The LLMC-Digital Newsletter
      Issue No. 9: August 2004

Report on Annual LLMC Meeting

LLMC has held annual meetings for libraries participating in its microfiche program very year since 1977. To maximize attendance, these meetings have always been held during the annual AALL conventions. Our 27th annual meeting took place last month in Boston. This latest meeting was conducted under new rules adopted at the 2003 meeting, when the LLMC-fiche libraries voted to transfer, both control of LLMC’s assets, and also their accumulated voting rights, to the Charter Members of LLMC-Digital. As always, the main official business of the meeting was to elect Directors and Councilors for open slots on our governing bodies, the Board of Directors and the Advisory Council. Ballots, geared to each library’s subscription status, were picked up by delegates on arrival. Some 68 representatives of the 265 LLMC-Digital libraries attended.

 In the Board of Directors election three slots were at issue. The group first moved to replace Carol Billings and Blair Kauffman whose four-year terms had expired. Nominees were Judith Gaskell, Librarian to the U.S. Supreme Ct., and Carol Roehrenbeck, Director of the Rutgers-Newark Univ. Law Library. Both were elected by acclamation. In a special election to fill the two years remaining in the term of Board member Dan Lavering, who had resigned for professional reasons, the sole nominee was Richard Amelung, Head of Technical Services at St. Louis Univ. Law Library. He also was elected by acclamation. 

In the election for Councilors, six slots were available for election, two due to Councilors Gaskell and Roehrenbeck being tapped for service on the Board of Directors, and another four due to the expiration of the terms of Councilors John Christensen, Dir. at Washburn U. Law Lib.;  Jim Fox, Dir. at Dickinsen Sch. of Law Lib. of Penn.St.U.; Kent McKeever, Dir. at Columbia U. Law Lib., and Ed Schroeder, recently retired Dir. at Florida St. Law Lib.. Nominees for these slots were outgoing LLMC Directors Carol Billings and Blair Kauffman; Michael Beaird, Dir., U. of Arkansas-Little Rock Law Lib.; Anne Crocker, Dir., U. of New Brunswick Law Lib.; Elizabeth McKenzie, Dir., Suffolk U. Law Lib.; and Regina Smith, Dir., Jenkins Memorial Law Lib..     

 Following the above elections, the membership of our two governing bodies is as appears below. (see endnote #1) In conclusion, on behalf  of our new Board and Council, we extend our sincere thanks to Carol Billings and Blair Kauffman for their just completed four years of service on the Board of Directors and for their willingness to put in yet another three years as Councilors. We thank Dan Lavering for his two years of service on the Board and six years of Councilor service before that. Finally we thank John Christensen, Jim Fox, Kent McKeever, and Ed Schroeder; each of whom has given many years of service on one or the other, or both, of our governing bodies.

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 Following the elections, Executive Director Dupont gave a short report on recent Consortium developments and near term plans. This was followed by questions from the attendees and then adjournment. (see endnote # 2)

 July Board of Directors Meeting

The LLMC Board of Directors normally meets twice annually; typically at the July AALL and January AALS meetings, both to economize and to maximize attendance. The recent mid-summer meeting was held on Saturday, July10, from 9:00AM to 4:30PM. Our gracious host was Betsy McKenzie, Dir. of Suffolk U. Law Library. The meeting was held in that library’s spectacular Suffolk Room with a sky view over-looking the Boston Commons.

 Highlights among the policy decisions made by the Board at the meeting were:

 — Board organization: In response to the increased responsibilities involved in managing both its microfiche and on-line programs, the Board established two formal subcommittees: Finance and Personnel. Membership on these two committees for the 2004/05 period are: Directors Georgia Clark (Chair), Jules Winterton and Ann Rae for Finance; and Directors Maryruth Storer (Chair), Richard Amelung, and Margaret Leary for Personnel.

 — Subsidized meeting attendance:  To encourage maximum participation at all of LLMC Board meetings (normally held in conjunction with AALL and AALS conventions), the Board authorized the subsidizing of expenses for those Board members whose way to either of those gatherings would not be paid in normal course by their home institutions.

 — Staff recruitment: Most production personnel at LLMC are recruited locally from the Hawaii labor force, but the Board feels that supervisory positions requiring familiarity with law library operations and legal bibliography merit a national search. The Board determined that the next new position for which a national search will be appropriate is an Assistant Director for Content Management. This person will take on some of the Executive Director’s responsibilities for maintaining bibliographic content on LLMC-Digital. These include:  developing target lists for future data capture, assembling relevant bibliographic information, negotiating with library sources for the donation or loan of hardcopy, inspecting incoming materials and making appropriate adjustments in the bibliographic records, assigning the necessary digital-directory information, monitoring the flow of books through the production process, providing required bibliographic guidance to production personnel, conducting needed negotiations with the LLMC-Digital catalogers at Saint Louis University Law School, and maintaining a bibliographic interface with the operations of LLMC’s digital partner, the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office. The Board asked the Personnel Committee to prepare a recruitment plan aimed at a job listing before January 2004 followed by interviewing and hiring in 2005.

