August, 1996

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Mathematics News Nancy Carter

The Mathematics Roundtable met on Monday, June 10, 10:30-11:45A in Room 312, Hynes Convention Center, Boston. After a brief flurry of confusion due to switched rooms, the Mathematics Roundtable convened in Room 312 of the Convention Center. There were approximately 45 people in attendance. The first speaker on the agenda was Donald Babbitt, the Publisher of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). He made numerous announcements concerning MathSciNet and answered many questions from the audience. Some interesting points were: Within two years, AMS expects to include reviews from 1940-1979 on MathSciNet. Current Mathematical Publications (CMP) records are being updated daily. Consortium pricing is available. However, consortia differ so radically in make-up, that there can be no set formula for this. 1997 prices for MathSciNet and MathSci CD will remain the same as prices for 1996. The Data Access Fee (DAF), however, will increase by 5.1%. Right now only Dialog or MathSci tapes (e.g., the CIC Consortium) have CIS online. Negotiations are ongoing to include in MathSciNet. There will probably be a surcharge for this. There was a question concerning statistics on each site usage. Such information, such as data on hits, would be valuable for librarians to justify purchase. Mr. Babbitt explained that such information, while potentially valuable, can also cross over into invasion of privacy, among other things, and the Society is proceeding cautiously. AMS is willing to share subscribers' names by region, such as by state, to facilitate the formation of consortia. Bert TePaske-King from AMS announced that he and Paula Shanks have volunteered to take charge of the "New Journals in Mathematics" list that had been maintained by Richard Funkhouser and Janice Jaguszewski. They plan to post on a Web page an updated list of new journals of interest to mathematics librarians. Included would be all titles of interest, not just those indexed in Mathematical Reviews (MR). They hope to soon post a proposal for their site on PAMnet and solicit feedback on format, length of time title left on list, etc. The second portion of the program was a presentation by Joanne Goode of Brill Science Library, Miami University. The title was "Exploring Access vs. Ownership: A Pilot TOC/DD Project." Accompanying her talk with overheads, Joanne described Miami University's emphasis on undergraduate education, illustrated by a Mathematics Department acknowledged for excellence in this area. The Mathematics faculty, numbering 55, agreed to take part in an experiment in which eleven selected journals would be removed from the shelves and made available only through table-of-contents (TOC) and document delivery (DD) services. Faxon was chosen for TOC service and MathDoc and CISTI (Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information) for DD service. Each Monday the TOCs were received from Faxon and routed to the Mathematics faculty who indicated any documents needed. These were then ordered through one of the DD services. After the documents arrived they were sent to the requesting faculty members via campus mail. Readability turned out to be more important that speed. At the end of the project a survey was sent to the faculty. Responses indicated a high degree of satisfaction with the procedure and an interest in seeing such practices used in the future. Questions and discussion from the audience followed. (For additional information contact Joanne Goode) The Roundtable was adjourned at 11:45A.