Documents Users Group
We had a very good discussion and came up with some interesting ideas, both for the state plan and also for things that our group might want to do in the coming months. Representatives were present from: UTSA, St. Mary's, SAC, SAPL and Trinity.
We would like for the state plan to do three basic things: 1) help us with upper management, who do not always understand the importance of what we're doing and what we're asking for; 2) give us guidance and specific ideas on how to accomplish the goals put forward; and 3) coordinate the dissemination of training by encouraging local groups and individuals to reach out with their continuing education efforts and by helping avoid duplication of these efforts.
On the "will" vs "should" question, there was some disagreement. On the one hand, some of us felt that some goals are effectively impossible for all libraries to achieve; on the other, however, we agreed that often upper management won't give us the resources we need unless they are "forced" by some standards and directives.
A possible solution to this problem would be to prioritize the goals and objectives listed in the plan and come up with some number of "required" or "mandatory" standards, and then a set of "strongly recommended" items to come under "recommended for good depository practice." Flexiblity should be built into the plan, as a matter of pragmatism, but also to fit in with Bruce James' efforts to get away from "one size fits all." In any event, the language of the plan, particularly any requirements or recommendations for action, should be understandable to supervisory units in each institution--not only library directors but also university/city administrators, etc.
We also felt that the plan should fully incorporate electronic government information, as well as acknowledge the benefits of new technologies such as video conferencing and web-casting. Any language that seems to limit recommendations only to tangible materials should be avoided, unless, of course, it is dealing specifically with tangible materials. For example, the draft plan's many uses of the phrase "depository materials" should be replaced by "government information" in most instances. As to electronic communication channels, they can be used to solve many of the problems our state faces by virtue of its size, by facilitating cooperation, collaboration and training.
There are varying levels of institutional support for collaboration in San Antonio. Many of our institutions are quite small and cannot commit to large consortial purchases, for example, while schools such as UTSA have the clout of the UT system behind them and have possibly deeper pockets. The different missions of our institutions figure into this variation as well; the community college district, for example, which has two depositories, has quite different needs from the four-year institutions, especially those that are developing research collections in support of new graduate programs. And of course the Public Library's mission is quite different still.
Databases that were mentioned as good candidates for consortial purchase possibilities were Lexis/Nexis and Index to Government Periodicals, which are not included in TexShare. We agreed that if somehow some entity (such as the regionals) could negotiate on behalf of the depositories the way the UT system negotiates for its system schools, that would be fantastic. But probably too complicated to be practical.
We agreed that encouragement of the development and maintainance of active local groups should definitely be part of the plan--specifically encouraged if not actually required. The relationships supported by our regular meetings are invaluable to work in our individual libraries and we strongly feel that all depositories should have some such group in which to participate, at least virtually, if not actually face-to-face, and as often as is feasible.
Digitization projects are probably best left to larger institutions than those in San Antonio, although SAC points out that they have undertaken to digitize their campus newspaper archives and have developed some resources and expertise in this area. But particularly as small projects like this might be considered by smaller institutions, coordination at some higher level becomes even more vital.
In the area of cooperative collection development, we have worked on this in the past but have not re-visited it in several years. We wondered what sorts of different issues are involved now, given the large amount of electronic information available to everyone. The result of our discussion of this topic was a consensus that it's not as simple as it appears at first and that some guidance in this area would be welcome Some of the pitfalls we discussed included maintaining agreements to collect in certain areas as personnel, curriculum, institutional mission, etc., change over time, not to mention technological developments.
The small, local workshop model seemed to be the most popular among our group, but we like the idea of broader dissemination of each local group's efforts. This could be encouraged by support for web-casts and development of online courses, as well as coordination of topics (to avoid duplication of effort). UTSA reported on a system they use for training that is online, which allows self-paced study and keeps track of an individual's progress. The system also produces reports that can be used for performance and promotion evaluations. Using a system like this to make workshops such as those put on by the Census Bureau more widely available would be great.
We had ideas for many small, targeted workshop ideas that could be developed by individuals and groups with an interest in doing so, to be coordinated and publicized by the regionals: materials processing and collection maintenance (for technicians and students as well as new librarians); writing collection development policies; specific agency information; specific programs (such as Adobe, Excel, Dreamweaver, etc.); how to do cooperative collection development; trends in collection growth and management; how to do web-casts and teleconferences, how to manage/conduct digitization projects.
Most of our group felt that they would receive institutional support to attend an annual training meeting/thingy. We also felt that one recommendation the plan should certainly make would be for institutions to provide support for individuals developing and/or conducting training sessions. The regionals should not need to conduct all this training, but their function as coordinators and organizers would be essential.
We are generally satisfied with communication among Texas depositories, although we feel that perhaps the Tx-Fed list is under-utilized (although this might just be a by-product of govdoc-l's "market share").
We like the clearinghouse idea, although we wouldn't turn down free brochures, etc., developed by the regionals. A clearinghouse providing examples of good publicity ideas would be welcome. Perhaps a website for this purpose could be developed and alerts sent out via Tx-Fed when additions have been made.
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