Agriculture and Environment Interest Group

July-December 2002

Six-monthly report to the Board of Directors

Our Group currently has a membership of 124 scattered throughout Australia with a few overseas. Traffic on our e-list is still rather quiet but it has been a good forum for a couple of interesting discussions.

The Group is interested in some of the matters being discussed under the heading of the information agenda and would like to participate in discussions on the aspects of providing access to Australia's research output, and global scholarly information, In particular, we are currently concerned about access to Australian agricultural and environmental science information and the policies, funding, and future of the Australian Bibliography of Agriculture.

One member was able to attend the NPC regional meeting in Melbourne as our representative, and report to the group on that meeting. However, we feel that consultation process by ALIA with members Australia-wide was not handled effectively this year. The delegates who attended the NPC meeting in Canberra could not possibly represent the interests of the wide variety of groups within ALIA. We note in the recent report on the NPC that 'representatives of ALIA issue-based groups with interests relevant to the NPC agenda' were invited to attend but we don't [know] which groups were invited to send a delegate or how they were selected. We are concerned at the limited opportunities available to groups not represented at the NPC to discuss and to influence the development of ALIA policy and to bring issues of concern to the attention of ALIA.

Other issues that ALIA is currently working on that would seem directly relevant to members of this group are 'Favourable purchasing agreements for institutional members for products and services' and 'Model copyright licence for electronic resources for special libraries'. As we weren't invited to participate in the forum held in Canberra on 14 October, and haven't received any information about what decisions were made at the forum, our ability to participate has been very limited.

At present we are trying to organise a gathering at the Online conference in January 2003, if a suitable venue can be found. We were surprised to discover that the conference organising committee had not made any arrangements for rooms to be available for ALIA groups to gather during lunch at the conference. No doubt we were naive in assuming that rooms would be available at such an expensive venue, but we thought that such gatherings of interest groups were part of the remit of a major ALIA conference.

Although our group is not very obviously active, we have had some important discussions on our e-list, and a recent canvas of the list indicated strong support for the continuation of the group.

Group treasurer's report

Since 1 July 2002 there have been three transactions on the Group's account. One was a debit of $71.91 for costs associated with mailing the Group's newsletter, while the other two transactions were incorrectly added to our account by ALIA. These amounted to $79.07 and ALIA has assured the Group that the amounts will be credited on our next statement.

Marsha Reilly
Convenor

John Elias
Secretary/treasurer