CMT Sponsored Big Ticket Prioritization Process - Winter 2006
Goal:
Develop a single list of the highest priority expensive purchases desired to enhance the general collections. The list will be arranged in priority order.
Timeline
- April 2006- July 2006
- Prioritized list is announced when available.
- 2006 Big Ticket Results (Excel)
- CMT begins review of renewals of electronic resource subscriptions for FY07.
- Prioritized list is assessed and, if funds are available, purchase in FY07 is considered.
- March 2006
- CMT reviews candidates for prioritization. By March 15, 2006 CMT prioritizes candidate titles according to CMT Big Ticket Criteria for Prioritization.
- By February 24, 2006
- Collaboratives review and prioritize candidates for big ticket prioritization. CMT members bring prioritized lists forward to CMT. Collection Managers from special collections may also submit prioritized titles to CMT.
- Fall 2005-February 2006
- By December 16, 2005, collaboratives create a non-binding list of candidate titles (no descriptions) for big ticket consideration and send it to the CMT reflector to assist with planning and scheduling.
Background:
The prioritization process occurs as needed. The process has been implemented six times to date. The prioritization process was developed because past purchase activities without prioritization resulted in unfocused and ineffective collection development. Purchases of lesser value to the general collections were occurring because of sudden purchase opportunities while high value purchases could suffer from a lack of advocacy. CMT has recognized that one time purchases can compete with continuing purchases for the same funding and thus it is important to prioritize both together. The regular need for a prioritized list for budget management and negotiation of consortial purchasing has shown that such a list is useful even when funding sources for actual purchases varies. The prioritization process has been developed to generate broad input and broad evaluation while recognizing the need for a concise list that could be updated frequently.
The prioritization process is not a funding process! Purchase decisions are made separately as funds are available. The availability of funds for new purchase in FY07 is currently unknown. Substantial levels of new funding are not expected. If CMT can identify or create available funds, items are not purchased strictly in priority order as many purchase decisions depend on the amount and nature of available funding. Traditionally a variety of funding sources have been used in developing the collections through purchase of big ticket priorities.
Principles:
- Collection managers will suggest candidates for prioritization
- Each of the subject collaboratives and IRST will prioritize items suggested by their members before sending the items to CMT.
- CMT will consider prioritizing a big ticket proposal on request even if it might be purchased by or housed in a special collection as long as it will support the general collections. If more than one proposal is coming from the same group, the proposals must be prioritized following to the process outlined below.
- One-time and continuing purchases will be prioritized together.
- If a purchase is of interest to multiple collaboratives, all interested collaboratives should prioritize the candidate purchase.
- For effective consideration, CMT needs 1) a description of the candidate purchase, 2) a justification of its contribution to the general collections including how it benefits campus programs (e.g. discussion of multiple disciplines or interdisciplinary areas served, major gaps filled, etc.), 3) accurate pricing information (in the case of electronic resources contact Betty Day rather than the vendor directly for quotes), and 4) if possible, the candidate’s prioritization by a subject collaborative. See examples from previous reviews provided at the end of this document.
- While there is no hard cutoff point, items priced at less than $1,000 should be accompanied by justification for consideration as a big ticket item that addresses both their value to the collection and why they have been submitted to this process given their unusually low cost for big ticket items.
- To assist collection managers, a listing of criteria considered in the CMT review process are listed at CMT Big Ticket Criteria for Prioritization. This list may not be exhaustive but has been helpful in past reviews.
Process:
- CMT announces process and delineates a timeline.
- Collaborative members bring candidates to their subject collaboratives for review. Collaborative members are responsible for gathering descriptive information, obtaining accurate pricing information prior to prioritization, and developing a justification based on the purchase’s contribution to the development of the general collections.
- Collection managers not on subject collaboratives may propose candidates for consideration directly to the CMT. The CMT Leader will contact the collection managers for Gov Docs, Special Collections, East Asia, Non-Print, and Information and Reference Services to remind them of their opportunity to participate in the process. Multiple submissions must be prioritized by the submitter.
- Subject collaboratives prioritize their collaborative’s candidate purchases by balloting. For each item on the list, collaborative members receive three votes to allocate to their preferences, not to exceed seven votes per single item.
- CMT members present all candidates from their collaborative’s lists to CMT with justification, voting results and feedback on the collaborative’s prioritization process.
- CMT discusses each potential purchase and may request further information from the subject collaborative or subject collaborative member.
- CMT considers any other candidate purchases presented by non-subject collaborative members.
