The Mathematics Roundtable met on Tuesday, June 10, 3:00-5:00 pm in Room 203 of the Convention Center in Seattle. Over 55 people were in attendance including librarians, publishers' representatives, and at least one University of Washington mathematician.
New Journals in Mathematics
Bert TePaske-King reported that Mathematical Reviews has assumed the responsibility for maintaining the "New Journals in Mathematics List" which was formerly kept by Janice M. Jaguszewski and Richard Funkhouser.
The following information was reported about the list:
- Paula Shanks, Acquisitions Librarian at Mathematical Reviews, will be updating the list.
- Everything in the New Journals list is in Math Reviews.
- The list gives price for the journal when it first became available. It is not updated to be the current price.
- The list gives information for both print and electronic journals. There are links to electronic journals where appropriate.
- The list only goes back to 1994, and they plan to only keep four years worth of data on the AMS server.
- The list is available at the following URL: http://www.ams.org/mathweb/mi-newjs.html
AMS Library Committee Work
The Committee's report which was included in the February 97 issue of the PAM Bulletin provided information about the 1996 Library Survey and a proposed program for the Joint Mathematics Meeting to be held in Baltimore in January, 1998.
Carol Hutchins reported that a draft of responses to the 1996 Library survey has been received, and an analysis will be published in the Notices sometime this fall.
Conference on Electronic Communication in Mathematics http://www.geom.umn.edu/docs/cecm/
Martha Tucker of the Mathematics Research Library at the University of Washington gave a brief report on the Conference on Electronic Communication in Mathematics which was held at the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota, May 29 to June 1, 1997. There were about 60 people at the conference including mathematics professors, some computer science professors, and a few librarians. More information about the conference is available at the web address given above. Some of the sessions of interest were the following:
Mark Steinberger - Making Optimal Use of the Electronic Environment
Andrew Odlyzko - The slow evolution of electronic publishing
Kevin Guthrie - JSTOR: Providing Electronic Access to Journal Archives
Hal Varian - Future of Electronic Journals
Open floor for announcements, questions, and discussion
A) Dr. Donald Babbitt of the American Mathematical Society made several announcements including the folowing:
* The AMS policy for usage statistics will be provided to an official contact person at your institution.
- Statistics must be requested
- Statistics can be organized by sub-domain
- Statistics are delivered twice a year
* The reviews for the 1940-79 bibliography are currently being entered into the database. They are starting with the most recent first (1979) and are working backwards chronologically.
* Consortial pricing for Mathematical Reviews is available. Rationale for the consortial pricing is to increase access to the MathSciNet (MSN) for institutions that could not previously afford it. The price is related to the "Mathematical Activity" at an institution.
* The MSN fee has not increased in the last two years.
* Contact Dr. Babbitt for more information
B) Current Index to Statistics http://galton.uchicago.edu/~cis/
There was some discussion about the problems that people have experienced using the Current Index to Statistics (CIS) on CD-ROM since there is no standard front-end search engine. Several people expressed the desire for the database to be available through MathSciNet. There is no schedule to have CIS available through MathSciNet, but it is available in the MathSci Dialog file 239. It was suggested that this could be a possible item for discussion at the January '98 joint meeting of AMS and MAA.
C) Experience with Electronic Journals (EJ's)
The discussion about electronic journals emphasized the need for usage statistics from journal/publisher websites in order to enable librarians to evaluate how often each electronic journal to which their library susbcribes is used. Problems of cataloging electronic journals were also discussed. Several of the publishers' representatives provided information about their electronic journals.
* Dr. Babbitt said that the AMS plans on linking to Academic Press Journals from their index.
* Publishers are developing accession numbers and codes for specific journal articles so that there is a standard place to go for an article. (One example is a PII.
See: http://pubs.acs.org/journals/pubiden.html)
* There is a problem with linking in both directions. For an interdisciplinary journal article, how does it know which indexing/abstracting service to use to give more information on the citations at the end of an article?
* Springer/Link will absorb the cost of electronic access for 1998. They report single digit percentage increases in their serial prices.
* SIAM also reports single digit percentage increases in their publishing costs.
D) Effective User Surveys
Many methods to determine library use were mentioned including the following:
1) Use a barcode wand to identify a used item.
2) Have patrons mark a sticky note after use.
3) Have patrons fill out a survey that asks them what items they use. Rank the materials into four categories: core, frequently used, infrequently used, never used.
4) Ask patrons what forms of materials that they are using: books, journals, paper preprints, electronic preprints, colleagues' materials, technical reports, etc. Where do they get these materials?
5) Use citation data to determine use.
E) Document Delivery
A problem with getting copyright clearance from some publishers even if the library is willing to pay a high fee was mentioned in this brief discussion.
Other topics that had been suggested by the membership for discussion, but which there was no time to discuss, included the following: Research in Mathematics - how has this changed, Publisher Relations, Marketing electronic journals in mathematics, Math in the former Soviet Union, Favorite reference tools - least favorite, Web homepages, Selecting items to send to storage.
Return to Contents page
Created by: Laurel Kristick, August 1, 1997
Modified by: Laurel Kristick, August 7, 1997