CEAL Executive Committee Meeting Minutes

Meeting II:  held 7:15 to 9:30 p.m., Friday March 23, 2001 at the Sheraton Hotel, Chicago.

Present: Bill McCloy (Washington Law) [President]; Doris Seely (Minnesota) [Secretary]; Wen-ling Liu (Indiana) [Treasurer]; Executive Committee Members-at-Large: Hsi-chu Bolick (North Carolina at Chapel Hill); Vickie Fu Doll (Kansas); Sarah Su-erh Elman (UCLA); Sachie Noguchi (Pittsburgh); Anna U (Toronto); Karen Wei (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); Committee Chairs: Yuan Zhou (Chicago) [Chinese Materials]; Hideyuki Morimoto (UC Berkeley) [Japanese Materials]; Joy Kim (USC) [Korean Materials]; Abraham Yu (UC Irvine) [Technical Processing]; Rob Britt (Washington Law) [Library Technology]; Cathy Chiu (UC Santa Barbara) [Public Services]; Gail King (Brigham Young) [Publications].

CEAL DIRECTORY

Producing the print Directory is much too big a job for the CEAL Secretary to handle and the MS Word files which have been used for the print Directory are too fragile and unstable for mounting on the Web, so we need to find new ways to produce both the print and the online versions. Rob Britt suggests converting the files to Access. Doris Seely suggests dropping the characters to make production easier for whoever next takes it up. There seems to be no current input method that can easily handle hangul, Japanese simplified characters, kana, PRC simplified, and traditional Chinese characters in quick succession. Lack of appropriate input methods makes adding characters extremely difficult and time-consuming and lack of one uniform font makes mounting them on the web similarly difficult. Until we have more advanced technology, it seems that the work of adding characters will still far outweigh their usefulness.

Bill McCloy will appoint an ad hoc membership committee to work out new ways of producing the Directory. Vickie Fu Doll is familiar with the technology and is willing to help with this project. Sarah Su-erh Elman is also willing to help. Bill will ask Jim Cheng of the University of Iowa if he can chair. This will initially be a two-year ad hoc committee which might then become a standing committee if the ad hoc committee decides that is what we need.

Doris Seely asked that the words "member" and "membership" be deleted from the various sections of the online CEAL Directory, except for those based on part 4 of the print Directory, which actually do reflect CEAL membership. The other lists include many people who are not CEAL members so that the labels are misleading.

CEAL STATISTICS

Vickie Fu Doll and Fung-yin Kuo Simpson reported on their planning for automation of the CEAL statistics. CEAL Statistics Task Force members will set up CEAL statistics online input forms with individual institution password security protection. In the coming year, CEAL will begin collecting statistics through an online input interactive database. The few member libraries that have no access to the Internet and cannot input online can still submit their statistics data using an Excel form as an e-mail attachment. The Task Force will add categories for e-resources as ARL has done but will modify the ARL forms to fit East Asian library resources. The additional statistical categories to be requested for e-resources will be posted on eastlib for comment before they are implemented for this year's statistics. The deadline for submitting CEAL statistics for JEAL will be sometime in October/November shortly after the ARL statistics are due. All late submissions will appear in the online file only, not in JEAL.

The CEAL Statistics Task Force proposed to mount the previous three years of CEAL statistics (96/97, 97/98, 98/99) on the Statistics Homepage. The years 99/00 and 2000/01 are currently accessible on the web. However, the current program does not work for the previous years' data as the list of reporting institutions and the categories of statistics were very different back then. A separate program will have to be designed in order to correctly display previous years' data since we had major statistics category changes in 1999/2000 and participating libraries have varied greatly each year.

It was decided that CEAL will establish a standing committee on statistics. The chair will serve for a three-year term to coincide with that of the president. The chair need not be a member of the Executive Committee but may want to attend meetings to report.

It was mentioned that we might consider sometime in the future devoting an issue of JEAL to CEAL statistics and to comparative analysis based on them, with the Statistics Committee taking the lead on planning and preparing this.

EQUIPMENT COORDINATOR TO BE APPOINTED

The equipment needed for committee meetings is expensive and complicated to order, set up, and maintain during the committee sessions. Therefore at the second Executive Committee Meeting each year, the President will appoint an equipment coordinator for the next year's CEAL meetings. (For 2002, Bill will ask Sun-Yoon Lee of USC.) This person will work with the President and committee chairs and will be responsible for arranging for a standard array of equipment, software, and accessories for the committee meetings. He or she will be available, or find someone else to be available, at all committee meetings to coordinate and troubleshoot on site. If a committee needs anything not in the standard equipment package, the committee chair should consult with the equipment coordinator in advance to see if it can be provided.

Equipment and software considered standard will include computers with 3/5-inch diskette drives (and CD-ROM or DVD drives if needed by presentors), presentation software, web browsers, software for CJK input and display, LCD projectors, overhead projectors, internet connections, a temporary internet service provider, projection screens, and cables and extension cords of sufficient length for necessary electrical and network connections. Where hotel equipment rental costs are prohibitive, consideration will be given to borrowing equipment or renting from an off-site vendor.