- CMT prioritizes proposed candidate purchases using the voting procedure described in step 4. CMT may set a cut-off requirement (eliminating items from collaborative lists that received very small numbers of votes). Voting procedures are detailed at CMT Big Ticket Criteria for Prioritization.
- CMT announces the results of the prioritization process.
- CMT evaluates the list as needed and determines when to repeat the process either because the list has become outdated or because the list has been substantially reduced by purchase.
Examples of Candidate Purchases suggested in Previous Prioritization Processes
- IEEE/IEE Electronic Library (IEL), Votes: 80 out of 594 (13%)
- Description: IEL includes IEEE Spectrum (a journal), Proceedings of the IEEE (one title), IEEE and IEE journals (106 and 12 titles respectively), IEEE and IEE conferences (370+), Active IEEE standards, and back files from 1988. The publisher reports that IEL contains over 700,000 articles and more than 2.3 million full-page PDF images.
- Justification: Faculty and graduate students from many different departments have asked for these back files. The Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science departments are very vocal in their requests. Many other departments such as Physics, Mathematics, Meteorology, Life Sciences and most of the other 8 departments in the School of Engineering use IEEE and IEE publications too. We will be putting a significant part of the key current literature for these disciplines on the desktops of the faculty and graduate students bringing in the big research dollars for this campus. These titles are among the most cited in their fields. Our existing subscription has approximately 2000 articles downloaded per month. An additional advantage is we will have usage data for these materials and we will be in a position to make the decision to cancel print. This would in turn save a great deal of shelf space as well as money.
- Summary: IEL back files to 1988 and the addition of IEEE active standards would clearly add value to major user communities on campus by providing ready access (desktop) to these core journals, proceedings, and standards in the fields of electrical and computer engineering and many related fields.
- Price: $24,000 or less per year (subscription)
- Please note that other Maryland campuses may join us in this purchase. We are currently spending $68,000 for a part of this package of journals and proceedings. The additional cost will add back files (1988-current) and active IEEE Standards. Currently we only have online back files for 1998. Price expires Nov. 30, 2001.
- Sponsors: Neal Kaske and Julie Arnold
- Statistical Universe, 63 votes, 11.05% of the total:
- Statistical Universe fills the need for an easy to use, powerful database of statistical material. This is a combination of Lexis Nexis' proprietary statistical database with the online version of American Statistics Index (US Government published statistics), Statistical Reference Index (Statistics from state, local and non-governmental sources, such as trade publications) and index to International Statistics (UN, World Bank and other international statistics publishers). Includes the full backfile for IIS, ASI and SRI going back to the mid-1970s or 1980 (depending on product), and includes linked "full text" tables for a growing percentage of the content, including especially tables from ASI entries, Statistical Abstract of the US and other federal publications. Quick searches can be done on only full text tables (special "PowerTables" search) for easier to find statistics, without having to use the relatively more complicated search for abstracts of the ASI, IIS and SRI records. This is a very valuable general reference resource, since it replaces the unwieldy and often neglected print versions of ASI, SRI and IIS and would make those valuable sources more accessible, particularly to undergraduates. We get a large number of statistics questions at the reference desk - as we are all aware, many professors urge their students to obtain statistics when doing research for their projects in a variety of fields. In addition, this product would be especially useful for government research and the departments of Economics and Government and Politics.
- Statistical Universe is 4 parts. Purchase of Base is required, and we urge purchase of all three modules for full functionality. These prices are for the full year.
Base (required) $.33 per FTE = $9005 A: ASI $.15 per FTE = $4093 C: SRID $.15 per FTE = $4093 D: IIS $.15 per FTE = $4093 - Submitted by Travis Johnson
- Harrassowitz approval plan, 118 votes
- Format: print, monographs
- Publisher/vendor: Harrassowitz
- Price: $30,000 to start -- see below
- Description and justification: There is a renewed interest on campus in German studies, especially in the History department with the hire last year of prominent historian Jeffrey Herf as a full professor. The history department faculty is concerned that we are getting the most recent publications from Germany and that our library collections are adequate in size and content to the studies and research done on campus. The study of German history and German Jewish history, although primarily in the 20th century, is one of the strongest areas in the History Department after American history. It produces a great number of graduate students both in MA and Ph.D. programs, many of whom work as interns and in other positions in many locally based organizations, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, German Historical Institute, National Archives, etc., where they can test their knowledge and abilities first hand. Besides History a number of other departments on campus have specialists or interests in German and Central European Studies, including for example, Art, Architecture, German languages and literature, Linguistics, Philosophy, Music, Government and politics. Finally German scholarship in many disciplines has been long recognized as one of the best in the world, and an approval plan will allow us to better keep up with the current developments there. The approval plan will serve all of these departments and the areas of interest.
