Attending: John Kolsti, George Sylvie, Michael Winship; Linda Brown, Farzin Dinyarian, Noah Mass, Kim Skrobarcek; Peggy Mueller, Meghan Sitar; Fred Heath, Dennis Dillon, Mark McFarland, Sue Phillips, Kay Sewell; Jocelyn Duffy (recording)
The agenda for the next meeting will include an overview of the development efforts being conducted for the Libraries by Linda Abbey and Tom Galyean, and a review of the Google Digitization Project by Dennis Dillon.
Ms. Duffy distributed two handouts: Agenda for the meeting of the Libraries Committee, November 7, 2005, and Diagram of the Libraries Storage Facility site at the Pickle Research Campus.
Professor George Sylvie convened the meeting in the absence of Professor Ken Ralls.
Kay Sewell made a report to the committee on the planned addition to the Library Storage Facility on the Pickle Research Campus.
The present storage facility, completed in 1993, occupies approximately 11,000 sq. ft. and holds 10,000 4'x3' shelves. The facility is 99 percent full.
The second unit will also occupy about 11,000 sq. ft. and will include an additional 4700 sq. ft. of processing and service area. It is being jointly constructed by UT Austin and TAMU, with UT putting up $2M towards construction, and TAMU $1.25M. It will hold an estimated 1.7M volumes.
There is no start date slated yet, but once construction begins, the project should be completed in 18 months. The Libraries are hoping to have the slab for LSF 3 poured at the same time to save money later on.
Usage of the current materials at LSF is fairly low. Construction costs now are comparable to those of 1993, at about $300 per sq. ft. The LSF is modeled on the Harvard storage facility.
Mark McFarland reported on the intended purposes of the Texas Digital Library project [view presentation], undertaken by the five Texas ARL members: UT Austin, TAMU, Texas Tech, U Houston, and Rice.
TDL is seen as a ten-year collaborative project to promote scholarly communication and access, to facilitate the digitization of theses and dissertations, and to leverage the relative scarcity of available funding for the increasing numbers of would-be online users.
The hardware and software will initially be based at UT Austin, with TDL staff funded by the five directors of the Texas ARL libraries. The release date of the initial site is planned for February 1, 2006.
Fred Heath noted that TDL will contain only public domain, public access materials. Mark McFarland stated that TDL will have authentication processes in place for some materials.
