Mathematics Roundtable Parker Ladwig Sponsor: SIAM This year’s roundtable was different from previous years, as we did not have any speakers. As a mathematics librarian of two years, Parker led the group in discussions of topics he had questions about. Informal Survey
ladwig.1@nd.edu
Notes: Jane Kinkus, Linda Yamamoto
Parker began the session by conducting an informal survey. There were only 21 attendees at the start of the session, but by the end of roundtable, there were approximately 26.
What type of institution do you serve?
What subjects do you cover?
How long have you been a mathematics librarian?
Do you have a non-MLS advanced degree (or working on one)?
In what subject area did you receive your undergraduate degree?
Who among you has the oddest combination of responsibilities?
Laura Taddeo at Buffalo is responsible for English, urban planning, and mathematics
Public Services
The remainder of the session was organized into three broad areas: public services, technical issues, and collection development issues.
The following report was mentioned as interesting and informative reading: Anderson, N. D.; Dilcher, K; Rovnyak, J., "Mathematics research libraries at the end of the twentieth century," Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 44 (1997), no. 11, 1469--1472. Complete information on the survey may be found at http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jlr5m/survey/survey.html.
What sort of help do your patrons/users ask for?
The consensus was that since our users tend to be at the graduate level or higher, they are pretty self-sufficient, but other majors are in need of advanced mathematics help. No one at the roundtable works a lot with undergraduates. At UT-Austin, for example, the textbook collection acts as the mathematics book collection for undergraduates.
Patrons/users primarily ask for help in chasing citations, and they generally approach the reference desk only when they cannot find the citations and/or resolve the citations themselves.
The 1995 release of AMS’s MathSciNet has made things easier. Some do use the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) codes to search for articles, but they are probably used less often in the online version. The Library of Congress subject headings do not work as well as MSC codes for many mathematics subjects.
Does your library have an information literacy program for mathematics, i.e., are you teaching research skills?
UCSC gets the new mathematics graduate students for an hour at beginning of the year, then a tour of the library (the setup is similar at Stanford).
MIT shows classification codes to undergraduates in a class taught in the spring (attended mostly by third-year students).
Brooklyn University and Drexel require all departments to have an intensive, subject specific writing course for upper level undergraduates (MIT has a similar requirement).
Notre Dame is looking to develop research skills for science students.
Are non-mathematics librarians and staff hesitant to answer mathematics-related questions?
Staff spend the most time with students in those libraries with less than 5 FTE employees. Some one suggested creating a competency training programs for reference staff.
At Oregon State University, the 18 science librarians are not afraid to deal with mathematics questions, even though they can refer them to the mathematics librarian.
UCSD is developing competencies for staff; but they also face problems with anxiety about chemistry questions.
Drexel often has library school students staffing the desk. Subject specialists assign questions for these students to work on while at the desk. A mathematics question might be, "Find the author of a review, and the paper it reviewed."
Are there institutions that have a VIGRE grant from the NSF?
VIGRE stands for Grants for Vertical Integration of Research and Education in the Mathematical Sciences. Two institutions mentioned having VIGRE grants: UT Austin, Princeton/Park City Mathematics Institute.
There’s also REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates Program, NSF). But, it appears to have onerous requirements for reporting, and its focus is on undergraduates.
Technical Issues
Do departments train students on how to use TeX or LaTeX? Should mathematics librarians know TeX or LaTeX?
No--it is not that hard, and it is getting to be second nature for mathematicians to know TeX. One professor gives out a basic book on LaTeX published by SIAM: Learning LaTeX by D. Griffiths and D. Hingham. Older researchers may still use departmental staff.
Is anyone working with MathML?
MathML is still under development and has not been adopted widely yet. W3C has information at http://www.w3.org/Math/. MathML is like XML, and displays mathematical characters on the Web. The creators of MathML say it is for publishing rather than authoring. SIAM and the AMS have both donated money for MathML development, and SIAM is eagerly waiting the new version of Netscape, which is supposed to support MathML. There are companies that convert TeX to MATHML.
Is anyone planning to use the IMU standards for their Web sites?
The International Mathematical Union announced an effort to standardize mathematics Web sites, http://www.math-net.org/Math-Net_Page_Help.html. There appear to be no plans to employ these standards probably because mathematicians are too independent.
Is anyone involved in digitization efforts of older mathematical literature?
