Sunday, 25 June 2006, 10:30 A.M.-12:00 noon, Astor Crowne Plaza, Bienville Room

Michael Seadle, Chair
Tim Shipe recording

26 people were in attendance.

The meeting opened with introductions and announcements.

Gordon Anderson, editor of Reference Reviews Europe, mentioned the need for editors/reviewers, especially for non-German works. The publication could also use more abstractors. Anyone interested may contact Gordon at ganderso@umn.edu.

The first speaker was Dr. Evelinde Hutzler of the Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg, whose talk was entitled “A German Perspective on the  Use of  Electronic Journals in Digital Libraries.”

Her focus was on the Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek (EZB), an electronic journal portal for end users developed at Regensburg. Started in 1997, the EZB now has 359 European members; the Library of Congress has also joined. The EZB provides structured access to both free and licensed e-journals, with browsing capabilities by title and subject. At present, EZB includes 27,200 titles, including 11,800 free titles. 3,200 of the titles are “born digital”; the remainder exist in both print and electronic form. Access is also provided to 25,000 titles via aggregators. The EZB does not itself store any content; it is strictly an access mechanism.

Each member enters its own holdings data; EZB then generates individualized web pages which can be used as a local “digital library.”

Studies of user behavior indicates that patrons at member institutions use EZB far more than their local OPACS to gain access to e-journals. User satisfaction is high because of the user-friendly interface and the high quality of the database (a result of cooperation among the member libraries). EZB can be used with link resolvers, and has been utilized for linking in Vascoda, in bibliographic databases, and in other subject portals.

More information may be found at http://ezb.uni-regensburg.de/?lang=en.

The second speaker was Tim Shipe of the University of Iowa, who gave a brief report on the WESS tour for American academic librarians, “Leipzig, Dresden, Weimar: Exploring a Library Landscape.” The tour, which took place in March, included visits to five libraries, the Leipziger Buchmesse, the Deutscher Bibliothekartag, and a number of other cultural institutions and monuments.