Documents Users Group
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Attendance: John Barnett, Camille Fiorillo, Amory Irby, Michael Kaminski, Ben Longoria, Victor Lopez, Tina Mesa, Tina Petimezas, Ruby Wehmeyer, and Kathy Amen.
There were many announcements and a lively discussion of various issues that have come up since our last meeting. Kathy received emails from Claudia at TLU and Wilson and Dorothy from SAPL, expressing regret at not being able to attend today due to short staffing. First, the announcements:
St. Mary's: Kathy introduced everyone to her new assistant, Ben Longoria. Ben was at Our Lady of the Lake, in serials, before moving to St. Mary's. He's working on his library degree through North Texas. Chris is no longer at the Law Library, and as yet a replacement has not been hired.
Palo Alto: Pat's technician position has been moved to another department
UTSA: they are moving somewhat toward a division along subject lines between the downtown and 1604 libraries, with downtown currently handling architecture/interior design, public administration and criminal justice materials
Trinity: their third floor is going to become an "information commons," and documents are going to be moving to the first floor, and will be housed in compact shelving
SAC: they have purchased the Proquest New York Times service, which provides full-text (full images) of the paper back to the 1850's.
Discussions:
Claudia sent Kathy an email posing questions for the group regarding the checking and correcting of URLs in cataloging records. Tina P. and Victor responded that they check and correct URLs systematically; Tina once again sang the praises of GODORT's PURL Alert page, which provides lists of corrected URLs.
Kathy will be going to the FDLC next month and will report on it at our next meeting. Tina P. said she heard from Steve Sexton (formerly at UTSA); he is now in South Carolina and back working with documents. He'll be at the meeting and Kathy will find out what's up with him.
Kathy did send out letters over the summer in the group's name to protest the OMB directive allowing agencies to send their printing elsewhere than to GPO. None of our Congressional delegation responded to the letters, and it is our understanding that the directive is now in effect. Kathy will try to get more information and opinions on this issues at the FDLC.
No one has ever received a microfiche they have claimed from the GPO contractor CRS, in line with the experiences reported on govdoc-l. Amory has sent second claims, as GPO instructed, but still hasn't gotten a response.
UTSA is trying to do more work on collecting local documents, a perennial difficult issue.
Tina suggested that we might want to get someone from the Census Bureau down to do a program on finding data on their website. It could be set up for us and other librarians from our institutions who might be interested. We all thought this was a good idea.
John was tentatively named as this year's president; he said either he would take the post or pass it along to the other librarian currently working with documents at the 1604 library, since he said she might be able to attend more meetings. Kathy suggested that we consider setting up some sort of rotational schedule for naming a president, so as to avoid people having to be put on the spot. The post is somewhat ceremonial, but does involve signing the occasional protest letter.
Since some of those attending mentioned that they have dropped off of govdoc-l due to the large volume of mail, Kathy suggested that they might subscribe to GPO's new list which would ensure that they receive all the "official" news dealing with the Depository Program. There is a page which gives subscription info on the FDLP Desktop.
We set a tentative schedule of meetings for the coming year. Our next meeting will be at UTSA Downtown on Nov. 1 at 9:30 a.m. Subsequent (tentative) dates and locations are as follows:
Dec. 6 -- Trinity (traditional Christmas lunch)
Feb. 7 -- Palo Alto
March 7 -- TLU
May 2 -- SAC
Respectfully submitted,
Kathy Amen, Secretary/Treasurer
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