Oberlin Group Meeting 2010

 First day of one of my favorite annual meetings. The first discussion was an example of why I like this group so much. An open, thoughtful, egalitarian, discussion of whether and how we should be organized. As a director, I rarely get to participate in such discussions.

I was asked to lead a discussion with Ray English of Oberlin on open access. My part was OA trends to keep track of because they are relevant to the liberal arts. I included OA campus policies, OA content -- production and consumption -- including journals, monographs, reference works, and data, institutional repositories, open education resources, and OA student activism. I tagged a bunch of sites in delicious for examples etc.

This afternoon we are talking about institutional repositories with Sabrina Pape of Vassar, Richard Fyffe of Grinnell, Carol Dickinson of Colorado College, Amy Badertscher of Kenyon, Gail Scanlon of Mt Holyoke, and Niel McElroy of Lafayette. Things to keep track of include:

LASR
MDID
Grinnell College Libraries Data Repository
Alliance Digital Repository
OhioLINK Digital resource Commons
Digital Collections at Lafayette
MetaDB

Next step Dave Pilachowski of Williams College on EBL. An e-book collection development system in which you only buy the book once it is used three times.This patron driven acquisitions model is something I am very interested in.
Pat Tully  on cooperative collection development of e-books using Coutt's MyiLibrary. A similar product to EBL.
John McDonald of Claremont Colleges has done a study that found that patron driven purchases result in higher circulation beyond that patron request. They are using Elsevier. Loaded the MARC records (14,000) to the catalog, and would buy the most heavily used  at the end of the year. Users are comfortable with the model, they use fewer books that you think, we would not overly buy books. Conclusion: use patron driven purchasing for non-core titles and subjects.
I will publish this now, but add to it as the day progresses, so stay tuned.