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During the process of identifying a Brazilian university library with the potential to join the Partners Program, the Serviço de Biblioteca e Documentação, Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo (FFLCH Library) became one of two libraries under consideration. Once the Project Chair determined there would be sufficient funding to support two Brazilian partner libraries, FFLCH remained in the picture. My correspondence originally began with Adriana Cybele Ferreira as the library's technical director. In spring 2002 when I began scheduling a visit to campus, I learned that Ms. Ferreira had received a promotion within the USP library system and Márcia Elisa Garcia de Grandi was the new director with whom I would be making arrangements. Agreement: The conditions of the agreement were favorable to Ms. Grandi but, as in the case with UFRGS, the agreement would also have to pass through the FFCLH administration for final approval. It was not necessary to modify the text of the agreement but the approval process took longer than my time on the USP campus. The agreement is still under review in São Paulo but when the signed copies are returned by mail to me, I will forward them to Duane Webster for signature. Journal Selection: The FFLCH Library initially sent me a list of over 200 Brazilian journal titles that it receives. During Spring 2002 via electronic mail, Ms. Grandi expressed a preference for determining how this new workflow might affect her operations before committing to the number of titles the library would be able to input into LAPTOC. Another issue that came up was the non-Brazilian, non-Latin American scope of many titles on the list. Examples of these were journals covering European literature, Asian studies, titles dedicated to one European philosopher. The question arose whether or not this type of journal had value in LAPTOC. It might be the only venue for their bibliographic listing, though someone seeking articles about German literature or Hegelian philosophy might understandably not think to consult a Latin American database for these topics. I queried the US Project members via their discussion list, and most responded with a preference for maintaining LAPTOC's coverage of journals to those that deal with Latin American topics. In that respect, I followed the criteria for journal selection that had been developed. |
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Though Ms. Grandi had selected a couple of the non-Latin American journals for inclusion by the time I arrived on campus, she was agreeable to discussions as to why this type of journal should not be included in LAPTOC. By the end of my site visit we selected twenty-two titles for the FFLCH Library's assignment. They cover the disciplines of social sciences, geography, women's studies, humanities and culture, literature, religion, and economics. Most are published in the state of São Paulo, and are a combination of both research journals and commercial titles. The FFLCH Library is amenable to adding more titles to its list in the future.
Training/Inputting: Ms. Grandi will serve as the FFLCH Library's Project Coordinator. She assigned responsibility for inputting assigned titles to one of her librarians, Washington de Santana. Though I showed Ms. Grandi what takes place in the inputting workflow, I primarily spent time training Mr. Santana and then reviewed his work throughout the week. He had little difficulty understanding the inputting guidelines and got off to a good start on producing many records for LAPTOC. At the end of the week, I demonstrated LAPTOC and talked about the Project to the rest of the FFCLH Library staff.
At the request of the Project Chair, I came up with an estimate of how many TOCs the library would be likely to add by the end of the grant. I used the USP online catalog to do a rough count of the holdings of their list of journals and came up with a possible 285 TOCs. That may not be an accurate figure since the way some holdings were listed made it unclear if the title was actually comprised of single volumes (vols. 1-5), or if the numbering included single issues (vol. 1, nos. 1-3 through vol. 5, no. 1-3, for example). The latter is probably true for some of them so that it is possible they will reach their maximum of 500 TOCs.
Computer Equipment/OCLC ILL Subsystem/Brochures: Since the FFLCH Library could not directly acquire the computer equipment specified in the grant, Ms. Grandi needed to explore how we could make the purchase. She identified a local vendor for the equipment. The same situation arose as happened in Porto Alegre when we learned that having my ARL liaison make the purchase with her credit card for delivery to the library would be regarded as an export purchase. In July 2002 after my return to the United States, Ms. Grandi and the vendor realized that the best way for ARL to directly pay for the equipment would be to do an electronic funds transfer to the vendor's personal account. It appears that FFLCH will have the equipment soon. I also learned in July that the copy of Ariel version 3.1 designated for the FFLCH Library was not delivered owing to Federal Express' difficulty in deciphering the USP address system on campus. I have contacted an Ariel associate to resolve this problem.
Though the whole USP library system is an OCLC member, it does not currently use the OCLC ILL Subsystem. The FFLCH Library uses Comut, the national bibliographic exchange system in Brazil for document delivery of articles to research libraries. I explained to Ms. Grandi that I needed to confer with the ARL consultant hired to recommend interlibrary loan/document delivery practices before I could determine if the FFLCH Library might be able to adapt Comut as a document delivery mechanism for LAPTOC articles or would need to make arrangements to use the OCLC ILL Subsystem. She understands this and will wait to hear more about this development.
I turned over a small batch of the new Project brochures in Portuguese to Ms. Grandi as well as a master copy to be used in the future for duplicating more. She agreed these will be useful for campus publicity.
Conclusion: The FFLCH Library at USP has demonstrated that it will be a capable partner in the Project and will
benefit
from inputting articles into LAPTOC. What I have not yet pointed out is that the library is one of many on the USP
campus whose only centralized structure has to do with maintaining the Daedelus online catalog and other technical
processing. Each library on campus reports administratively to its particular faculty, department, or institute. While
FFLCH has one of the larger libraries on campus, its collection does not necessarily overlap with other collections.
For example, the library of the Escola de Comunicação e Artes (School of Communication and Arts) holds journals
covering its programs in art, library science, journalism, music, theater, communication and broadcasting, and public
relations and tourism that FFLCH does not receive. The Instituto de Estudos Brasileiro's library may have stronger
collections in journals on Brazilian history. A future partnership endeavor exploring the possibility of other USP
libraries becoming partners would probably be worthwhile to enrich Brazilian journals covered in LAPTOC.
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Appendix: FFLCH-USP Title Assignment
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Gayle Williams
ARL Coordinator of Latin American Partnerships