 — Equipment purchases: In the past four months LLMC has purchased two Zeutschel Omniscan 5000 digital book scanners at a cost of $42,000 each and retired two of its five step-and-repeat film cameras. Continuing with its program of gradually replacing all of our film cameras with digital-capture capability, the Board next addressed the purchase of digital-to-film writing equipment. This will fulfill LLMC’s commitment to preserve our digitally captured data in analog format also. Dupont recommended a digital-to-fiche system manufactured by the German firm Staude, in preference to a similarly-priced ($83,000) digital-to-microfilm system manufactured by Kodak. The Board approved the purchase of the Staude system, with an installation date of September, 2004. It also authorized Dupont to explore the options for purchasing a high-volume digital book scanner, with a projected decision

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slated for the Board’s January meeting and possible purchase and installation in early 2005.

 — Budget allotments for fiscal 2004/05:  Dupont presented detailed sales projections showing that LLMC will have revenues at its disposal for the rest of fiscal 2003/04 of at least $1,190,000, derived from LLMC-Digital subscriptions and an estimated $155,000 from continued sales of microfiche; for a combined total of $1,345,000 or more. The Board approved a “broad brush” distribution of these funds among major  expense categories as follows:

— Internal HQ operations, sales, digital data capture aimed at an annual rate of five million images (tiffs), tiff proofing/tagging = $620,000

— Outsourced digitizing of fiche back-file at an annual rate of five million tiffs = $164,000

— Outsourced OCRing of digital tiffs performed by the Univ. of Mich. = $218,000

— Outsourced LLMC-Digital hosting services performed by the Univ. of Mich. = $265,000

This general expenditure plan will leave LLMC with a cash surplus at the end fiscal 04/05 of $78,000 or more.

— Targeting new LLMC-Digital content: The Board discussed the benefits and drawbacks in various targeting sequences for mounting titles on LLMC-Digital. After weighing the options among the remaining titles in the fiche backfile, it settled on a two-pronged approach:

— The next major area of focus for LLMC-Digital will be the U.S. state collections contained in Section Two of LLMC’s print Catalog. The state collections account for roughly 40% of the 600,000 fiche in the LLMC fiche backfile. Also, given the fact that many of the state titles are held in print by most LLMC-Digital subscribers, they offer a very high potential for a space-recovery yield to many customers.

Since LLMC is proceeding on the principle that nothing will go up on LLMC-Digital unless it is cataloged, one potential choke point in our production line is in cataloging. Backlogs are predictable when St. Louis U.L.L. is faced with collections containing a large number of single treatises or other small titles. To provide breathing space when such backups occur, LLMC will exploit the fact that seven of its microfiche collections are already cataloged to high standards as OCLC major-microform-collections. Therefore, the following collections will “jump the queue” and enter the production stream whenever some relief is needed in the cataloging area. The tentative order in which these collections will go up on LLMC-Digital are: Catalog Section 9, Military Law Collection (to be up by Xmas); Sect. 1B, Federal Judicial Center Publications; Sect. 8, Blackstone;  Sections 13–15, the three Civil Law Collections; Sect. 12, Canon Law; and Sect. 10, Native American. Although Native American has been requested by many subscribers, it has been relegated to the last position because it has a very large number of titles, and because it’s prior cataloging (not done by St. Louis) will have to be substantially upgraded to meet current OCLC standards.

— Sales program for LLMC-Digital: The Board considered several options pertinent to the future sale of LLMC-Digital subscriptions, some of them already in various stages of negotiation. In conclusion, to facilitate these various sales approaches, the Board made four separate policy decisions:

— As in the fiche era, sales through commercial vendors on commission will be part of our sales program

— When negotiating with groups such as state-wide consortia, covering populations outside of academic law libraries, Dupont is authorized to bargain for consortial rates using annual base rates of $2,000 per-million-people for the general public and $1.10 per-attorney for lawyers.

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— When negotiating with bar-oriented law libraries which seek to provide IP-controlled remote access for their members, Dupont may bargain for scales analogous to those outlined in the previous paragraph.

— Regular (i.e., post-charter-period) subscription fees to LLMC-Digital for non-academic law libraries will be raised roughly 10-20%. (see endnote # 3) 

— Other On-Line Services: Dupont described inquiries from other on-line services, for-profit and non-profit, for links with LLMC-Digital. One for-profit service has proposed what would amount to mutual advertising, where each site would have links to the other when relevant to a patron’s search. The Board decided that, as to for-profit enterprises, LLMC should not itself initiate such feelers. If approached by others, it should pursue only those which are clearly to its own benefit. In addition to fear that such involvements might be expensive distractions at this stage, directors were concerned lest such contacts imperil LLMC’s non-profit status. On the non-profit side, a federal agency has requested free use of LLMC digital images (tiffs) for use on their free web site. Board members were concerned that consent in this case would lead to similar requests from other federal and state agencies, or even from non-profit NGOs. They felt that LLMC might  well end up undermining its own site, especially now, when the majority of titles mounted on LLMC-Digital are federal agency decision series, and where its next big target category is state documents. The Board established a policy of denying all such requests, at least for now, and given the current makeup of the on-line publishing industry.

