The following members compose the Group:
Ch., Martha Hsu
Martha Brogan
Kurt De Belder
Richard Hacken
Michael P. Olson
Leena Siegelbaum
Advisor, James Spohrer
Background. The Group first met at the 1995 ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia. The impetus for its creation arose from the recognized value to continue the work of the WESS/ARL Acquisition Study chaired by Barbara Walden, and the WESS/ARL political science project carried out by Jim Spohrer and Michael Olson, both completed in 1993. These WESS projects were themselves a result of the ongoing work of the Association of American Universities Research Library Project (carried out in collaboration with ARL), which began in April 1992. In 1994 a task force that was part of the AAU Research Library Project, charged with studying the acquisition and distribution of foreign language and area studies materials, presented its findings to the steering committee of the project. Because of the earlier WESS/ARL studies, this AAU task force strongly encouraged the creation of the WESS Social Sciences Working Group to continue the work of the earlier studies carried out by Walden and Spohrer/Olson.
The WESS Social Sciences Working Group is involved in larger ARL activities in another significant way. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of using the latest technology for cooperative collection development of foreign materials, ARL convened an eclectic group of librarians, administrators, and teaching faculty in the spring of 1995 to organize an actual demonstration project for German language publications. The ARL German Demonstration Project was first proposed in the final report of the AAU Task Force on Acquisition and Distribution of Foreign Language and Area Studies Materials. Participating on both the Project group and on the German Social Sciences Working Group, Martha Hsu has put together an informal report summarizing the status and activity of the German Demonstration Project up to the fall of 1995. As noted, the Project group has convened once in the spring, and a number of important decisions were made at that meeting