Jane Kinkus and Barbara Hamilton
jkinkus@purdue.edu and hamilton@idaccr.org

Sponsor: IEEE
Notes: Cynthia Holt and Michael Knee

The 2003 Computer Science Roundtable proved to be a lively and informative exchange of ideas among CS information professionals. The CS Roundtable, which was sponsored by IEEE, was well attended by academic, corporate, and governmental librarians as well as vendor representatives. Because many of the respondents to this year's electronic "Call for Topics" expressed a desire for an open discussion format rather than formal speakers or presentations, moderators Barbara Hamilton and Jane Kinkus presented a slate of topics for group discussion during the 90-minute session. After introductions by each of the attendees, discussion commenced on the topics which had been established before the conference.

The first scheduled topic was CS collection development issues, especially when you're on a budget, which was clarified by the original sender as "CS collection development issues pertaining to subject faculty who are not responsive or not cooperative." Colleagues stated that it is important to meet with faculty in their offices to find out what their teaching and research interests are. It is also important to meet with the department chair periodically. While most agreed that the librarian-department relationship usually depends on the department's liaison, this responsibility often falls to the newest department member, who is usually preoccupied with tenure activities.

The second scheduled topic concerned the use of electronic book services such as Safari or Books24x7. Many attendees reported that their institutions use at least one such service, usually as a supplement to the print collection, not as a replacement, because several institutions report that access to electronic books has not prompted a decrease in the circulation of print computer books. One academic librarian reported that an electronic book has even been used as a course textbook. Members discussed the pros and cons of various e-book vendors.

Regarding the use of technical reports Web sites, several attendees reported using CiteSeer (formerly Research Index), a freely available scientific digital library system that implements Autonomous Citation Indexing. However, it was pointed out that CiteSeer is no longer crawling the Web for new things. The University of Maryland's Virtual Technical Reports Center (http://www.lib.umd.edu/ENGIN/TechReports/Virtual-TechReports.html) and Stanford University's "Guide to Technical Reports" (http://library.stanford.edu/depts/mathcs/mathcscoll/techreports.html) were recommended as good places to start searching for technical reports.

One participant's concern was how to promote print journals to high tech patrons. One comment was that many CS faculty have their own print collections in their offices, and therefore they don't feel a need to come to the library. However, some CS people are not confident of the current state of digital archives, and rely on the library to maintain print archives of important resources.

Despite the lively discussion on each topic, there was enough time to discuss a few extra topics:

• Several new journals have been sighted, including ACM's Queue, and IEEE's Neurobiosciences and Security and Privacy Magazine.
• It was mentioned that the ACM's Digital Library will stop bundling print and online as of January 2004. There were some concerns about the quality of some of the scanned papers in the ACM Digital Library; the ACM is in the process of upgrading images, especially of older, poorer quality ones.
• Several people had questions about ACM's Computing Reviews. The print version has suffered from a bad reputation, which the online version has inherited. However, staff at Computing Reviews have been reviewing and adding to the list of journals and books that are reviewed, and are trying to improve the product by identifying the best of the CS literature for review. Book coverage is becoming more timely, and article coverage continues to improve.
• Many comments were made about Lecture Notes in Computer Science. The group expressed the need to have the number of books in this series more evenly distributed from year to year for budgeting purposes. Members discussed features of print and electronic-only access, including pricing and cataloguing issues. Springer's alerting service can help bibliographers make collection development decisions.
• There was brief discussion about publishers' compliance with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Members asked publishers to make their services as compliant as possible with standards to promote continued use by librarians and patrons.