It becomes of purely historical interest, and we cannot let that happen to us. We are also planning within that access inventory survey to ask for information about consortial relationships, not just whether we have them, but for some brief descriptive information about what they are. I am prompting you because we think that as we point toward cooperative and inter-institutional relationships we need to understand better where our members stand. Stubbs' quick analysis of ILL data suggests that we need to know more about this area and also that we be able to share that, especially as we move into things like benchmarking. The access inventory will probably look like a checklist, not so much looking for numbers, but for the presence of low, moderate, or high degrees of various electronic forms of information in your institution.
Precision is one of the major challenges in statistics.
The second major initiative will be a better understanding of deployment of staff. We will undertake this after the access inventory survey, and it will be a much longer term effort, one that may take two to three years. It is nevertheless extremely important. We need more than just an understanding of the size of our professional staff, and not just by title codes. It will be more inclusive, so that we understand where we are coming from and where we are going with the use of professional staff, support staff, and student assistants.