Library Committee

Voting members present: Bradley Boovy, Marit Bovbjerg, Carolyn Fonyo, Janet Nishihara, Melissa Santala, Tim Zuehlsdorff
Voting members absent: Erica Fleishman, Kate Kerish, Hua-yu Li
Guests present: Anne-Marie Deitering, Kerri Goergen-Doll, Margaret Mellinger

Housekeeping

• The Chair, Melissa Santala, agreed to take notes for minutes for this meeting.

Brief Discussion of October 26, 2021 Meeting Minutes

• The Chair had sent a new draft of the minutes of the October 26, 2021 Library Committee (LC) meeting out to committee member ahead of this meeting for review. The Chair explained the minutes had been edited for brevity and clarity in response to feedback on the original draft. This version will be archived on the LC website unless further edits are requested.

 Updates from the Interim University Librarian – Anne-Marie Deitering

• Budget
  • Library has been overspending the collections budget for at least a decade; coping mechanisms have included: targeted cuts and cancellations, and repurposing money from salary savings. OSULP does receive FRA money to support collections, and has received annual allocations from the Budget office to address journal inflation since 2015, However, because of campus-wide reductions, for the last 3 years the library budget has been essentially flat. With 5.5% inflation, a flat budget is a big hurdle. These problems – the ongoing collections gap, the flat budget, and the need to fill empty positions -- came to a head last year. Twelve out of a total of 80 positions were kept open for more than a full fiscal year. The library’s E&G allocation each year is based on prior years, so those positions need to be added back in. The library has re-hired most of those positions, with two administrator positions remaining. Last year robust carry forward funds and a $550,000 bridge from the Provost kept them going.
  • Strategy going forward:
    • Apply carry forward again this year
    • Asking for another year of bridge funding ($600,000)
    • Start process of Elsevier negotiations to reduce costs. The goal is to reduce cost by 50% (approximately $700K), without losing access to content.
    • This plan was presented to Sherm Bloomer (Associate Vice President of Budget and Resource Planning) and was well received
    • Other scenarios are unattractive:
      • Library positions are needed to staff departments responsible for managing licenses, and providing alternative access to scholarly material (such as ILL and document delivery); and to keep service hours steady.
      • Smaller collections cuts will not solve the problem given the budget constraints.
      • Greater collections cuts will be based on dollar amounts and timing, and they will not be very strategic.
    • The budget situation has put the library in the position of needing to cut content that gets used, things that wouldn’t have been cut before.
• Open and Sustainable Scholarly Communication effort
  • Increasing journal costs, the Open and Sustainable Scholarly Communication (OSSC) effort, and Principles Guiding Negotiations with Journal Vendors
  • There is a budgetary need to shift away from a subscription model toward on-demand use/purchase of articles. OSU’s Interlibrary loan (ILL) was able to stay active throughout the entire pandemic (when other university libraries did not) by purchasing on the article level. This infrastructure needs to build up more, leaving subscriptions for only what users need immediate access to all the time
  • Guiding Negotiations with Journal Vendors
  • Went to FS executive committee and the Faculty Senate Research Council with the draft Guiding Principles which were based on MITs principles and edited and added to them. Have also reached out to department heads and administrators, but still need to go to faculty. Library staff expects to bring the Guiding Principles to the full FS in March. The presentation will need to explain the situation and walk a complicated line: the library needs more money, but more money alone isn’t going to solve the problem.
    • Marit Bovbjerg suggested making it apparent to users the cost to the library of purchasing an article when using ILL.
    • Anne-Marie Deitering expressed concern that it would disrupt (and perhaps discourage). Regarding the cost of ILL, one practical answer would be to borrow for a single use, but then buy if something is borrowed several times.
    • Kerri Goergen-Doll was also concerned about discouraging use. Everything you has a cost, but you should be able to use stuff.
    • Carolyn Fonyo asked if there would be a lag for on-demand resources and wondered if it would put off students.
    • Anne-Marie Deitering noted that 90% of requests are filled within 13 hours. This number could be made even better. She also noted that on-demand works best for users that know exactly what they need. Grad students are difficult group to think about. When they know what they need, can just buy the article, but if they don’t know, it might be better to have a subscription. This goes beyond what are high impact journals and journal that OSU authors need to publish in. How do we get into these conversations?   
    • Carolyn Fonyo suggested it would be good to have grad student focus group or grad student representation on the LC.
    • Tim Zuehlsdorff asked how are decisions made to cut content?
    • Anne-Marie Deitering said cuts cannot be made purely on usage, because large units would get everything they need and small units would bear all the cuts. There must be and are a variety of metrics. However, the library is at the point where they are cutting used content.
• Collections work: Over 1M volumes were touched in the past two years. Offsite storage was moved from one location to another. The collection space in the Valley Library was re-considered. The Valley Library was opened relatively normally except for 1^st floor which was being used for moving collection. More space has been opened up for users in the Valley Library, e.g., government documents will be moved to the first floor opening up the main floor for user space. A grad writing center was incorporated into the 6^th floor by weeding low use materials and moving collections.
  • Carolyn Fonyo asked how the collections decisions have been evaluated.
  • Anne-Marie Deitering said they had been considering bringing in expertise (like an economist) to evaluation the collection criterion. She was also thinking of using a 3-yr endowed chair (which is hard to fill because it must rotate) for collections analysis.
  • Marit Bovbjerg noted that other libraries must be dealing with rising costs and asked if anyone out there is doing anything different or if their approach is the same as ours, are they doing the same thing as us.
  • Anne-Marie Deitering: Either they are doing what we are doing, or better endowed institutions are using “transformative publishing agreements” that includes subscriptions and publishing rights, but with article processing charges (APCs). These may not be so transformative and may result in inequity. There are some consortia that are developing other “transformative agreements” which may be a little promising but not wildly so.
• IT and acquisitions are still working remote. Other units are in-person.
• Library hours are close to normal. We are no longer providing overnight service in Valley, and SCARC is offering appointment-based services because of staffing levels.
• Electronic services and home delivery that was stood up during the COVID pandemic are going to be continued.
• Finally, Anne-Marie Deitering stated a desire for OSU to absorb the Cascades Library. This would unify the administration of OSU Libraries. This would need to be agreed to by the Provost and by Andrew Ketsever, Interim head of Cascades campus.

