by Andrew Shimp

The Math Roundtable at the Annual Conference in Chicago was organized as an open discussion among participants on issues surrounding mathematics libraries and librarianship. About 35 people attended. Open discussions at individual tables occupied the first 20 minutes. At the end of that time, the group gathered as a whole for introductions and to mention a topic of interest and continued discussion for the last 20 minute discussion segment. The participants were offered the opportunity to continue the discussion in themed groups or as a whole. They voted to continue discussion among the entire group.

Topics of interest and further discussion included:

• Mathematician use of e-books. Participants found mixed preferences: users want both e-books and print. They dig into the content with print but appreciate the searchability of online. The usability of the interface impacts the acceptance of e-books. On the other hand, one university noted that e-books were accepted by faculty, providing a comfort level with the purchase of online version in place of print.
• Getting MARC records for e-books into the catalog.
• Author fees; open access journals
• Communicating to users about not all publications being electronic or available electronically at your library.
• How necessary is it to have print journals?
• Math Department reaction to Elsevier boycott organized by Timothy Gowers.
• New Elsevier journal on astronomy and computing
• Outreach: relationships with math departments; difficulty getting into departments and connecting with undergraduates.
• Piracy: how it impacts smaller publishers.
• Budget, open access, smaller publishers; how tenure and review affects demand for resources and budgets.
• Patron-driven acquisition
• How can Mathematical Reviews play a role in research instruction? Tutorials are available for bibliographic instruction.
• Library use of on-demand services for articles. Some libraries are cutting journal subscriptions based on usage when it is less expense to obtain the article via interlibrary loan or document delivery services. The just-in-time model offers more flexibility than just-in-case subscriptions. A library instituting a document delivery service received negative feedback from faculty who perceived that the change would more severely impact maintaining subscriptions important to the math department. Pubget was mentioned related to offering different levels for buying an article.
• Librarians are becoming more divorced from users, with patrons getting articles from friends or colleagues, or going to other libraries.
• Mathematics of Planet Earth. An article about the project appeared in the January 2012 issue of Notices. Could we be involved in outreach activities?
• Joint Mathematics Meeting, January 9-12, 2013: special registration rate for librarians; opportunity to meet graduate students. Librarians would like to be involved in a session with graduate students.
• Mira Waller announced a redesign of the Project Euclid Website that includes the ability to export citations, print books on demand, and provides compatibility with mobile devices.
• PAM Chair Elect Stella Ota is seeking ideas for 2013 conference planning.
• Tony Stankus, editor of Science & Technology Libraries, is seeking papers on topics such as (1) how to acculturate and teach searching in math; (2) relative acceptance in math of e-books over paper and (3) does having a math library correlate with the ranking of the department? Some interest was expressed in gathering contributors for an article on surveying users about e-book usage.
• Beth Ayer, Web editor for AMS, noted that she does feature articles on math librarians.
• We would like to thank Beth Ayer for providing her notes of the session.