San Joaquin Valley Library System

Reference Committee Meeting
April 4, 2001


Members Present:  Natasha Kahn, SJVIS; Mike Drake, SJVIS; Marie 
Stanley, Fresno County; Van Quine, Tulare County; Stan Matli, Madera 
County; Nila Stearns, Kern County; Kay Anthony, Coalinga; Janet 
Harader, Kings County.

Members Absent:  Porterville, Tulare City, & Mariposa

The meeting was called to order by chair Marie Stanley.  

1. Newsbank Presentation.  Karen Weinstein, a sales representative 
for Newsbank, Inc., gave a presentation in the Tulare County computer 
lab on the merits of their product for full-text newspaper articles.
Some of the pluses include being able to access your home-town 
newspaper on-line (if available) by keyword searching as well as other 
national newspapers,  availability of several packages to choose from, 
and the inclusion of some obituary material.  How much of the 
information from the original obituary is included is dependent on 
what the newspaper decides to supply.  Past issues of newspapers are 
included.  The number of years is dependent on the newspaper.  Minuses
include no system-wide availability or discounts; however, there are 
some jurisdiction discounts available.  They can bill the system, but 
the cost is determined for each individual library jurisdiction that 
subscribes.  You are required to purchase your local newspaper to 
receive the package you choose.  This can be very costly (e.g. Tulare 
County’s cost for the Visalia Times-Delta would be $11,000/year plus 
$4,000 for the database package).  None of the Bee (McClatchy) 
products are available right now, although they have promised a number 
of times that they would soon have them online.  

       It was decided to take the information back to our individual 
jurisdictions and re-visit the issue at our June meeting.

2. Minutes.  The Reference Committee minutes need to be sent to Elida 
Mendoza at Fresno County for the Administrative Council.

The minutes of February 7 were approved as corrected.
    
3. Re-evaluation Cycle for Existing Online Subscriptions.  Infotrac & 
ReferenceUSA are already in the budget for 2001-2002.  The Infotrac 
subscription expires the end of September & Reference USA the end of 
November.

Infotrac seems to be working well for most jurisdictions.  In June, 
Reference Committee members may bring recommendations of vendors they 
would like to invite, or if we are satisfied with Infotrac we can 
choose to keep our subscription as is.  Heartland of California may 
be looking at subscriptions also.  There is always the possibility of 
waiting to see which ones they will be testing.

Reference USA is the product more libraries were dissatisfied with due 
to its slow speed and downloading problems.  The committee decided to 
see if there are any other products that we can look at.  SJVIS (Mike 
& Natasha) will find out what other large library systems have and 
what vendors we might like to invite for a demonstration.

4. Consideration of New Online Subscriptions.

Learning Express.  Kings County brought this product to the 
committee’s attention.  Kern had this product at one time and did 
not find it to be broad enough in scope.  There was also the problem 
of not enough on-line time to complete the exams, as most libraries 
restrict usage of the computers to one hour per day.  No one was 
interested in a system-wide trial.

Informe.  Stan Matli asked if this is a worthwhile product to have.  
Fresno County has it; however, no statistics are available as to its 
usage by the public.

Grolier.  There was no system-wide interest shown at this time.

Novelist.  This is a Reader’s Advisor type of product and is used more 
by librarians than the general public.

Biographical & Genealogical Index.  SJVIS has this and is able to 
answer many questions with it.  Many of the books indexed are in our 
system.  Some committee members were interested in a biographical 
database.  SJVIS staff can bring possible database selection to the 
attention of the committee.

EBSCO for Children.  It has World Book as well as articles.  Fresno 
purchased it with the home user in mind.

BIP.  No one showed interest in having a trial of this product.

5. Heartland of California.

A lease contract is being negotiated with the Tulare County Library 
for office space.  Plans are to contract for reference, reference 
training, and telecommunications.  They will contract delivery service 
between all libraries in this region.  A van will be bought, and 
deliveries will be made two times per week.  There are 46 
jurisdictions, composed of 140-150 libraries involved this fiscal 
year.  The Heartland received $361,000 for four months of operation 
this year but will only receive $460,000 for twelve months next year.  
They will be hiring an administrator for the Heartland region for a 
salary of $46,000.  The concern is that California will want to have 
libraries join in sharing resources, but will they be willing to 
provide enough funding for this venture?

Members shared reference resources.

The meeting was adjourned.

Respectfully submitted,



Janet Harader, Secretary
Reference Committee