Attendance: Sally Bauer, Pam Billings, Dorothy Blow, Jeremy Donald, José Escobar, Camille Fiorillio, Amory Irby, Michael Kaminski, Victor Lopez, Wilson Plunkett, Christina Ramos, Azucena Rodriguez-Guerra, Ruby Wehmeyer and Kathy Amen.

We spent most of the meeting discussing possibilities for web harvesting and digitization of local documents. Kathy reported on a very cursory examination of local agency sites, emphasizing that the harvesting project would be very complex to organize in any comprehensive way. There are some "publication-"like webpages, but also dynamic content such as databases. She suggested that these dynamic sites could be cataloged, and noted that the cataloger at St. Mary's is interested in doing this kind of cataloging. Once a website has been cataloged, Kathy will notify the rest of the group so that a cataloging record could be placed in each of our OPACs.

We decided that those who were interested and could spare the time would look at particular categories of sites and identify documents to be harvested and websites to be cataloged. Michael has been doing some work with the city's economic development folks and so will take that subject area. Since Trinity has a big geology department, Jeremy will look at water and environmental agencies. Kathy will look at health-related agencies. When any of us find documents, email them to Kathy and she will put a copy on the library server at St. Mary's, then notify everyone of the URL so that information can be added to cataloging records.

For example, just as an experiment, she downloaded three years of Edwards Aquifer Authority financial reports. Here are the years and the URLs:

• 2001: http://library.stmarytx.edu/acadlib/edocs/edwar01.pdf
• 2002: http://library.stmarytx.edu/acadlib/edocs/edwar02.pdf
• 2003: http://library.stmarytx.edu/acadlib/edocs/edwar03.pdf

A particular problem is posed by long serial runs; we might need to work out a different procedure for handling these types of publications.

As far as digitization of older documents is concerned, Kathy is willing to just start scanning some older things at St. Mary's, with an added benefit being the freeing up of shelf space. When she gets around to doing this, she will notify the group of the titles with their new URLs on the St. Mary's library server. Michael had discussed our digitization ideas with Frank Faulkner, head of Texana at SAPL (which is the department that handles their local documents). Frank pointed out a great digitization candidate would be older city minutes, which exist in poor quality microfilm. If we could work with the City Clerk's office to digitize from their original documents it would be a very useful item for historians and researchers. We decided that we need to invite Frank to a meeting so that we can get his ideas on digitization priorities, and take advantage of his expertise in dealing with city agencies. Michael also noted this Cornell digitization tutorial, which is a good way of learning more about how to manage digitization projects.

A final conclusion by the group was that we all need to know more about local agencies and local data. Hopefully, if nothing else comes of the harvesting and digitization initiatives, we will at least have enhanced our expertise in this area.

Jeremy was asked about his idea for getting special tabulations of Census data for San Antonio neighborhoods, but his conclusion has been that neighborhood boundaries are not well enough defined here to be able to do that efficiently. He does have all kinds of San Antonio GIS data which can be used to construct maps showing geographical representations in many subject areas. He is definitely our go-to guy when it comes to questions about GIS.

Announcements of interest:

• SAC is reclassifying all their documents in LC
• UTSA has recently outfitted their office with new ergonomic desks
• Trinity's tech services area has also been remodeled, with everyone getting their own cubicle

Texas depositories have been somewhat concerned about a lack of shipments. At least we were able to confirm today that no one has received anything since October.

Our next meeting will be held after the Depository Conference in Seattle, which is April 2-5. Exact date and place will be announced when confirmed.

Respectfully submitted,

Respectfully submitted,

Kathy Amen, Secretary/Treasurer

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