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2010 NC Independent Colleges and Universities (NCICU),

Purchasing Committee Meeting, May 13

by Lauren Corbett

Carol and I attended only 1 of the 2 days of the Purchasing Committee meeting at Meredith College in Raleigh. Georgia Williams of Chowan University was Chair for 2010. Georgia thoughtfully broke with the tradition of being the host and arranged for the central location in consideration of travel costs for participants.

  • INTEGRATED SEARCH SYSTEMS On the day that Carol and I were not present, the group looked at demonstrations of integrated search systems from Ex Libris (Primo), Serials Solutions (Summon), and EBSCO (Discovery). We heard comments about how expensive these systems are and it seems that most of the NCICU members are taking the same approach as we did — wait and see.
  • NC LIVE Jill Robinson Morris gave an NC Live update. Foci for the past year were: 1) content, 2) access and integration, 3) awareness. NC Live will be dealing with about an $85,000 cut in budget next year. As a sidebar to this presentation, Lauren learned that NC Live “governance” is 4 Committees of Interest (COIs): 1) NCICU, 2) state universities, 3) community colleges, and 4) public libraries through the State Library. K-12 is not represented because they don’t have a formal, single, centralized body to represent them. Kathy Winslow is the representative to the Resources Committee for NCICU.
  • SERIALS ASSESSMENT Carol enlivened her presentation on Serials Assessment, covering our cancellation project and weeding guidelines, by using humorous pictures to illustrate her points. She had the audience laughing about every 5 minutes. For example, her first slide was one of storm trooper action figures (Star Wars) killing Cheerios. (Serials cancellation is a killing action, n’est-ce pas?) Near the end of the day, Georgia used an index card process where each attendee recorded one great thing from the day and only items with unexpected benefits beyond the agenda were selected to be read aloud. Carol’s presentation was mentioned twice!
  • COPYRIGHT Kevin Smith, a lawyer and Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University gave a presentation on copyright, most of which was very familiar since he spent quite a bit of time on the TEACH Act, but a particularly useful tidbit that was new to me and Carol was that while it is illegal for a French professor to circumvent DRM on DVDs to assemble a collection of film clips for a course, a new small exception allows a film studies professor to do this with films _from the Department’s collection_ (but not the library’s collection). Kevin concluded with a plug for librarians to play a role in getting professors to stop giving away their copyright.

Discussion in the business meeting at the end of the day concluded that the May meeting is the best opportunity for members to share questions and answers surrounding issues in libraries and that they wish to continue in this vein instead of limiting to the historical action agenda. Several members agreed that it is important to have a theme for the meeting so that each institution can send the appropriate representation for both learning and knowledge contribution. For example, if ILL is to be covered or reference desk services, Lauren would not be the most appropriate representative from WFU.

However, for May 2011, the plan is to have three e-book vendors present a proposal for consortial purchasing. David Brydon of High Point University is the Committee Chair for 2011 and will be hosting the meeting at his institution. Mary Roby of Gardner-Webb University was elected as Vice Chair/Chair Elect.