Duane Webster, ARL Executive Director
Fred Heath, ARL President, Presiding

142nd ARL Membership Meeting
Excerpted from the ARL Business Meeting
May 15, 2003

MR. HEATH: For those of you here on Tuesday night for the Town Meeting Discussion on the financial needs and strategies of the AAU/ARL Global Resources Program [GRP], I want to thank you again for your contributions. For those of you who were not here, you may have seen this Association at its best when its membership gathered a day early to engage in a very strategic way an issue that's before us all. We face a need to deal with the program's scope, its leadership, and its sustainability over time.

Strategies and recommendations are emerging, and in the absence of a Chair of the Advisory Committee for the program, I'm going to turn to Duane and ask him to summarize where we are in these deliberations.

MR. WEBSTER: Let me start by saying thank you to Harvard and Nancy Cline for making available to all of us the talent and commitment of Dan Hazen during the course of this last year. Dan has served part time as Visiting Program Officer to direct the GRP. He has made an enormous difference in our ability to engage this set of issues in discussions with a wide variety of groups and to bring in a wealth of information to inform our efforts.

I also want to thank the nine libraries that have underwritten the cost of having this support and being able to put the Advisory Committee together, and for it to meet during the course of this year. Let me mention those institutions. The contributing libraries are the University of California at Berkeley, the Center for Research Libraries, Duke University, Indiana University, New York University, University of North Carolina, University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, and Yale University. In the aggregate, they brought together a budget for us to work with of $80,000; thank you very much for your willingness to do that and for the contribution to the entire community. It did allow us to move the program forward.

I also want to acknowledge the resignation of Paul Mosher as Director of Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania. That certainly is a loss to our community. He was an influential member of the research library community and, as chair of the GRP Advisory Committee, provided very important leadership for the program over this last year.

Over the course of the discussions this week and working with the ARL Executive Committee and talking with our colleagues at the Association of American Universities [AAU], we have agreed on a new Chair for the Committee and that is: Barbara Allen, President of the CIC [Committee for Institutional Cooperation]. Barbara was a member of the first Global Resources Program Advisory Committee and worked with us over the five years of that initial phase of the program. She is a leader who is very effective in bringing together the academic side of higher education as well as a person quite knowledgeable of the ARL community and is eager to work with us in advancing this program.

I also want to note that we've added another ARL director to this Advisory Committee, in order to continue to have a strong research library director presence. Bill Gosling from the University of Michigan has agreed to join the group. Bill joins Paula Kaufman, Betsy Wilson, Lou Pitschmann, Alice Prochaska, Bernie Riley, and Jean-Pierre Cote as the array of directors involved in this committee. They join, of course, representatives of other constituencies that share a stake in the future of the program. Very importantly, we successfully recruited Pauline Yu, when she was Dean of Arts at UCLA, to be a part of the Advisory Committee and she did join us for a meeting. Then, of course, subsequently, she accepted the presidency of the American Council of Learned Societies. She is very much involved in this set of issues and will continue on the Advisory Committee in her new role as President of ACLS.

The Advisory Committee met in February. We're going to meet again at the end of June, June 27th, or at least that portion of the Committee who were going to be able to secure time from their schedules.

Without taking too much of your time, I want to offer a few observations and try to summarize the discussions about the Global Resources Program that have taken place this week. We've had a number of opportunities for discussions. The Executive Committee spent a good portion of their meeting discussing where we're going with the GRP; the full Board also engaged this extensively. We had the Tuesday night Town Meeting discussion with about 60 directors participating; and there was a luncheon meeting on GRP of about a dozen directors on Wednesday. The Collections and Access Issues Committee discussed this program and where we need it to be going, and I know that there were a number of discussions in the corridors concerning what to do next. So I'm going offer some observations from all of these discussions that I attended or was a part of, but I invite additions or different points of view if those exist here in the community.

One of the things that is clear is the importance of the very broad goal of strengthening North American access to international and foreign language resources in support of teaching and education. This seems to be a fundamental issue that needs addressing for all of our members. Now while all agree to the importance of this goal, the smaller and mid-size institutions have a somewhat different take on it than the large institutions. The smaller institutions, mid-size institutions are concerned not only with building foreign language collections to support local scholarly interests but also with ready availability and convenient access for their users to an even broader array of resources that are not maintained locally.

The larger institutions have a very significant and extensive investment in the acquisition of foreign language resources. Sometimes as much as fifty percent of their acquisition budget goes for foreign language resources. So their primary interest--not that better access strategies aren't important as well--but their primary interest is in making sure their acquisition investment is fully leveraged in ways to sustain and expand collections of foreign language resources.

I think there is another element here in terms of what is happening within this arena and that is the number of institutions that are having to pull away from a significant investment in foreign language resources. There are fewer institutions that can be significant acquirers of information in this arena and thus, this mix of changing conditions and changing perspectives underscore the importance of the goal and the need for complementary strategies that pursue collection building and improving access and delivery services.

The second observation I heard this week is that, as important as this agenda is, the big challenge is how to advance and take action on such a broad and ambitious goal.