Library Support for Authors Regarding Journal Copyright Agreements

• Melissa Santala brought up a recent difficulty in getting assistance in dealing with a journal copyright agreement with Springer. She believes it to be in the purview of the library to assist with this (because the library staff took on this role at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where she previously worked), but found it difficult to get answers regarding how to get a fair and legal copyright agreement. She also couldn’t find out who at OSU should sign such an agreement on the OSU’s authors behalf. She noted that there is no other agreement with an outside entity that a faculty member could sign.
• Marit Bovbjerg also noted how faculty are in general not able to sign into agreements as OSU employees.
• Kerri Goergen-Doll made note of a library website with information on copyright agreements.
• Melissa Santala concluded with a request that the library consider providing more support to faculty in this area, especially as these copyright agreements should be considered an issue within the Open and Sustainable Scholarly Communication effort.

Initial Planning for Library Committee Presentation to the Faculty Senate

• Regarding the timing of the presentation
  • Spring quarter, but in a FS meeting after a planned presentation by the library staff on March 10, 2022
  • Identified top issues to present
    • Budget issues
    • Development of the OSSC Guiding Principles
    • Impact of upcoming negotiation with textbook publishers
  • Identified sub-committee for the development of the presentation
    • Melissa Santala
    • Marit Bovbjerg
    • Tim Zuehlsdorff

Timing of the Spring Quarter Library Committee Meeting

• Plan to schedule the next meeting for early May, soon after the Library’s budget request is expected to be finalized.

Minutes prepared by Melissa Santala