Austin, Texas
May 18-20, 1994

The Research Library the Day After Tomorrow

Report of the Executive Director

Duane E. Webster
ARL Executive Director

MR. BLACK: I would like to call on Duane Webster now for the Executive Director's report.

MR. WEBSTER: Thank you, John. I will briefly talk about the activities of the Association over the last six months, will address some of the personnel changes that have taken place at ARL, and also briefly discuss our financial circumstances. It has been a very active six months for us. As you can see from where you sit, we are operating at full capacity here. Very importantly, during this period we accomplished two major landmark achievements.

First, we were able to prepare, issue, and get support for the final reports of the AAU Research Library Project. As you know, these collaborative efforts always involve intensive behind-the-scenes staff work: orchestrating the people, getting the reports written, as well as providing supporting material and making revisions. The success of an effort such as the AAU project very often resides on the backs of people who do not get a lot of attention in that process. I want to emphasize again how indebted we are to the very talented group of staff that we have at ARL who are the point people on making the AAU projects work. Ann Okerson was the key person on the Intellectual Property Task Force, preparing the report and bringing the group together. Jaia Barrett, working with Paul Peters, were the key people on the STI and Jutta Reed-Scott was the key person on the AAU/ARL Foreign Acquisitions Project. Dan Atkins captured the essence of that achievement this afternoon when he noted how many people have been involved and how important this effort is in terms of attracting the attention of the university presidents. I would like to underscore what he said earlier that these task forces have produced high quality reports and an important set of recommendations that provide an extraordinary opportunity for research libraries to express leadership on a set of issues that are key to our future.

Our other achievement in the last six months was the completion of the four-year-long NRMM Project. Over half a million monographic records from the National Register of Microform Masters were converted to machine-readable form. Of course, as the staff knows, I always get anxiety attacks when we come to the end of a project. We were able to put together a successor to that four-year-long project, which will look at serial records. With financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and with a partnership with three of our members--the Harvard University Libraries, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library--we are now going to attack, with leadership, the serial records.

In addition to completing those two big events in this last six months we initiated a number of new activities. We started a new program on the recruitment of minorities to research librarianship. We set up a new working group on electronic information resources, which is chaired by Sharon Hogan of the University of Illinois at Chicago. We have put together a new workshop on planning and operating electronic reserves, to be conducted at Duke University in two weeks, and because of the overwhelming demand from people wanting to be in this event, we are conducting a second event in Denver, CO in two months. As you also know, we have also expanded our statistics measurement capability.

In addition to these new efforts, we continue to operate a range of programs. We continue to sponsor the Coalition for Networked Information. The Coalition has been quite successful in tracking interests of a number of constituencies on a set of issues that are important to our future. Over 200 institutions are now part of the CNI Task Force. As you have seen over the course of these last several days, we have a very active committee/working group/task force structure that involves a large number of you in advancing issues of importance to our future.

A continuing goal and challenge is keeping you informed of all that is going on at ARL without providing an overload for you. In the last six months, we instituted a new communication tool, an electronic monthly alert service where we try to give you late-breaking news. We report news of ARL activities or news that we believe is important to you and that you ought to be alert to. The monthly alerting service does not take the place of the ARL Newsletter or the revenue that the newsletter generates for us, but the newsletter is really intended to be more selective, more formal. It comes every other month, and it is aimed at a somewhat broader audience than directors alone. We hope you get it to your staff. We want it used with your faculty. Make sure it gets distributed more broadly within the scholarly community. We give copies to American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) so they can send it out to each of their constituent societies thereby creating a regular channel of information about the research libraries community.

We also put together, in the materials that were sent to you for this meeting, an activity report that covers all of the activities during the course of six months. It enables us to look at how progress is being made on each program over time. Finally, in the program brochure for this meeting we try to summarize and group those several different activities around priorities of the Association, so you can see again how movement is made on priorities as well as keep abreast of the specific activities month by month.

Now, this coordination is possible because of the staff. We have invested a significant amount of attention in putting together this talented groups of senior staff, but I am pleased to report that in this last six months we have been able to bring into play some additional newer, younger, fresher folks who are working with us. I want to make sure that you see how those folks are fitting into the team at ARL.

First, Kriza Jennings. While Kriza has worked with ARL for a number of years, in these last six months she has expanded her attention and her portfolio to include working in the minority recruitment capability. She is now dividing her time 50/50 between the OMS cultural diversity effort and the ARL Minority Recruitment and Retention Initiative. This new effort is a result of an investment made by the increased dues that you voted for last fall and the willingness of the Delmas Foundation to give us an initial grant to start that effort.

Also, I would like to recognize that we have a new advisory group working with Kriza, chaired by Joan Chambers. I want to express my appreciation for her willingness to jump into that program. The Committee met for the first time at this meeting, and we will be hearing more from them very shortly.

I also want to introduce once again Martha Kyrillidou. Martha is the new Program Officer for Statistics and Measurement. She will lead the expanded effort looking at performance assessment and understanding better how we measure access. Martha has an extensive educational and practical background in measurement and evaluation. She was recently with the Library Research Center at the University of Illinois, where she was also a Ph.D. candidate.