We are looking at how best to organize the community to put together a coherent and cost effective effort that can make a difference. Our challenge is to secure a balance between centralized coordination and encouragement as well as incubation of projects, without creating a costly, bureaucratic operation that ends up being not very responsive to the needs of member libraries. So there was a lot of discussion during the course of this week of how best to organize the effort, and we drew extensively on Dan Hazen's most recent paper that looks at four different options for doing that.1

I think the sense coming out of that flow of discussion is that the GRP ought to be some sort of hybrid between option one and option two as presented in Dan's paper. That is, there is support for a central capacity that would encourage and influence specific projects during their design and development phases, and then facilitate communications among them. In addition, there is agreement that GRP should be positioned to identify, mobilize, and help initiate high-priority projects, and also pursue complementary activities centered on advocacy and fund raising. If you have not done so, I hope you do read Dan's paper. It is very thoughtful and lays out the issues for us in a very useful way.

The third observation I would make is that the projects launched under the umbrella of the program have demonstrated a number of successes and that we've had a chance to learn from their experience during the course of the last five years.2 I think those six projects have proven to be of immediate benefit to a number of institutions and that is why we've had such a large number of institutions participating and underwriting the costs of those several projects. But it is also clear during the course of discussions this week that we have to do more with these projects. These projects have to be framed within a conceptual vision, if you will, or conceptual framework, that allows the program to go in a direction that is coherent, persuasive, and can capture the imagination of our colleagues as well as chief academic officers. This conceptual framework also needs to allow us to move toward a more effective way of providing strengthened access to international resources. So the projects need to continue but they need to be repositioned as the program is redefined.

There is a real interest being expressed in how we develop projects that anticipate need rather than respond to historical need. Then, of course, there is also interest in looking at how we develop projects that address interdisciplinary, thematic needs and not simply area studies or country based efforts. And finally, there is a sense that it is important to fill gaps in geographic areas not now covered by any project to ensure the whole global landscape is being addressed.

The next observation I would make is that everybody agrees that ARL can't do this alone. ARL's particular role is one of advocacy, coordination among projects, and of project initiation and support during an incubation period, but we're not an operating agency. So there is a very strong interest being expressed in exploring how best to work with an agency such as the Center for Research Libraries. The idea is to move projects, after conception and a period of testing, to operation within an organization that might be able to sustain them over time in a more effective way and for a wider array of uses than what we could do at ARL.

The Center is certainly one of those key partnerships; we're also looking at how best to work with the HEA Title VI National Resource Centers, the Library of Congress and other national libraries, and of course, we want to continue the partnership, the very important strategic partnership of AAU.

AAU continues to consider international education as a priority. They've established a presidential committee to address this set of issues and the provosts, the chief academic officers within AAU, in particular, want AAU to continue to pay attention to this set of issues.

The last thing I'll observe about this week's discussions is that the funding for the Global Resources Program is a challenge, of course. I think coming out of the flow of several different expressions this week is the sense that we've got to look at multiple streams of revenue or support for this effort and not expect one simple solution.

Clearly the membership is saying they don't want to have an on-going subscription fee to support the program. I think there is a strong sense that we've heard from you--and if this is not correct please comment--that funding for this sort of activity, which is of common good and common importance to all members, ought to be achieved through some sort of either reallocation of current dues and/or additional dues in order to have a core base to operate the program.

In addition, because of the commitment of the Board to moderate any dues increase for this next year, the discussions concluded that we should implement some sort of voluntary bridge fee--a temporary one-year offering or invitation--for members to support the Global Resources Program during this bridging process while we move toward a dues-based activity. A fee in the range of $1,500, which we hope that upwards of sixty or more institutions would be willing to contribute, would move the GRP through this next year and put us in a position to maintain the GRP as an on-going program.

A second stream of financial support will be through seeking grants, and there is some optimism about our ability to develop some level of funding from outside the Association through foundations and government agencies to support some of the projects and other activities that might be pursued. Another funding stream we think can be developed comes with the proper articulation of the concept and our strategy. We think that AAU and possibly our other partner organizations will be in a position to contribute some financial support.

Also, we will rely on a fee-based strategy to support specific projects. Those institutions that want to participate in one of the projects, and gain benefit from it, will need to be willing to support it with a small fee of between $500 to $1,000, depending on the project needs.

This set of observations is going to go to the Board. The Board will discuss and engage this tomorrow at their meeting. If my comments are at variance with what you heard or if you'd like to add to these comments, all of us who are working on this set of issues would welcome an opportunity to hear your point of view.

MR. HEATH: Thank you, Duane, and if there is follow-up that you wish to make to Duane or staff or to me, we are available for the rest of the Membership Meeting to hear you on this point of issue.

Notes

1. "Scholars, Libraries, and the AAU/ARL Global Resources Program: Conceptual Framework and Options for Action," prepared April 14, 2003, by Dan Hazen for discussion at the May 2003 ARL Membership Meeting, http://www.arl.org/
   arldocs/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/142/GRPscholarRpt.pdf.

2. "AAU/ARL Global Resources Program Projects: Strategic Vision Statements," February 2003.