2011-2012 Annual Report
Acquisitions Standing Committee

The TS-SIS Acquisitions Committee met in Philadelphia on Monday, July 25, 2011, from 7:00 - 7:43 a.m. The meeting segued into the Acquisitions Roundtable discussion, which lasted until 8:30.

At the meeting, progress reports for 2 ongoing projects were given:

1. ACQWEB: At its Denver meeting in 2010, the Committee had decided to cut ties with AcqWeb, and assume responsibility for maintenance of a list of law-related vendors/publishers. In Philadelphia, Anne Robbins (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) showed a blog mock-up than can be used to create and maintain the list. Anne, Eric Parker (Northwestern), Wendy Moore (University of Georgia), and Ajaye Bloomstone (LSU) volunteered to work on populating the blog with information about vendors of interest.
2. Collection development policies: We were unable to link to the policies on the ALL-SIS site, since that site is password-protected with a password only available to ALL-SIS members. To date, we have been unable to resolve the issue (though many of the members of TS-SIS may also be ALL-SIS members, so can get access to the ALL-SIS password from their webmaster by asking him for it).

During the discussions at the Roundtable, I proposed that the Acquisitions Committee pursue a survey of law libraries to get a sense of what sorts of materials are being canceled these days, which are being considered for cancellation, and which are being kept. Damon Campbell (Florida Coastal School of Law) and Shyama Agrawal (Duke) volunteered to put together a survey. I volunteered to share with them a similar survey we did among academic law libraries in the Chicago area in 2010 in preparation for a workshop.

The survey went live on May 1, 2012, and will be open until June 1. It consists of 23 questions. As of this writing, we have received responses from at least 54 libraries. Hopefully we will get many more! In any case, it is our hope to share the information gathered with the larger law library community, providing a "snapshot" of what we are doing collectively these days, collection-wise, in response to budgetary and other constraints.

Progress on the other 2 issues (discussed in Philadelphia, and mentioned above) has been limited. We still have not found a smooth way around the collection development policy password problem. I also believe that progress has been slow on the publisher blog due to time commitments on the part of the volunteers.

This year, the Acquisitions Committee consisted of the following members:

The Acquisitions Committee is next scheduled to meet in Boston on Monday, July 23 from 7-8:30 a.m.

Respectfully submitted, May 22, 2012, by Eric Parker, Acquisitions Standing Committee Chair.

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Revised: June 10, 2012.
URL: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/committees/acquisitions/annualreport/20112012.htm