Reports

Charge: Increase effectiveness in providing electronic resources in a timely and efficient manner to the BLC membership. Determine best practices in providing this service. Explore inclusion of other libraries or consortia to maintain the BLC's competitive edge.

1. The BLC Office compiled a price savings report that delineates individual member savings for each product subscribed to through the BLC. This report will be included in the proposed E-resources Web Site.
   
   
2. E-Resources Web Site: The Williams College systems librarian, Walter Komorowski, has agreed to work on the web site. Laura Walters and Jonas Barciauskas will meet with him and Barbara Preece in July to design the site.
   
   
3. Met with three vendors to discuss their willingness to develop new pricing models for the BLC. Invited them to submit proposals to support consortium-wide acquisition of their products. We received proposals from two of the three vendors.
   
   

The task force recommends that the BLC continue its role in brokering cooperative access to electronic resources. The task force further recommends two models for these purchases: a central buying fund model and a buying club model. These 2 models are delineated below.

1. Central Buying Fund Model: The task force recommends that a central e-resources fund be established through an initial annual assessment of $7,500 per BLC member.
   • Type of Product: The central buying fund model would be used for the purchase of products of broad-based universal interest, including moderately priced products that all members would purchase and expensive products that are of interest to most members but beyond their individual means.
   • Rationale: By using the central buying fund to purchase products that all members would purchase, the BLC will benefit from economy of scale and leverage significant savings for each member. Similarly, by purchasing an expensive product using the central buying fund, the BLC will make a useful resource available to those members who would be unable to purchase it on their own. Over time, the central buying fund would be used to purchase a suite of databases of broad enough subject scope to guarantee effective return for all members.
   • Fund administration: The task force recommends that a new task force be established to administer the central buying fund. The new task force will annually review the amount of the assessment so as to sustain ongoing expenditures and support new initiatives. The task force will consist of six representative members serving on a rotating basis for staggered terms.
   • Decision-making model: Pending Board acceptance of the central buying fund recommendation, the current E-Resources Task Force recommends that a decision-making model for central purchases be developed as soon as possible. This will help ensure the successful and timely launch of the central buying fund model, which would be introduced to the E-Resources Contacts group in September. If it pleases the Board, the current Task Force agrees to have one additional meeting in July to draft this decision-making model. The decision-making model should include:
     

     a. selection criteria
     b. timetable for selection of titles
     c. mechanism for feedback from the larger e-resources contacts list
     d. a plan to evaluate the model

   • Decision-making model:

     a. Titles for consideration come from the e-resources contacts list and/or the BLC office.
     
     b. The office sends out all suggestions for a trial to the e-resources contacts list to gauge interest. Members have one week to respond to the e-response list to note interest in the trial.
     
     c. If significant interest is found, the office sets up a month-long trial. Information on this is sent to the e-resources contacts list.
     
     d. Members must respond to the e-response list by 2 weeks after the end of the trial to note interest.
     
     e. The office gathers preliminary pricing information that is shared with the e-resources contacts list. Final commitment must be made to the e-response list 2 weeks after pricing is received.
     
     f. The office negotiates the license and sends final license for comments to the e-resources list. Members have 1 week to comment.
     
     g. The office sends the license, sign-off sheet and invoice to appropriate contacts.
     
     h. The office maintains the e-resources web site with all product information.
     
     i. The office sends a monthly summary of the status of titles being considered to the e-resources contacts list.
     
     

1. The task force recommends that, in addition to the central buying fund task force, a short-term task force be established and charged with examining current institutional subscriptions for potential cost savings. Some of these subscriptions may be candidates for the central buying fund model or the buying club model.
2. The task force recommends that the BLC sponsor a symposium during the next academic year on new models for pricing electronic resources. The participants and presenters should include librarians, publishers, and faculty. The Society for Scholarly Publishing is a potential partner in this endeavor.
3. We recommend that the BLC not include other non-BLC libraries in its purchasing at this time. Revision of the current BLC electronic resource acquisition processes should be completed and evaluated before other institutions are invited to join us.

