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(Editor's note: SCAC was established by the SUNY Council of Library Directors. The group's current chair is Mary Casserly (Albany). SCAC is doing important work in, among other areas, the precedent setting realm of shared library collections across SUNY. The Collections Council 2004-2005 Annual Report is reprinted here with permission.)

SUNY Collections and Access Council
Annual Report
2004-2005

Background
In a memorandum to SUNY Center Collection Development Librarians dated December 10, 2003, the SUNY Center Directors called for the creation of a SUNY Center Collection Development Council (later changed to the SUNY Council for Access and Collections—SCAC). The initial charge of the Council was to plan for “continuing access to the content of Elsevier journals in the event that we are unable to negotiate a successful renewal for access to ScienceDirect.” The charge called for coordination of activities to ensure maximum access at minimum cost, and for applying “similar cooperative principles to other major publishers and journals in the humanities and social sciences to realize system savings on a widening body of electronic resources.” In addition, the Council was asked to formulate recommendations concerning paper copy retention of materials, and for the identification of “workflows and organizational structures necessary to maintain the ongoing coordination of the collection.” The memorandum also defined the initial membership of the Council as consisting of collection development and access services librarians from the Center and Health Sciences Center libraries, and Carey Hatch of OLIS as ex officio member. A revised memorandum dated February 14, 2004 filled in some missing gaps concerning the membership of the Council, and indicated that the first meeting of the Council would be held in March in Syracuse with Lou Wetherbee as facilitator to “clarify goals and expectations.” The overarching theme that emerged from that meeting was an understanding that we would be working toward the concept of a unified collection.

Between March 2004 and April 2005, the Council has met nine times and has worked on a number of cooperative, collaborative projects towards the goal of one library, one collection. The Council’s efforts have in common an attempt to develop models for sharing our existing fiscal and staffing resources in order to expand our students’ and faculty’s access to information. The Council is interested in models that can be applied first among our members and then extended to the other SUNY libraries.

Accomplishments

• The Council was formed just as SUNY began the process of negotiating with Elsevier for a renewal of our ScienceDirect license. Because of the importance of ScienceDirect as a research tool and because of the amounts of money involved - both in dollars and as a percentage of our acquisitions budgets – feelings about the terms of that license ran high. But when the dust settled, the new 5-year license included access to about 800 more journals than we had under the previous license. We are very aware that it is not efficient or effective for each of the University and Health Science Center Libraries – never mind each of the 64 SUNY libraries - to maintain their own list of subscribed titles plus an up-to-date version of the Freedom Plan list. Therefore, our ScienceDirect efforts now focus on finding efficient ways to document, manage, and communicate information about the 1836 titles now in that collection and about the title changes, additions and cessations that will occur over the next 5 years. We have explored solutions with subscription agents; we have explored the idea of distributing the work among the UC and HS library serials departments; and we have talked about designating one library to maintain the Freedom Plan list. At our April 2005 meeting, we met with representatives from Elsevier about this and we are cautiously optimistic that Elsevier finally “gets it” “it” being the need to provide service to its customers. At that meeting Elsevier announced several new services that will make it much easier for us to maintain our lists and know what titles we should have access to in the Freedom Plan. The upshot of this is that we have developed a strategy for maintaining an accurate Freedom Plan list and for communicating changes among all of the SUNYs.
• At the April meeting, Elsevier representatives announced that during the period of our license they will give SUNY access to new Elsevier journals as they are added to ScienceDirect. That is, such journals will become part of our Freedom Plan, even though our contract specifies that we cannot have access to any titles added to the ScienceDirect platform after the start of the license unless we subscribe to them. Important exceptions to this policy are Cell Press which has a separate, FTE-based pricing formula, situations where Elsevier takes over the holdings of an entire publisher (e.g., Urban & Fischer), and instances where third party journals do not agree to being included in the Freedom Plan.
• The Council has also put considerable effort into obtaining memberships for all of the SUNY University and Health Science Centers and the four-year institutions to BioMed Central. BioMed Central is an open access publisher that provides free, online access to their 60+ journals. Access is free, so there are no subscription fees. Instead the journals are supported by author fees. Last year, BMC announced a new pricing model based on institutional – not library - memberships. Faculty at BioMed Central member institutions do not have to pay publication fees. When University at Buffalo’s library looked into membership for their institution they found that it would cost $10,500; for another $1500 a consortial membership which would cover all SUNY University Centers, Health Sciences Centers and 4-year institutions could be purchased. The Council applied to the [UUP-NYS] Joint Labor Management Committee Technology Subcommittee and received funding to cover most of the cost of such a membership for 2 years beginning with June 2005. The University Center and Health Science Libraries will split the remaining cost of the membership. The Council is developing a template that can be used to promote this membership and will distribute it to all the SUNY libraries.
• The genesis of SUNY-wide access to the New England Journal of Medicine is similar to that of BioMed Central. In obtaining a price quote for the online version, it was determined that the consortial price was cheaper than the individual price. As a result, thanks to NEJM subscriptions maintained by the HSC and SUNY Optometry Libraries, access to NEJM online from 1993 onwards is available to all SUNY libraries. The Council has made a recommendation to SUNYConnect that it absorb the cost of the SUNY-wide consortial license next year.
• The ILL members on SCAC determined that because of the volume of use generated by the Center libraries, all SUNY libraries were eligible for the Copyright Clearance Center’s Volume Purchase Program. As a result, transaction fees charged by the Center were reduced from $3.00 to $1.00.

Projects

• In the area of Interlibrary Loan, SCAC is seeking to build on the successful experience of Empire Express to improve access to, and delivery of, materials in our collections. The ILL representatives are developing a plan for discussion at our meeting scheduled for June 2005.
• The Council is currently investigating the possibility of consortial licenses for online access to other journals, including Nature, journals published by Cell Press, the American Society of Microbiology, Taylor and Francis, and Sage.
• The Council has also targeted some subject areas that might be appropriate for joint database subscriptions, including business and computer science – especially handbooks in e-book format. SCAC is still investigating; funding is an issue – there is no additional money beyond our local acquisitions budgets for any of these efforts. The group has made a recommendation to SUNYConnect regarding the need to include a full-text business database (specifically, either Proquest’s ABI/Inform or Ebsco’s Business Source Premiere) as part of the SUNY-wide collection. If this were to happen it would free up money from our local budgets – since each of the University Center Libraries subscribes to one of these databases – that could be used to acquire some additional resources jointly.
• Finally, SCAC members are very concerned about shrinking monograph collections – both our local collections and the SUNY collection in the aggregate. We are discussing ways of expanding the breadth of monographs available to our users by coordinating purchases and improving methods of resource sharing and material delivery. We believe that university press titles are a good place to begin our efforts.

Conclusion
At our April 2005 meeting, we discussed the need to better publicize that the Council exists, our accomplishments, and the areas in which we are working. We were very pleased to see that many of our interests and efforts coincide with the directions outlined in the SUNYConnect Strategic Guidance Document, and have requested that the Council be included in that document. We have already begun to address many of the initiatives described there – particularly those under Strategic Direction D [“Implement SUNY-wide Collaborative Collection Development and Management (including: Management of a SUNY-wide Electronic Resource Collection and Library Services)”] - and we believe that we can bring leadership, and valuable experience working together, to those efforts.