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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 50| April 2001
Australian Library Collections Task Force Meeting
The Australian Library Collections Task Force met on 9 February 2001 at the National Library of Australia. Anne Camfield joined the Task Force, replacing Klaus Altmann as the CSIRO representative. The agenda and a number of the papers from the meeting are available on the Librarys web pages at www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/alctf/meetings.html#meet6
The issues surrounding the rapid transition to electronic journal subscriptions is under examination by the Task Force, and one of the papers presented to the meeting summarised the results of a Focus Group held with a small number of Physics researchers at Sydney University last November.
Some of the interesting points discussed by the physicists were high reliance on online sources such as the Los Alamos pre-print server, reliance on colleagues for advice about using online information sources, the importance of ARC guidelines in determining publishing patterns, a lack of awareness of electronic journal costs, and the advantages of electronic journals in terms of improved graphics and speed of and convenience of access to newly published material. In general materials unavailable in the university librarys print or electronic collections are not requested on interlibrary loan because of the perceived slowness and complexity of the interlibrary loans system. Monograph sources were valued for overviews of a subject. Further focus groups are being planned, to cover a range of subject areas in different universities.
A final draft of Access to Science Serials in Australian Libraries was discussed, and this report will be made available in the near future. It complements the current Focus Group studies, and indicated similar concerns by researchers about the interlibrary loans process. At its next meeting the Task Force will consider a paper on issues of concern in interlibrary loans, and the National Resource Sharing Working Group is also examining this topic in the current benchmarking study.
Malcolm Gillies from the Coalition for Innovation in Scholarly Communication was a guest speaker at the Task Force meeting, and gave an overview of recent developments in government policy in the area of research infrastructure policy and funding. A number of important papers over the past year contributed to the January 2001 statement by the Prime Minister, Backing Australias Ability (see http://203.32.86.142/Info_Pack/info_pack.html).
For this meeting of the Task Force, the National Library prepared a
document summarising the status of the recommendations of the Towards
Federation 2001 conference, convened by the Library in 1992. The report
can be found in the meeting papers online. State libraries have been asked
to provide additional information to update the report to be discussed by
the Task Force at its next meeting in August 2001.
Sandra Henderson
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au