It was suggested that we should coordinate our digitization and preservation efforts, and that PAMnet should be used to share information about these efforts.
At the AMS/MAA 2002 Joint Meetings, a group of publishers and other interested parties convened in response to Ewing's white paper on digitizing past mathematics literature. The latest version, Version 12.3, March 2002, appeared at http://www.ams.org/ewing/Twenty_centuries.pdf. Also, there was a planning group meeting in July in Washington DC (with the NSF) concerning the proposal.
EMANI. The Electronic Mathematics Archive Network Initiative "to insure the preservation and dissemination of mathematical information for future generations," involves Springer and others—see http://www.springer.de/press/companynews/emani.html and http://www.sla.org/division/dpam/pam-bulletin/vol29/no2/mathematics.html. This differs from the SMETE Open Federation, which was "formed to promote the teaching and learning of science, mathematics, engineering and technology at all levels"—see, http://www.smete.org/about_smete/.
Distributed Mathematics Books Initiative. This is a collaborative effort of the University of Michigan Library's Digital Library Production Service, Cornell University and Goettingen Universitat. NSF funds were used "primarily to develop an interoperability layer with the three strong digital library systems at these institutions." Michigan will contribute digitized 19th century mathematics monographs from the UM mathematics collection. "Cornell has digitized 576 volumes of mathematical monographs and will generate OCR to enhance access to their materials. Goettingen will contribute digitized monographs, dissertations and multi-volume works of the electronic Mathematical Archive and the database Jahrbuch ueber die Fortschritte der Mathematik, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft."
Someone mentioned Gallica, but items are hard to identify
Notre Dame started a project to scan Clavius’ collected works--see http://www.sla.org/division/dpam/pam-bulletin/vol29/no2/mathematics.html.
Stanford Digital Delivery of Interlibrary Loan (dd-ILL) program will digitize a monograph if it is out of copyright and in many cases would not circulate from the library. This program has been integrated into the regular ILL workflow. However, there has not been a lot of demand for scanning sci/tech materials.
One of the worst interlibrary loan problem faced is trying to get 150-year old books of interest to people studying mathematics and mathematics education. A big underlying problem is dispersed paper collections that are decaying badly—these older materials cannot be loaned because of their condition. If these materials are in the public domain, they could be digitized.
Another problem is the mid-19th century or later books that circulate. These items are not old enough for rare books collections, but they need to be preserved. Notre Dame has a "medium rare" collection in the Mathematics Library. The difficulty is how to identify them—publication dates in the 1820’s-1850’s are still being used as an indicator. Many preservation decisions are based primarily on circulation statistics. Also, originals of translations should be preserved.
Collection Development Issues
Are there any journal cuts planned?
Some participants expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of journal cuts—many libraries have to meet a quota for canceling a certain number of titles in favor of electronic only. Although faculty have talked about the problem of high journal prices, and have been forced to consider cutting journal subscriptions, there has been no change on which editorial boards they serve or where they submit their articles for publication.
Drexel cancelled standing orders for monographic serials.
At Oregon State, new subscriptions would be online-only. Others admitted the same.
Are there problems with online journals?
Getting the online copy can be slow: someone ordered an online subscription in September 2001, and it finally got turned on in May 2002.
A major concern is archival access to online-only subscriptions. Publishers do not have answers for our archiving concerns, while librarians are coping with budget and space problems. Mary Rose Muccie from SIAM said, "We will give you the files, but we will not guarantee perpetual access; we recognize the need to move TeX to XML, but we have no funds to do so. Also, who is going to make sure files migrate over time?"
From the publisher’s perspective, Lev Malov from Turpion asked, "Would anyone subscribe only to the online copy?" "No" was the consensus. And yet last year, some said that Turpion would need to offer an online-only option or else subscriptions would be cancelled. This year (2002), Turpion offered an online-only option, but only received five subscriptions from North America. Turpion needed two FTE employees to deal with the electronic side alone, pay for digital objective identifiers and CrossRef services, add search capabilities to the Web site, etc., so it is not cheaper to produce the electronic in favor of the electronic.
Is the Big Deal a problem?
For many the answer is yes, because some titles included in the package have been cancelled in the past and because some titles are not wanted. Many librarians find the pricing structures difficult to figure out. Also, Elsevier has admitted that their electronic version is not complete, and Springer does not handle errata very well because corrections are not always linked to the original article.
