(Minutes taken by Group Chair, Michael
Olson)
Below I summarize the main points of
the meeting. Also, I pose a number of questions that I trust we can discuss via email
among ourselves before we meet in Germany in March. If we can approach resolution on
certain points in anticipation of whatever presentations we may be expected to make in
Göttingen and Leipzig, that would be most welcome.
Please read through the following, and
I invite your response via email to the group at large to the questions I have listed at
the end of each item. The following will
require hard decisions, but the greater the time we can now spend thinking about and
discussing these issues among ourselves, the better prepared we will be for subsequent
action, during and after our trip in Germany.
We discussed
the possibility of H-Net becoming an initiative of our working group. I asked Jim Niessen,
a fellow member of our working group who is involved with H-Net, to summarize the main
points of his proposal, including specific requests of our working group, for us to read
and discuss now. Jim has kindly posted the following:
“Colleagues,
I’ve been
working on the H-Net proposal for several months, but was unsure how much of what I had
been passing on to Roger and Mike about it was making its way to you. I was being a little hush-hush because the consent
of some key players was contingent upon that of others, including you.
As suggested at
our meeting February 1, I’ll now try to state succinctly why I ask you to recognize
the project as a working group initiative as we go into the spring meeting.
1. The commonality of interest of the Global
Resources Project and H-Net Reviews: The goal of the GRP is to enhance access to the
content of foreign publications, while H-Net is seeking to increase its review coverage of
these publications in order to better serve its international community of scholars, to
date 90.000 subscribers on more than 100 lists and millions of web visits per month. To
this end, H-Net wants to establish a center or centers in Europe for the ordering and
mailing of review copies between European publishers and reviewers. American libraries will benefit from quicker
access to detailed, quality reviews of foreign publications at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/
, where they will be browsable and searchable by author, title, reviewer, list, ISBN,
publisher, and LC call number.
2. Benefits to our German partners of
collaboration on this initiative:
The most productive of H-Net’s lists in Europe, H-Soz-u-Kult , http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~sozkult/
, has turned out close to a hundred reviews in the past year but needs for financial and
personnel reasons to
Latin American specialty of the Latin American Institute that is
supported
3. German and also broader subject content: Many reviews will be on
German history, with German literature likely to follow.
But let’s remember that the German resources project does not exhaust its
mandate with German content. Our Goettingen
and Frankfurt colleagues gave us presentations in Washington of the resources for American
and African studies they had mounted on their libraries’ websites. By finding a place for the H-Net proposal among
our working group initiatives and on the agenda of our March meetings in Germany, I
believe we will be serving the broader goals of the Global Resources Project.
My hope is that in
putting the proposal on the agenda for Goettingen and Leipzig we can enlist the active
support and participation of our German partners for this project. Then Leskien, H-Soz-u-Kult editor Ruediger Hohls,
Gudrun Gersmann (the manager of the early modern project), and I could work out details on
the prospective Munich operations outside the formal GRP meetings and perhaps bring our
Goettingen and Frankfurt partners in already. GRP status would encourage our partner
libraries to participate.
At our meeting on
Feb. 1, I suggested that working group members might help with the recruitment of editors,
but on further consideration I do not believe working group members need be concerned with
this. It will be quite helpful enough if you
can agree that the proposal fits with the goals of the German Project and the Global
Resources Program. Then my fellow H-Net
staffers and I can work out the details with our prospective German partners. H-Net will have a major presence at the 19th
International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo in August 2000, including a meeting
of H-Net editors in Europe that we hope to use for recruitment purposes.
Let me know if this
answers your questions or if you would like to hear more.
Jim Niessen,
HABSBURG Editor/Reviews Editor <lijpn@chimera.acs.ttu.edu>
Chair, H-Net
Reviews Committee. Co-Chair, European Planning Committee”
Questions
from the Working Group Chair:
ˇ Do we wish to include H-Net as an initiative of our working group? If
so, why? If not, why not?
ˇ If we were to include H-Net as an initiative, to what extent would we
want to limit its focus as an initiative vis-a-vis Germany - either German studies or
German publications? Or do we want to include H-Net with all its non-German components as
well?
ˇ If we include H-Net, do we want to include other initiatives, e.g.
RRE, IFB, etc.?
ˇ More generally, do we, as a working group for collection development,
want to get into the business of facilitating access to the content of any work, or of
facilitating access to non-content aspects (e.g. reviews, bibliographic citations) of any
work, or both?
Jeff Garrett, a
fellow member of our working group and the current chair of the WESS Research and Planning
Committee, summarized the findings of recent reports generated by the database.
Questions
from the Working Group Chair:
ˇ Does our working group now want to involve itself with this database,
either in tandem with or in exclusion from the WESS Research and Planning Committee?
ˇ If we choose to become involved, what are our next steps?
ˇ If we were to conduct subsequent studies built around the database,
how statistically significant and careful do we want to be (assuming a correlation between
significance and care on one hand and time and effort expended by us on the other)?
The working
group did not spend a lot of time discussing the possibility of conducting subsequent
studies, either new or continuing.
Questions
from the Working Group Chair:
ˇ Do we want to look into the possibility of another study a la (or
contradicting) studies by Walden, Pitschmann, Spohrer/Olson, Koch?
ˇ What would we examine?
ˇ Who would spend the time and effort?
We spoke about
the possibility of our working group facilitating gateways, or portals, for German
materials - be they materials related to German studies, German-language materials, or
materials from Germany - on the Internet. One example might be Reinhart Sonnenburg’s
German Studies Page, which is on WESSWEB.
Questions
from the Working Group Chair:
ˇ Do we want to undertake this operation?
ˇ If so, how expansive do we want to become?
ˇ What issues do we need to consider?