University Library Committee February 24, 1999 Minutes Present: Ansar Ahmed, Veterinary Medicine Stephen Baehr, Arts and Sciences Eileen Hitchingham, Library Stephen Donohue, Agriculture & Life Sciences, Chair Richard Helm, Forestry and Wildlife Milko Maykowskyj, Staff Senate Raymond Plaut, Engineering Humberto Rodriguez-Camilloni, Art and Architecture Absent: Angela Barger, SGA Tim Copeland, GSA Thomas Gatewood, Education George Graham, Teaching and Learning Deborah Mayo, Faculty Senate Doug Patterson, Business Guest: Gail McMillan, Library Linda Richardson, Library for COR Continuing with the previous meeting's theme of briefings about library services and resources, Gail McMillan presented an introduction to the Scholarly Communications Project (SCP). Ms. McMillan is Head of the SCP and Special Collections at the University Libraries. She distributed a handout showing the homepage of the project and a listing of the e-journals (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu). This site is also accessible from the library homepage under library services. The project got started nearly ten years ago when faculty members expressed interest in publishing a journal here on campus. Given limited resources to start a university press, a decision was made to experiment with scholarly electronic publishing. Currently there are 16 journals published by the project, with about 3/4 of them edited by faculty here on campus. Most of the journals are the complete journal as you would take it off the shelf, some are only abstracts of the table of contents, and some are journals mirrored from the MIT press. A useful development within the last six years has been the ability to link articles between articles, so that when an article is cited, you can click on that link and go directly to that electronic journal. Ms. McMillan noted that the editors publishing e-journals AND who also publish a corresponding paper journal which they charge a subscription fee for or make available through membership, have not lost any subscribers as a result of free access to the electronic version. One advantage to having an e-journal format is that all the articles that are submitted electronically are in a searchable database. Copyright issues have been an involvement of the SCP, and within the last year they have consolidated the library copyright policies and put them online at the SCP site. This information clarifies common myths, and offers links to sites that are more comprehensive. There was discussion about the benefits for faculty of using electronic reserve to post articles for class rather than using personal URLs, especially as related to copyright and ease of access for students. The SCP with the graduate school forged a new process for theses and dissertations to be submitted and stored electronically. In January 1997 electronic theses and dissertations became mandatory for all of Virginia Tech's graduate and doctoral students. Information on the SCP homepage provides guidelines for graduate students. A system was set up so that you can browse the theses and dissertations, searching by author or department. Because Virginia Tech was one of the first universities to be involved in this, the SCP has been helping others set up systems like we have so that students can submit the works electronically, have them evaluated online by the graduate school, and then become available to the public. Statistics are kept electronically of the use of the documents. Whereas in the past a paper copy of a dissertation might be requested from the shelf 2-3 times per year, there have been as many as 75,000 "hits" on an electronic dissertation. Some of the electronic documents take advantage of multimedia, using more pictures, pictures in color, sound files, various layout designs and moving pictures. G. McMillan addressed an issue related to the submission form that accompanies theses or dissertations. The form includes a question as to the kind of access the student would like to give to their materials. There has been a misconception in the past that when you limit access electronically to the university community that this is just like the accessibility it would have had as a book on the shelf. It does not; when a book was on the shelf, the library used it to share things through interlibrary loan with other universities or libraries. S. Baehr raised a question as to how one should do a search on the number of articles published at Virginia Tech, when there are several different names that faculty publish their articles under (VPI, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Virginia Tech, etc.) This may have implications for ranking organizations based on the number of articles published and therefore our institutional image. L. Richardson offered to bring this issue up at the Commission on Research. G. McMillan pointed out the other sections available on the SCP site: a digital image database of over 14,00 images, searchable by all of the words that describe the work; international newspapers, news reports online, and guides to the Special Collections department. The meeting was adjourned at 5:05. There will not be a meeting in March; the next meeting will probably be April 28.