Washington, D.C.
October 18-20, 1995
MR. CAMPBELL: Good morning. Welcome to the members’ business meeting.
I would like briefly to report to you on some of the work of the Board and review some of the major issues that were before us. Actually, we didn’t have a great number of action items, but in accordance with the topic of this meeting, we extended an invitation to Dr. Billington at the Library of Congress to meet with the board. To our great surprise and happiness, he decided to do that.
We had a very good session with him. It was fairly candid, sharing with us some of the biggest challenges facing the Library of Congress, including budget issues. Like all federal agencies at the moment, the Library’s budget is somewhat under attack. One of the most difficult pieces of this attack is what is called an “unfunded mandate” that requires salaries to be raised a certain percentage, but without providing extra funds.
He also talked to us about the progress of the LC’s National Digital Library (NDL) project. One of the things to report about that is that it helped to sell LC’s budget. Mr. Gingrich, among others, is enamored of electronic library enterprises, and so NDL has become one of the ways to attract Congressional support. It is the only item in LC’s budget for which Dr. Billington received extra money.
A third item that was high on his list of concerns was security problems. To some degree LC reorganization was a response to the security issue, and he discussed the reorganization with us, as well.
It was an informational meeting; I know that we have concern from time to time about our relationship with the Library of Congress, our biggest member. We believe it is important to keep the lines of communication better than they may have been in the past. So this is, we hope, the beginning of an ongoing conversation.
The Board spent a good deal of its energy talking about our projects with the Association of American Universities (AAU). We were particularly concerned — and these are all issues without Board resolution, because we wanted to hear much of what you had to say and also the result of the committee discussions.
The Board also spoke about the appropriate stance for this organization with regard to the National Information Infrastructure Working Group’s report, Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure, known as the White Paper. How do we represent ARL member library interests without endorsing a document that does not meet our needs or without being so radical that we lose our credibility?
The Board considered at length the possibility of negotiating with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). We will be informed later about the discussions of the Working Group on Copyright Issues on Wednesday, and will return to the CCC topic. There are great issues at stake, and much to be won or lost depending upon how well we gauge our interface with that group.
The third thing we talked a good deal about was the schedule for scaling up the AAU/ARL demonstration projects, of concern due to the urgency felt by the presidents on the AAU/ARL joint Steering Committee. The Board had introductory discussions about each of these issues last Tuesday and will, after receiving input from our committees, return to consider those issues again this afternoon.
I also report that the Board, after receiving a report last summer, dissolved the Task Force on the Preservation of Copyrighted Materials, with appreciation for its work. That Task Force was established last spring and chaired by Paula Kaufman. We thank Paula and all the Task Force members for carrying out the assignment so efficiently. It’s nice to know that we not only create, but that, in good time, we take apart.
I would report to you quickly on one other item, the National Initiative for Network Cultural Heritage (NINCH). This is an effort being put forth by a number of agencies in order to ensure the widest possible participation by organizations that serve arts and humanities in the cultural heritage evolution of the global information highway.
The Board made a decision to join that group for one year. The cost to ARL for this engagement: $10,000. We will have to decide whether we want to continue to be engaged with this group of players. The invitation to ARL to join was issued by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Art History Information Program, and the Coalition for Network Information. There are now quite a number of members, with approximately $100,000 forthcoming from organizations that wish to participate in this project.
I should say that ARL’s initial year’s membership was covered by the Delmas Foundation, so membership for 1996 will not cost us. We will be making a decision next year about whether this enterprise is something we should remain in and pay the fee for from our own resources.
The last piece of business is that the Board elected a Vice President and President-Elect. I want to ask you to join me in congratulating Gloria Werner, UCLA.
Now we need to proceed with the election of new Board members, so let me ask Nancy Cline to give a report as Chair of the Nominations Committee. Nancy.
MS. CLINE (Pennsylvania State University): Thank you, Jerry. I was Chair of the Nominations Committee, and it included Marianne Scott and Carolyn Snyder. I am pleased to tell you that we had probably a record number of nominations to work through.
