Present: Ruby Bell-Gam (UCLA, chair); Elizabeth Darocha Berenz (CRL); Miriam Conteh-Morgan (Ohio State); David Easterbrook (Northwestern); Greg Finnegan (Harvard); Marion Frank-Wilson (Indiana); Karen Fung (Stanford); James Getner (LC); Miki Goral (UCLA); Cristina Horte (Ministry of Health Reference Center, Mozambique); Pamela Howard-Reguindin (LC Nairobi); Bassey Irele (Harvard); Al Kagan (Illinois-UC); Esmeralda Kale (Northwestern); Zbigniew Kantorosinski (LC); Patricia Kuntz (no institutional affiliation given); Joe Lauer (Michigan State); Deborah LaFond (Albany); Peter Limb (Michigan State); Heidi Lyons (BU); Peter Malanchuk (Florida); Loyd Mbabu (Ohio U); Edward Miner (Iowa); Tom Nygren (Aluka); Lauris Olson (Penn); Patricia Odedengbe (Northwestern); Laverne Page (LC); Loumona Petroff (BU); Beth Restrick (BU); Gretchen Walsh (BU); David Westley (BU).

Opening
The meeting was called to order by the chair, Ruby Bell-Gam, at 9:00 am.

1. Introductions
After introductions of all present, Bob Hudson, Director of Mugar Memorial Library briefly welcomed participants to BU.

2. Agenda Review, Announcements & Approval of Fall 2005 Minutes
Bell-Gam announced revisions to the agenda. Minutes of the Fall meeting were approved as submitted.

3. Conover-Porter Award update
Gretchen Walsh reported on behalf of the committee. Other members are Greg Finnegan, Marieta Harper, and Al Kagan who recused himself from selection deliberations because his book, Reference Guide to Africa, 2nd ed. (Scarecrow, 2005) is on the list of nominations for the award. Walsh reported that this year ten works were nominated. She highlighted one title, Maths in African History and Culture: An Annotated Bibliography, which she described as interesting but not quite fitting all the criteria for the award. This led to a discussion about issues such as the definition of a bibliography, selection criteria and eligibility that are not clearly stated in the guidelines. In particular, the committee would prefer more specific guidelines for defining an “excellent” work; they have been guided by David Henige’s criteria for creating bibliographies. The guidelines should also be clear about procedures on how to handle the case of a committee member whose work is on the nominated list.
Loyd Mbabu asked whether titles can be re-nominated. Walsh answered in the affirmative, as long as the work was still within the stipulated time frame for eligibility. In response to Bell-Gam’s question as to how to proceed with revising the guidelines, Peter Limb suggested that they should reflect current practice, and there should be a statement about what principles the committee should follow. Lauris Olson asked whether Henige’s article should serve as the guideline, or whether there are others out there that could be used. The suggestion was made to ask Diana Wylie (who is on the ASA Herskovits committee) about their guidelines to see how they may inform the Conover-Porter committee.

• Acquisitions are on the upswing. Staff visited 15 countries on buying trips,
  resulting in a rise from 116 thousand items to 141 thousand in comparable periods.
• They have changed to a new cataloguing system, Voyager. They have had training issues and therefore a backlog which impacted libraries. Wants to learn more about cataloging practices of various libraries.
• New program – digitized table of contents, now available for English-language materials; other languages to follow.
• Described processes involved in CAP and exhorted members to pay their bills on time as late payment affected service, especially serials. Limb asked to be personally notified about any delays in payment from his institution.
• Some cost-saving measures now in place – Internet stamps. Wants feedback on new packaging method.
• Web site has been updated, hopefully will be done annually. New information added, including bibliographic information about articles on the LC overseas operation, profiles, etc.
• Wants feedback on the Quarterly Index of African Periodical Literature http://lcweb2.loc.gov:8081/asian/qsihtml/qsihome.html – How is it used? Is it valuable? How can it be modified? Three new indexers have been hired. Malanchuk says U. Florida uses the Index in their bibliography class and at the reference desk. Limb finds online version useful.
• Asked for support for CAMP proposal to film Malawian newspapers.

b. Cristina Horta, Ministry of Health, Mozambique
Horta is in the US on a National Library of Medicine fellowship. In her presentation, “Health Information Needs in Mozambique,” she gave a brief outline of the history of health services in Mozambique—which she said is 70% donor funded—and a description of the reference center where she works.

• The reference center collects information on donor-funded projects and other studies. Horta has developed a simple database with abstracts. Documents are sent to her voluntarily. The centre provides a value-added service: edits the documents for the authors.
  
• Horta tries to make sure other libraries know about the centre and its collection; offers documents to requesters in hard copy or via email.
  
• Future needs: financial support for staff training; digitizing print documents for uploading to center’s website; may need to use MESH (LC Medical Subject Headings) in the database.
  

5. Dissertations

a. DATAD
Bell-Gam does not have any recent information on the DATAD program.

b. “Recent Doctoral Dissertations” in ASA News
Joe Lauer said that he does not include those from South Africa, since the bibliographic control there is good. He is considering publishing the dissertations list online since ASA News is cutting down the number of issues it publishes per year. Bell-Gam asked whether putting the dissertations lists online as an alternative would have copyright implications. Olson said UMI/Proquest seems pretty much okay with having copies of abstracts online.

6. Bibliographies

• David Easterbrook announced that Northwestern has reformatted nine finding aids on photos (using EAD standards) and has a special website on the Abdullah Abdurahman family papers. Other finding aids include those to the Lorenzo Dow Turner papers. They may also work on the Winterton Collection of photos. They have received a gift of several hundred publications on West Africa, mostly Nigeria, from Simon Ottenberg and will create an inventory of his field notes.
  
• Olson announced that the African Index Medicus was again online.
  
• Limb: Michigan State University’s African E-journal project is completed.
  
• Marion Frank-Wilson announced the publication of a special issue of Africa Today on the theme of ICTs (information and communications technologies).
  
• Finnegan wondered what the RLG/OCLC merger would hold for libraries and all of us.
  
• Bell-Gam: UCLA and other University of California campuses have moved to subscribing to NISC’s Africa-Wide:NIPAD. Also mentioned errors on the ALC site; we should work with Joanne to fix them.
  
• Miriam Conteh-Morgan announced that she has been awarded an ALA grant to develop the Literary Map of Africa.

7 & 8. Problems in evaluating published works for acquisition; and how libraries are handling requests for articles cited in AJOL, NISC databases, etc.
Walsh asked whether there were procedures in place to deliver fulltext journal articles from AJOL and other such services. She also brought up the example of a recent H-Africa question asking about a “good” atlas for Africa. It turned out that a French one which was recommended had “racist” overtones. The larger question this raised was: how do you determine the utility or quality of a work you have not examined?

9. Newspaper preservation and archiving: what will be our legacy?
In the interest of time, this was deferred to a future forum.

The meeting was adjourned at 10.35.

Faithfully submitted,

Miriam Conteh-Morgan

Page Last Updated October 17, 2006