FACULTY SENATE UNIVERSITY COMPUTER & ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE
DRAFT MINUTES OF THE MEETING OF March. 31, 1999, Room 903, Campus Center
Approved: April 14, 1999
Present: E. Cutting, M. Crist, G. Fisher, G. Forman, A. Gaylord, M. Hanley,
G. Hough, E. Hurn, T. Jackson, J. Kunkel, B. MacDougall (Chair),
B. McCandless, N. Sims, M. Wingertsman
Bruce MacDougall called the meeting to order at 10:34 AM
1. Approval of Minutes:
The Committee corrected and approved the minutes of the March 1, 1999 Meeting
2. Announcements
A. Art Gaylord represented OIT with announcements and answers to queries.
(1) Parts have held up the implementation of the 92 new 56kB lines and
they should soon be installed and ameliorate the current saturation
problem.
(2) Ed Cutting expressed concern via Email that the backbone was saturating.
However, on checking, OIT found that the backbone was running at 4-5%
of capacity, perhaps peaking at 12% of backbone capacity. Despite this,
the backbone will be upgraded to gigabyte capacity this summer. This
upgrade is mainly due to the need to keep current with the support
for hardware rather than an immediate need for that local bandwidth.
(3) Minor revisions were made to the University Home Page including a focus
on Campus Initiatives:
a. A link to encourage participation in a Survey on the campus Retail
Food and Bookstore.
b. A link to details on Y2K readiness.
(4) The Melissa Virus has not had any noticeable appearance on campus as yet.
OIT recommends the use of antivirus software. A fix for the Word 97 and
Explorer (Outlook) vulnerabilities were discussed in committee.
(5) Query: Is the Mail System going to be changed?
An alternate to POP Email is being considered and tested by OIT. The IMAP
protocol will allow more flexible access to email from different locations
and thus will solve problems with access to Email archives from home and
office.
b. Eudora, IExplorer and Netscape will still work.
c. Pine and Elm users will need to change.
d. The transition will occur in the Fall.
e. IMAP has public and private folder capabilities which may help to
reduce the CC Email flow by allowing members to view a permitted folder.
f. New mail servers will allow higher archive quotas, 0.5Mb currently will
go to 10Mb limit.
3. Old Business
A. A web page on the Software Licensing Subcommittee's issues was reported.
(1) http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/kunkel/fsucecc/site-license.html
B. Library Director, Margo Crist, made announcements and responded to queries
relevant to Library operation. Full presentation of the information on
spiraling costs of scholarly publications which she shared with the Faculty
Senate in November 1998 and with us at this meeting can be viewed at URL:
http://www.library.umass.edu/presentations/
(1) Wireless internet connections will be installed on the Library main floor
and, after experimentation, to the remainder of the Tower. This will
allow greater freedom for people using microcomputers to retain internet
connectivity while they move about in the stacks where it would be
inconvenient to provide numbers of jacks in all locations.
(2) Margo is participating in a nationwide discussion of Internet-2 (I-2) vs
the Commercial Internet (Ic) applications in library operations.
a. two thirds of ARL libraries are part of I-2.
b. distance education is not a relevant issue for I-2 since small colleges
and commercial providers can not access the speeds of I-2.
(3) Query: Are the campus branch libraries (Morrill Science and Lederle GRT)
in the loop of library improvements?
Answer: The branch libraries continue to be a problem in providing
equivalent services. Marilyn Hanley added that the branches will be more
integrated into the Tower improvements through the summer.
(4) Authentication
a. Licenses to use software and access databases require authentication
of legal users for particular license restrictions.
b. New authentication protocol vendors are being investigated. Some models
involve rates for access authentication and are based of FTE's. Thus
a $0.40/FTE might be a rate that could be accrued for accessing Library
contents electronicly. How this would be paid for is a serious issue.
c. Our current number of serials is about 15,000, which is below many of our
financial peer universities. The inflation in serial costs is higher than
the increase in library budget which means yearly cancelling of serial
titles. This leads to getting less for more each year.
d. Science Citation Index is currently charging $80,000 for its 1999
database. We also have back issues from 1993-on which were purchased
at lower cost per year. The cost of individual journals are also
spiraling up with a 9.4% average annual increase per year over 1986-97
(e.g. _Brain Research_ currently costs $17,000/yr).
e. Margo made a plea for faculty to get involved in this crisis. She feels that
the journals and serials are getting a lot of faculty labor, such as sources
of information and editing of information, which is free to them. We
then turn around and buy back that information from them. Can faculty affect
the spiraling costs to universities by refusing to give up copyright?
f. Sims comment: Faculty are in a bind, they have to publish.
g. SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
-an ARL movement to create competing alternatives to high priced
publications (i.e. e-journals; retention of copyright; cost containment).
h. Query: Are efforts being made to ensure that authentication protocols
do not exclude the traditional openness that the library has exhibited
to our Commonwealth citizens who may not have a university affiliation
nor IP address that might be used in authentication.
Answer: Any visitors to campus would be afforded the same cordial
treatment and access to journals and library materials as in the
past. This access would be the same for anyone physically visiting
the building.
(5) Query: Are there licensable software or databases that the Library
uses whose licensing fees might be shared with Departments with
similar interests?
Yes, for instance Beilsteiner's is a chemistry resource which might
be useful to some technical departments and shared licensing might
be appropriate. Also the Oxford English Dictionary or Encyclopedia
Britanica Online, which are quite expensive licenses, might be such
sharable resources.
(6) Director Crist left us with an 8 page list of Electronic Journals Available
Through the UMass Libraries. (Secretary's Note: the list does not contain any
of the Wiley Journal Publications, which we have free access to download
full text reprints based on our Library hard copy subscription. Each such journal
must be added by an official representative of the Library. Linda Arny registered
AIBP which is a journal useful to me, at my specific request. Interested faculty
need to request that specific Wiley Journals be added to our access list or access
will be denied even though we have a subscription.)
The library will be adding these titles as quickly as possible. The policy
for adding these titles is in the final stages of approval. If there are
titles that individuals know about, but which aren't cataloged, they
should notify their library representative.
4. The hour being late we tabled the remainder of our agenda for next meeting
5. The meeting adjourned at 12:05 PM.
Respectfully Submitted
Joseph G. Kunkel
joe@bio.umass.edu
last updated 4/09/99