The Committee in its deliberations took a careful look at geographic balance, balance among types of institutions, and other responsibilities that we knew individuals carried that either gave background and experience, or brought ties to communities that were important parts of our overall agenda for ARL. It was not a simple task, because we had some very wonderful material to work with, what with the number of nominations that you all put forward.
I’m pleased to report that our slate includes the following: Betty Bengtson, University of Washington; William Crowe, University of Kansas; and Carole Moore, University of Toronto.
MR. CAMPBELL: Thank you, Nancy. By virtue of coming from the Committee, these names are before you. Are there nominations from the floor?
(No response)
MR. CAMPBELL: If there are none, will you accept this group by acclamation?
(Acclamation given)
MR. CAMPBELL: Thank you. Congratulations to our three new Board members.
We now need to adopt our dues level for the next year. In mid-September you received information about the dues. The board has, in recommending these dues to you, considered seriously your advice in recent years about keeping our increases as low as possible but still high enough to give us the capacities we need in these fairly intensive times. The increase suggested is $500, and it brings the dues figure, if approved as recommended, to the level of $13,850. Do you have questions?
(No response)
MR. CAMPBELL: Are you ready to approve the dues? May I have a motion.
VOICE: Move the question.
VOICE: Second.
MR. CAMPBELL: It has been moved and seconded. All those is favor please say “aye.”
(A chorus of ayes)
MR. CAMPBELL: Thank you very much. For the record, all those opposed?
(No response)
MR. CAMPBELL: Thank you. The motion is carried.
Now, I’d like to invite Joan Chambers to make a report on behalf of the Minority Recruitment and Retention Committee.
MS. CHAMBERS (Colorado State University): Thank you, Jerry. Some of you will remember that approximately two years ago there was an informal survey of directors to identify your priorities for the Association’s Minority Recruitment Capability. As a result of that survey, the Minority Recruitment and Retention Committee is working to develop a partnership with the Association of Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) to identify shared interests and common goals that ARL and ALISE can pursue jointly to our mutual benefit.
Graduate library science programs are experiencing increases in minority graduation. It is in keeping with the priority that you identified and with the charge to the Minority Recruitment and Retention Committee that we work with ALISE not only to sustain but to increase this trend in minority graduation, and also to understand and support other ALISE activities that coincide with ARL diversity initiatives.
You may be aware, for example, that diversity was one of the most important issues when the standards for accreditation of masters programs were recently revised. The multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual nature of society is referenced throughout the standards, because of the desire to recognize diversity when framing goals and objectives, designing curriculum, and selecting and retaining faculty and students.
My purpose in reporting to you today is to encourage those of you or members of your staffs who are going to ALA to consider arriving a day or two early in order to attend the ALISE annual conference. Briefly, several relevant ALISE committees will meet on Wednesday and Thursday, January 17 and 18, 1996. On Thursday morning ARL will sponsor a continental breakfast to provide an opportunity to talk one-on-one with ALISE members about interests and areas of shared concern.
Kriza Jennings, ARL’s Program Officer for Diversity, has agreed to post to the Directors’ list the relevant committees, the date and time of their meeting, and also the name of the chair. She will also let ALISE know who will be attending the meeting from ARL, so we will be both expected and welcome. Again, I hope you will think about this. Our presence could go a long way towards developing a relationship and encouraging activity that ALISE is doing and that meshes perfectly with the goals that we are trying to achieve in the Minority Recruitment and Retention Capability.
MR. CAMPBELL: I would like to call on Elaine Sloan to make a report on the future of the Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing (OSAP).
MS. SLOAN (Columbia University): Thank you, Jerry. I’m reporting on behalf of the Scholarly Communication Committee. At our meeting this week we had a very active and interesting discussion about the future of what we all agreed has been an extraordinarily successful enterprise. As you know, Ann Okerson resigned the position of Director of OSAP this fall to take up new duties at Yale. Susan Jurow is the acting director of OSAP. This is an indication of commitment, I believe, on the part of the Board, the office, and the Committee that we hope to maintain momentum during the transition between Directors.
You are all aware, I believe, that an ad has been placed and the office has received a number of very interesting applications for the job. So we are quite optimistic that we will be able to fill the job with a talented person who will continue the activities of the office.