I also want to acknowledge the very important help that Nicola Daval has provided in the transition. Nicky has been superb in filling in and helping out when possible where we needed her, and it is greatly appreciated. She and Patricia Brennan worked together with Gordon Fretwell and Kendon Stubbs to make sure that the publications and serials were maintained in spite of this change in assignments.

I also want to note that Dru Mogge has been appointed Electronic Services Coordinator. Dru is a recent graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at University of California-Berkeley, and has a background in computer operations and higher education administration. She is going to divide her time between helping with the Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing activities, developing the Directory, and operating the symposium that the office conducts every year, and working with ARL to put together more in the way of electronic information services for the membership. She has an article in the current issue of the newsletter describing some of the newer services that are now available. We are very pleased to have Dru with us as we have seen her impact already.

I also want to note that Patricia Brennan, who has worked as a Catholic University library intern over the last year on the statistics program, has kindly agreed to continue on with us in a professional capacity, as coordinator of ARL Executive Office publications. Part of Patricia's time will also be directed towards supporting Prue Adler in the federal relations and information policy arena. Patricia started in her expanded capacity on May 1, and as a result could not attend this meeting. We will have to introduce you to her at the fall meeting.

Beyond those staff changes, I would like to comment on the importance of the Visiting Program Officer Program that allows us to begin new projects by drawing on the talents of staff from your institutions. We have five different visiting program officers who have been working with us over the course of the last six months. They are from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Laval, Ohio State, and the University of Pennsylvania. We are inviting interested directors to nominate other staff that they would like to have working on issues of importance. We have projects that we are formulating right now in the areas of minority recruitment, the management of scientific and technical information, scholarly communications, and federal relations, so I invite your nominations and suggestions. We need the expertise of your staff to help move forward our ambitious agenda of activities.

I must also say that we continue to be delighted with our new office space. It is very conducive to a lot of work taking place in a short period of time in a concentrated fashion. We also continue to welcome your visits and offer the use of those offices for meetings, or work space when you are in Washington.

I will finish with a few comments about the ARL finances. This was the fifth consecutive year that we balanced the operating budget. It is of fundamental importance that you have committed yourself to adequate support for the Association. We, in turn, believe it is our obligation to operate at full capacity. This last year demonstrates that quite nicely. Our audited report gives us an operating surplus of less than $10,000 on expenditure of over $3.2 million. Of this $3.2 million, about $1.4 million is based on dues; the rest is based on cost recovery, sales, or grants.

By balancing the budget over a period of years we have made progress reversing the decline in the operating fund balance. We now have a stable fund balance, at roughly the $200,000 level. The operating fund balance, combined with the ARL Reserve Fund, has now grown to $300,000. Together these two funds give the Association a degree of stability that it has not had in the past. I am very pleased that I can report to you that we are on a firm financial footing.

In closing, I want to observe that we have an excellent partnership here. The governance structure of the Association is working very successfully to represent your interests in developing a focused agenda of priorities. These priorities enable the staff to concentrate our energies and activities. They also assure a sound financial management of your resources. As John noted, the Board engaged in a review of the strategic plan, mission, and continuing objectives of the Association. This ability of the governance structure of the Association to maintain a proper programmatic oversight and focus works very successfully, with hard-working and energetic staff.

MR. BLACK: Thank you very much, Duane. Are there any questions for Duane while we have him on the hot seat here?

MR. TOLLIVER (Kent State University): This may apply to you also, John, but I think we all agree that the task forces have done fine work. Now we're about ready to hit the road and where are we going? Are we going to have a discussion of what role the AAU is going to serve in implementing these recommendations?

MR. WEBSTER: We will have an opportunity tomorrow to hear from Myles Brand in particular. He was chair for this committee and worked closely with John Vaughn (AAU), who was the staff contact and has been in charge of the project. We have had several discussions with John about implementation strategy. We are working very hard to find a device that will allow continuing AAU organizational presence at the table. One possible structure that we have discussed is an oversight committee composed of AAU presidents and ARL directors. We would be pleased to have additional organizational sponsorship including representation from ACLS, AAUP, and AAAS. Additionally we are looking at specific activities and areas of focus for the task forces. I hope you are looking at opportunities where you can take some of the material that has been discussed here and use it for your purposes, either for community-based discussions or in constituting cooperative activities with other institutions.

This is going to be the occasion where the leadership in research libraries will really have to step on the line and say "we are going to make this happen." We have the attention of the presidents, we have a set of recommendations, we have a direction that we can go, and we have a Foundation that is interested in supporting some portions of that, too.

MR. BLACK: Any other questions? Okay. Thank you very much, Duane, for that report. Duane talked about the ARL staff, but just before we move off the record this afternoon, I want to record my recognition of and thanks to the ARL staff for their efforts on behalf of all of us in the Association--Duane and the staff combined--make being President of this Association not only a very stimulating experience, and I use that word intentionally, but also a pleasure. My official and personal thanks to Duane and all of his staff.

[At this time, the membership went into an off-the-record session.]