This report has been abridged. Information regarding specific vendors and products has been removed. The full report will be available online for the BLC community in the near future. Staff of BLC member libraries may contact the BLC office for unabridged copies of task force reports.

1. Barbara Preece and the BLC office created a Cost Savings Report. We have asked Barbara to add a column to the report that notes other benefits in addition to cost savings, i.e., access to more titles consortially than would be available individually.
   
   
2. We met with ProQuest, Alexander Street Press, and Oxford University Press to propose a central buying fund model of consortial purchasing. All three vendors will give us written proposals by May 1.
   
   
3. We recommend that BLC members become NERL affiliates. We propose to use NERL, when possible, for items over $10,000 and to use the BLC for items under $10,000 or not available through NERL.
   
   
4. We recommend that the BLC not include other libraries in its purchasing at this time. We prefer to perfect our own processes over the next year or two and consider opening up to other institutions at a later time. (In addition, we believe that Nelinet already provides purchasing opportunities for smaller New England libraries.)
   
   
5. Still to do: Barbara Preece will devise a procedural model that delineates responsibilities of the BLC office and streamlines communication between the office and individual institutions. This includes creating and maintaining a web site that contains all licensing information and producing a monthly list that outlines product status.
   
   

The E-Resources has been meeting monthly. Robert Evensen is the convener, and Laura Walters is the minute taker. There is no leader, as we will all play an equal part. We have begun to address the following charges:

1. Increase effectiveness: Effectiveness of this effort for consortium members can be measured in several ways: the cost savings they realize; the increased number of resources and access they can provide to their patrons; and savings of local staff effort. The BLC has never looked at whether buying resources though the consortium is effective using these measures. We would like to begin to remedy this- -looking first at cost savings- -by doing a Cost Savings Report, similar to the one done by NERL.

Action Item: Barbara Preece and the BLC office will create a Cost Savings Report showing how much money each institution saves for each product and how much more access each institution gains by joining with the BLC. Barbara will send a draft of the report by March 15 to see if it meets our needs. We will discuss the report at the March meeting and use it as one of the ways of evaluating the effectiveness of BLC purchasing.

Action Item: Barbara Preece will devise a procedural model that delineates the responsibilities of the BLC office and streamlines communication between the office and individual institutions. It is suggested that the BLC office be responsible for negotiating contracts; communicating with members; maintaining a web site that contains all licensing information; and producing a monthly list of products under consideration. We will also explore the feasibility of outsourcing the development of the web site.

3. Explore the feasibility of joining with other buying groups, consortia and libraries. a. NERL: We discussed whether the BLC could make better use of NERL. It was decided that NERL is an effective way to handle many purchases because of cost savings, increased access, and use of staff time. However, it was noted that not all BLC members are NERL members or affiliates. In addition, NERL does not open all its deals to affiliates; and NERL has a $10,000 threshold, whereas BLC has a $5,000 threshold.

Action Item: Make a recommendation that BLC members become NERL affiliates. Use NERL, when possible, for items over the $10,000 limit, but continue to use the BLC for items between $5,000 and $10,000, and for purchases not available to NERL affiliates.

4. Determine best practices: We asked if there are other models we could follow in addition to the current BLC and NERL models. We discussed the possibility of having a central buying fund that would be used to purchase shared products (ala OhioLink). This model might lend itself to the full-text primary source databases that are now becoming available but whose price puts them beyond the reach of many BLC institutions.

Action Item: Invite full-text primary source database vendors to meet with the task force to explore the central buying fund model. Barbara Preece will invite reps to the March 21 meeting.

This report has been abridged. Information regarding specific vendors and products has been removed. The full report will be available online for the BLC community in the near future. Staff of BLC member libraries may contact the BLC office for unabridged copies of task force reports.