The question to the Committee and one that I would like to pose to you all is: What do we wish the priorities of the office to be in the next several years?
We agree that the office is extraordinarily successful, and that Ann Okerson had an extraordinary impact. The question now is, where do we wish to take the office in the future? Recognizing, of course, that the individual who is selected as the new director will obviously shape some of that.
ARL staff prepared some background papers for us, and the Committee reviewed the current capabilities and activities of the office and potential strategies for the future. There was a unanimous and, in fact, enthusiastic sense that, at least in the near future, what we should be looking for is a person who will be able to continue the activities in the areas of electronic publishing, follow through on the kinds of recommendations that have come from the joint AAU/ARL task force, and on the kinds of initiatives that have taken place with scholarly societies and publishers.
That is, in essence, what the Committee recommended to Duane, and I think we would all like to hear from the membership. Are there other issues? Are there other areas that you would like to see this office address? Do you have concerns about this particular approach?
MR. WEBSTER (ARL Executive Director): One thing I might add, Elaine, is the success of the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Discussion Lists. There was a fairly extensive discussion within the Committee about the future of that directory. Its success is both a burden as well as a help to the revenue stream, and we should start to look very carefully at alternative ways in which that directory might continue to grow and be made available to the community, but maybe on a basis other than in-house preparation, production, and distribution.
MS. SLOAN: Yes. Thank you.
MR. BILLINGS (University of Texas): To some extent I think what we really need in an attribute for someone in this position is the ability to bring people together, and I say that vis-à-vis talking about something like the directory, because there is a completely different kind of skill involved.
The person in this job not only needs to bring the interest of this group and the people of this group together, but there is an essential issue involved in reaching out to commercial publishers, university presses, to all the new kind of ventures that are getting underway in the world of not just electronic publishing and the digital world, but the connections we have with what is going to continue to be the very important, paper-based publishing industry. So, to me, of essence to this position is someone with people skills, not the inferred technical skills.
MS. SLOAN: Let me just say, Harold, that I believe that is quite consistent with the views of the Committee. Anything else?
(No response)
MS. SLOAN: Thank you very much.
MR. CAMPBELL: Now I call upon Jim Neal for a report from ARL’s Working Group on Copyright Issues and of the Information Policies Committee.
MR. NEAL (Indiana University): The Working Group on Copyright Issues had a very energetic discussion at their meeting on the White Paper, and we will recommend to the board several strategies for expanded leadership and impact on the proposed legislation. There are really nine key elements. You will see these later, but I thought it was very important for you to know what the results of our discussion were here.
We will advocate for appropriate change or improvements in the current law. We think it’s very important that ARL continue to be seen as an advocate for change in this arena, but appropriate change.
We need to affirm and articulate our intellectual property principles as well as important professional tenets in areas such as intellectual freedom and privacy. We know that the proposed legislation goes far beyond intellectual property principles and attacks in some ways issues that we have held as important in our field for generations.
We need to evaluate the proposed legislation against these principles to identify key conflicts and gaps. Equally, we have to identify and resolve the critical philosophical and practical differences in interpretations which exist in our community. We need to move forward together. We need to propose new alternative legislative language that addresses the needs of the scholarly and higher education communities. We not only need to criticize; we need to formulate and propose.
We need to improve our understanding of the international dimensions of the issues.
We need to expand coalition building with the higher education, the not-for-profit, and the appropriate technology communities. We have alignments there that perhaps we need to build on.
We need to launch an effective and broad-based education and advocacy program, not only in our higher education communities but within our larger communities, and use the power of our state and national presses. We also need to implement tactics to slow down this process, so that reasonable and informed voices like ours can prevail.
That is the strategy we propose for ARL. One of the by-products of our discussion was a series of about 30 individual activities that can fall under the umbrella of that strategy program.
I would also like to report on the work of the Information Policies Committee. We affirmed priorities for ARL activities in four areas: the copyright/intellectual property issues, the changing environment for government information, digital library and telecommunications developments at the federal level, and appropriations in federal programs.
