One hundred and four member institutions were represented at the 139th ARL Membership Meeting held in Washington, D.C., on 17-18 October. Shirley K. Baker (Washington in St. Louis), ARL President, convened the meeting with a discussion on "E-Metrics: Preliminary Findings from the ARL Project." A panel of Carla Stoffle (Arizona), Rush Miller (Pittsburgh), and Sherrie Schmidt (Arizona State) brought the membership up to date on the status of work on E-Metrics (see article on page 8). Following this presentation, there were concurrent discussions on the following topics:
Background papers and a summary of most of these discussions now appear on the ARL website http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/.
The Federal Relations Luncheon featured a briefing by Thomas Susman, Ropes & Gray, on anti-terrorist legislation and its impact on libraries.
During the Business Meeting, Ms. Baker announced that the ARL Board on October 16th elected Fred Heath (Texas A&M) as Vice President/President-Elect of ARL. Also at the Business Meeting, the membership elected three new Board members to serve three-year terms. They are Joseph Branin (Ohio State), Frances Groen (McGill), and Brian E. C. Schottlaender (UC-San Diego). Continuing members of the Board are Nancy Baker (Iowa), Shirley Baker (Washington in St. Louis), Fred Heath (Texas A&M), Paula Kaufman (Illinois at Urbana), Sarah Michalak (Utah), Paul Mosher (Pennsylvania), Sarah E. Thomas (Cornell), and Ann J. Wolpert (MIT).
At the conclusion of the Business Meeting, Ms. Baker presented the gavel to Paula T. Kaufman, who began her term as ARL President. Ms. Kaufman acknowledged the contributions of four Board members whose terms expired this October: Meredith Butler (SUNY, Albany), Kenneth Frazier (Wisconsin), Joseph Hewitt (North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Carolynne Presser (Manitoba).
The 140th ARL Membership Meeting will be held May 22-24, 2002 at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, California. The meeting, hosted by UCLA and USC, will feature a program on fund-raising and recruitment.
On October 19–20, 2001, ARL sponsored "Collections & Access for the 21st-Century Scholar: A Forum to Explore the Roles of the Research Library." The Forum explored new approaches to collection management and machine-assisted access strategies that could increase the visibility of research library collections to students and faculty who are increasingly using the Web to conduct research.
Teams from 45 libraries brought 144 library leaders together in the one-and-a-half day forum. The meeting produced a valuable list of ideas for how ARL and other agencies could address these issues in a collaborative setting. Speaker presentations and notes from the discussion sessions are available on the ARL website http://www.arl.org/events/fallforum/forum01/. An ARL task force will be established to examine the action ideas that emerged from this forum and to make recommendations for how they may be pursued.
ARL is pleased to announce the availability of Electronic Ecology: A Case Study of Electronic Journals in Context, by Karla L. Hahn. In 1998, the ecology community was at the very earliest stages of developing a new communications system. Two new peer-reviewed journals were starting up in quite similar subject areas: one electronic only and the other publishing both print and electronic versions simultaneously. This study compares and contrasts the views of the editors who solicit and select material to publish in these two journals and the authors of content.
Through interviews with authors, editors, publishing staff, and journal readers, this study answers three questions:
The study also looks to the future of emerging publishing systems and highlights the importance of some of the functions developing in electronic publishing systems. An extensive bibliography is included.
Electronic Ecology is available for $45; visit http://www.arl.org/sc/ee/ to order.
"ARL Activities," ARL, no. 219 (December 2001): 10–11, http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br219/br219activities.shtml.