Art
Libraries Society of North America 31st Annual Conference
Wyndham Baltimore Inner Harbor, Baltimore, Maryland - March 20-26, 2003
Friday, March 21, 2003
5:00-6:00 pm
Adams Room
Adeane Bregman, Session Recorder
Tim Shipe moderated the meeting, which
started with introductions and suggestions for discussion topics.
The following is a summary of the issues and
discussions that occurred.
FAXON/divine situation: Members discussed
the current situation stemming from the Faxon (Rowe.com) and divine
bankruptcies.
Team Organization for Collection
development: Members shared their experiences with team-based organizations,
with and without faculty participation.
De-accessioning and offsite storage:
Space continues to be an issue at many institutions.
Some approaches included giving up carrel space for stacks; shifting and
weeding; sending no longer used materials offsite; determining de-selection
procedures (a section on weeding in collection development policies, book by
book de-selection, weeding duplicates, large sets, and books published before a
certain date); using student help for changing locations in catalog records;
determining de-selection criteria (out of scope of current collection policy,
circulation data supplied by ILS); guaranteeing rapid turnaround time from
offsite storage; using terminology such as “library shelving facility”
rather than “storage.”
Electronic journals: Participants voiced
concerns about guaranteed archiving, retrospective access, images in art history
journals, and encouraging small publishers and academic associations which
publish important journals (such as Gesta) to make their publications and
backfiles available for digitization and electronic delivery.
Amanda Bowen volunteered to gather a group to talk to various publishers
and e-journal providers about future plans and to advocate for titles not yet
available electronically. Institutions
that are opting for “electronic only” are receiving complaints from faculty.
Other discussion topics included inventory and missing books, decreasing budgets, managing endowment funds, and cataloging materials that are not “owned” but accessed. Time ran out before all topics were covered.