As a community we need to target and expand our legislative and informational efforts to federal agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and NASA, to name a few. We also need to become an effective part, for example, of the science coalition in Washington. As an aside, we are very fortunate to have Prue Adler working with us, an individual who is so respected and so effective in so many Washington communities.
The Information Policies Committee will recommend to the Board this afternoon the launching of a pilot program to develop and test new models for access to and preservation of federal electronic information. Building on the success of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Literacy project, the focus of the new pilot program will be government statistical sources critical to our scholarly communities.
Lastly, I want to extend special thanks to all of you for your successful informational efforts on behalf of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and NTIA Infrastructure Grants programs. We had an impact. Finally, applause to the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) and to Prue Adler for continuing leadership and coordination for our extraordinarily successful GIS program, which now involves research libraries across North America. Thank you.
MR. CAMPBELL: I want to take the opportunity at this time to acknowledge and thank departing Board members. It is an important service that they render to us. We have three who are leaving the board. One of them is David Stam, who is not present. Would the other two come forward and let us give you a certificate in recognition of your service as members of the ARL Board? George Shipman and Dale Canelas.
(Applause)
(Certificate presented to Mr. Shipman and Ms. Canelas)
MR. CAMPBELL: Congratulations and thank you to all three.
I want to also acknowledge the great five years of service by John Black. John couldn’t be here, but he’s been a tremendous colleague and exercised great leadership. I would like to acknowledge that we are all grateful to him. Now let me ask Duane to give us a brief report.
MR. WEBSTER: It can be brief, because I think the flow of discussions yesterday and today really underscore the essence of my report, that we are at a turning point with so many of the investments that we have made over the last few years, such as the investments in OSAP, in copyright issues, and in the relationship with AAU. Those investments have been well designed and well placed. Capitalizing on those investments over the next six months or year is going to be particularly challenging.
Of course, we are quite fortunate in being able to address those challenges with an extraordinary core of talented staff. I would like you to join me in acknowledging their contributions over this last year and what we expect to get from them in this next year. They have really proven to be quite agile.
(Applause)
I think you know we have an annual planning process in the Association where we develop a series of goals within each of the program capabilities. This last year the board urged us to move very quickly to address the three distinct issues of copyright, government information, and building digital libraries. The staff has responded extraordinarily well to that, as you can tell from a review of the Activities Report.
I also want to single out and welcome Mary Jane Brooks back from maternity leave. We are very pleased to have Mary Jane back and helping us make these meetings run smoothly.
I might also comment that, from a fiscal and facilities point of view, things are going very well at the Association. We are on our budget for this year, and we have been on balanced budgets for the last seven years.
We are, as you know, very much driven by dues. Seventy percent of our revenue comes from dues. That makes us, of course, very much a membership-driven organization. Increasingly we have been able to supplement dues by attracting support from other sources of revenue, and that has, particularly with efforts like the OSAP, helped to support an expanded a set of activities.
The office facility is working very well after what has been three years now. I would like to extend an invitation to you when you are visiting in Washington to come by, meet with the staff, and talk about your interests. If you need a place to work, if you need to have a small group meeting, or if you need a place to get some support services done, we are prepared to help you.
Finally, I want to acknowledge and thank Jerry Campbell for his inspirational leadership as President. He is truly a remarkable person, and a joy to work with.
MR. CAMPBELL: Well, it has been my pleasure and privilege to serve this organization in this office. It is also a pleasure, however, to hand the gavel over to Nancy Cline as ARL’s new President.
MS. CLINE: Well, thank you. It’s an honor to receive it, Jerry. I would just like to add my words to Duane in terms of what a pleasure it has been to serve with Jerry, both as a board member and just as a member of ARL. He is a very, very committed leader, the kind of person that, if something needs to be done, he is there to do it.
So, as a credit to his resourcefulness, his leadership, and willingness to take on challenging issues, I would again invite you to join me in a round of applause recognizing Jerry’s work. I doubt that this is a surprise, because he’s been involved at this end of the podium before, but, Jerry, it is my pleasure to present you with your ARL paperweight.
(Applause)
MR. CAMPBELL: Thank you very much.
