enter in this market besides Digitalia? Would Latin American publishers or distributors get involved? Garcia Cambeiro was a name mentioned who is interested in exploring ebooks.

The discussion will continue in the future, either at SALALM or next regional meeting.

 

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