According to Harrassowitz representatives, for us to have a plan which will give us simply core materials will be: for history alone we would need about $10,500, art -- $4,500; performance -- $1,500; music (just books) -- $2,000; literature -- $8,000; public affairs/public policy are not covered as a separate subject category. Total -- $26,500. To compare with other institutions: Emory spends around $38,000 a year; NYU -- $45,000; Univ. of Illinois -- $80,000; and Johns Hopkins -- $40,000.
- American Periodical Series Online, 49 votes
- Format: Online
- Publisher/vendor: Proquest
- Price: One-time content and 1st-year access fee: $72,290. 2nd-year access fee: $2625
- Description and justification:Full text/full image database of all magazines published in America from 1741-1900. Enable on-line (remote) access and full text searchability to content we have on microfilm (in the three American Periodicals Series sets). "Titles range from Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine and America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository, to popular magazines still in print, such as Vanity Fair, Harper's and Ladies' Home Journal."
Of interest to undergraduates, graduate students and scholars in such fields as literature, history, American studies, women’s studies, history of science and technology, slavery, religion, political history, education, cultural studies, and women’s studies.
- Academic Search Premier, 48 votes, 8.42% of the total
- Price: Approximately $8,000
- We currently get Academic Search Elite. We need to upgrade our subscription to Academic Search Premier, which will more than double the number of full-text titles available to us through this source. In doing so, we will be joining 10 University of Maryland System libraries which have already (since July) ungraded to this database.
Academic Search Premier is the world’s largest scholarly, multi discipline, full-text database designed specifically for academic institutions. With the most valuable and most numerous collection of peer reviewed full text journals, Academic Search Premier offers critical information from many sources found in no other database. Search Premier contains:
- Full text for nearly 3,200 scholarly publications (vs. Academic Search Elite, which has full-text for only 1,520 journals).
- Abstracts and indexing for over 4,160 scholarly journals (vs. Academic Search Elite, which covers only 2,730 scholarly journals) with many dating back to 1984.
- Full page images, as well as color embedded images
- Diverse content providing a valuable resource for your library, providing full text journal coverage for nearly all academic areas of study including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies, etc. (Note from Glenn: I decided to check this out myself, and search the journal titles lists for various individual subject areas, and I found numerous titles in each of the following subject areas: engineering, psychology, literature, sociology, history, architecture, religion, linguistics, biological sciences, criminology, and philosophy--at which point I was convinced of the database’s broad subject range, and stopped searching additional subject areas).
Furthermore, Academic Search Premier contains the entire full-text holdings of another EBSCO database, "The Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection," a comprehensive database with nearly 470 full text titles. With EBSCO’s smart-links between all of it databases, it would mean that if we had a subscription to Academic Search Premier, the records would be available via PsycINFO. So, for the first time, students could find a large number of full-text records in PsycINFO, which is one of our most heavily used databases.
- Submitted by Glenn Moreton
- SciFinder Scholar (added seat), 33 out of 594 (5.6%)
- Format: Online
- Publisher/vendor: Proquest
- Price: We currently have one 24-hour seat without SSM (substructure module), and one 2-hour seat with SSM. Sylvia is requesting a second 24-hour seat in anticipation of increased demand. 1 seat with SSM = $10,750. 1 seat without SSM = $7167. Prices are for October 2001 through June 2002
- Description:SciFinder Scholar is offered to academic institutions as the online version of Chemical Abstracts, which is the comprehensive abstracting journal covering all areas of chemistry. The original file covered the years from 1967 to the present. In April 2001, Chemical Abstracts Service made an additional 20 years of information available, so coverage now goes back to 1947. The remaining bibliographic information back to 1907 should be added by spring 2002.
- Justification: Originally, it was thought that Chemical Abstracts (CA) was of interest only to chemists. As research has become more interdisciplinary, we are now getting requests from faculty and graduate students in other disciplines (including aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, and geology) who need access to the SciFinder Scholar database. When we received our second connection or "seat" this summer, we made it available outside the chemistry building for the first time. There is an expectation that the demand for access to SciFinder Scholar will continue to grow in other departments, including the life sciences.
- Sponsor: Sylvia O’Brien