MS. CLINE: It has been a lot of fun working with Jerry, and I hope that I can carry the momentum of his leadership forward. It truly is an honor to serve as the President of ARL. It’s a particularly exciting time for our association, and the thing that makes me so confident that we will succeed in the years ahead is the commitment that comes from our member institutions, not only you yourselves, but the amount of your staff resource that you make available to move the Association’s agendas forward. It’s very important, and I look forward to working with that great potential.
I think the respect that has been accorded ARL in recent years is an indication of the hard work and the exceptional commitment that comes from the members. Along that line, one of the things that I have noted over recent years has been our strength in working relationships. As we work on issues that affect both our Canadian members and our US members, we have improved our ability to work together as an association and to frame issues more effectively for global scholarship.
I think the presence here of our visitors from SCONUL, the many informal and personal relationships that have evolved in that area, are also an indicator of how we face scholarship, research, and educational issues on a global basis, and the fact that we don’t let the individual national interests divide us. This was not always something that was true of the Association, but it is something that I look forward to sustaining.
It goes without saying we have a busy year ahead. I’m certain there will be a lot of new issues or new elements of our current issues that will be arising. I would like to briefly mention what we have planned for the 1996 spring program in Vancouver. Several of us met earlier this morning regarding this. We had Ruth Patrick, University of British Columbia, who will be our local host; Carolynne Presser, University of Manitoba, and Tim Mark from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL); and Duane Webster, Susan Jurow, and Jaia Barrett from ARL.
We were working through what some of our issues would be for the program that we are planning. What I would like to bring forward is a program that looks at agile research libraries. The elements of change that are affecting us and that we ourselves are driving create a need for much more agile and resilient organizations and also for new attributes of leadership, ones that are different from what we might have valued or emphasized ten or 15 years ago.
I think we are all focusing on much more client-oriented, people-focused organizations, and we are all finding a greater demand on our and our institutions’ time to be spent on cooperation, collaboration, handling competition in different ways, dealing with an entrepreneurial aspect of management, and expectations within our institutions and beyond our institutions.
I think for us to have the ability to not only participate effectively in change but also to lead change effectively will require different organizations to back us up or allow us to be a part of them.
Some of the program components that we talked about focus on strategic thinking in leading, and leadership in an entrepreneurial environment; the ways in which we invest in the human resources infrastructure, like staff development, training, and continuing lifelong learning for employees within our organizations; talent scouting and how we develop new skills and strengths or recruit them into our organizations; some of the aspects of coaching and mentoring versus the traditional supervisory approach; and, dealing with the aspect of greater visibility for our libraries, what it means in terms of the expectations that now come upon us from constituencies with which we may be working.
One of the things which Carolynne Presser mentioned was the changing relationship with the business communities, such as many of the “partners” with whom we work in some of these collaborative relationships. So that is what we’re working toward as a scheme for the program, one that will benefit the members of both CARL and ARL, because CARL will be meeting at the same time in Vancouver. We are also planning to make our committee meetings open to the CARL participants, about half of whom are also ARL members. So there won’t be great numbers of new faces, but we would like to be receptive and have our committee meetings open.
Those of us who have been chatting about the planning for the program think it’s going to be an exciting opportunity to have these two organizations in the same town at the same time. We don’t want to over structure the day, so that you can explore friendships and institutional relationships as well.
I would like to say in closing — you have heard it from everyone who preceded me, but one of the reasons I’m so optimistic about the future of ARL is that we have such an excellent staff. They deliver on the most incredible timelines and expectations in terms of working drafts and preparing for our committees. The work of the staff here is absolutely invaluable in terms of predicting our success for the future.
Furthermore, there is really nothing as great as looking out and knowing so many of you and knowing the work you have contributed to committees, task forces, and initiatives that we have underway.
We have rough edges. We have new areas where we have to resolve for the future, such as the AAU/non-AAU questions, but I’m confident that, with what has prevailed in the past and the type of work that we have brought forward up to this date, we will conquer questions such as that as well.
I thank you for the privilege of serving you and look forward to the coming year. So my official business is to adjourn us. Thank you.