— Enhancing our site’s interface: Given finite resources, our partners at the Univ. of Michigan have asked that we prioritize our requests for enhancements to the LLMC-Digital interface. Hoping to involve our customer base in identifying desirable enhancements and establishing priorities, the Directors decided to set up an  LLMC-Digital Interface Task Force, to which they will recruit members of their reference staffs, the people presumably most familiar with the best practices on other on-line services. Dir. Roger Jacobs of Notre Dame Law Library offered to get the task force off the ground by recruiting one of his own reference people to assume a lead role in this effort. Other directors will ask interested staff from their shops to work with the Notre Dame nominee. The Task Force will have an indefinite tenure, with the hope that it can organize itself and begin to provide input in the near future

Endnotes:
1.) LLMC 2004/2005 governing structure:
Final year of a person’s term follows the name

 Board of Directors
Richard Amelung Hd.T.S., St.Louis U.L.L. (06)
Georgia Clark L.L. Dir. (Rep. Wayne St.U.)
Jerry Dupont (LLMC Executive Dir., ex officio)
Judith Gaskell Dir. U.S.Sup.Ct.L.  (04)
Stuart Ho (Rep. U.Hawaii)
Roger Jacobs Dir., Notre Dame U.L.L. (05)
Margaret Leary Dir., U.Mich. L.L. (07)
Ann Rae Dir. U.Toronto L.L. (07)
Carol Roehrenbeck Rutgers-Newark U.L.L.  (08)  
Maryruth Storer Dir., Orange County L.L. (05)
Jules Winterton Dir., In.Advan.LegalSt.L.L. (06)

Advisory Council
Michael Beaird Dir., U.Arkansas-LR L.L. (07)
Carol Billings Dir., L.L. of Louisiana (07)
Bob Buckwalter Asso. Dir. Harvard U.L.L. (05)
Anne Crocker Dir., U.New Brunswick.L.L.  (07)
John Davis Dir. York U.L.L. (06)
Joel Fishman Libn. Allegheney Cnty.L.L.(06)
Bruce Johnson Dir. Ohio St.U.L.L. (06)
Blair Kauffman Dir., Yale U.L.L. (07)
Elizabeth Mckenzie Suffolk U.L.L.  (07)  
James Mumm Libn. Marquette U.L.L. (06)
Rita Parham Libn. La.St. U.L.L. (06)
John Pedini Libn., Social L.L. (05)
Mary Persyn Dir. Valparaiso U.L.L. (06)
Kathy Price Dir. N.Y.U.L.L. (05)
Tom Reynolds Asso. Dir. Ret. UC,Berk. L.L. (05)
Chris Simoni Dir. Northwestern U.L.L. (06)
Regina Smith Jenkins Memorial L.L.  (07)
Mark Strattner Sen.Col.Dev.Sp., L.C.L.L.. (05)

 2.) In keeping with a long and cherished tradition, the Boston Participating Libraries Meeting was brisk and brief; although, at 35 minutes, it was one of our longer ones.
3.) New LLMC-Digital Subscription Rates

Category A = $6,380
Major U.S. non-academic research libraries (holdings over 250K vols.)
Mega-law-firms (over 750 lawyers)

Category B = $4,310
Non-U.S. law schools
Large non-academic law libraries (120–250K vols.),
Large US State appellate court systems  
Very-large-law-firms (300 to 750 lawyers)

Category C = $2,850
Non-law-school-university lib. systems (U.S.)       
Large-sized St./Ct./Cnty. law libraries (80 to 120K vols.)
Mid-sized  US State appellate court systems       
Large-law-firms (150 to 300 lawyers)

Category D = $1,910
Non-law-school-college or university library systems (non-U.S.)
Mid-sized St./Ct./Cnty. law libraries (40 to 80K vols.)
Small  US State appellate court systems  
Mid-sized-law-firms (75 to 150 lawyers)   
Major public libraries (over 1-millon vols.)

Category E = $1,300
Small St./Ct./Cnty. law libraries (below 40K vols.)           
Smaller-law-firms (10 to 75 lawyers)         
Smaller public libraries (under 1-million vols.)      
Larger corporate & non-profit org. law libraries (10 lawyers or more)   

Category F = $860
Small St./Ct./Cnty. law libraries (under 10K vols.)
Small & solo-law-firms (under 10 lawyers)
Smaller corporate & non-profit org. law libraries (under 10 lawyers)

End of Newsletter # 9