Management Council Minutes - August 17, 2005

Facilitators: Russell Maylone; Denise Shorey
Recorders: Beth Clausen; Russ Clement

Present: Jim Aagaard, Lori Arp, Stu Baker, David Bishop Leslie Bjorncrantz, John Blosser, Julie Borden, Frank Cervone, Beth Clausen, Charlotte Cubbage, Peter Devlin, Rochelle Elstein, Catherine Feeney (for Radford), Jeffrey Garrett, Kay Geary (for Sarmiento), Esmeralda Kale (for Easterbrook), Harriet Lightman, Tom Mann, Steve Marek, Russell Maylone, Katie Melody, Bob Michaelson, Janet Olson (for Quinn), Rebecca Routh, Denise
Shorey, Barbara Smolow, Andrea Stamm, Patti Strait

1.Announcements and Acknowledgements
Harriet Lightman provided the following updates on the WCAS/University Library annual training day, scheduled for September 19:

1. The name of the event has been changed to Electronic Resources Forum.
2. At the present time, between 18 and 19 training sessions will be offered, many for the first time. Instructors include faculty from Art History, Art Theory & Practice, Economics, English, German, History, Psychology, Religion, and Theatre; graduate students from Anthropology, Economics, and History; 14 librarians; and representatives from Academic Technologies. The final list of subject sessions will be available later this week/early next week.
3. The noontime Faculty Forum will feature presentations from members of the departments of Anthropology, Art History, English, Linguistics, and Sociology.
4. Continental breakfast, morning and afternoon subject sessions, and the closing reception will all be held in the Library. The Faculty Forum and lunch will be held in Hardin Hall.
5. Approximately 140 students will participate in this year's event. These students are incoming graduate students in humanities and social science disciplines, in WCAS.

Please contact Harriet (h-lightman@northwestern.edu) or Jeeyuhn Kang (jyo806@northwestern.edu) with any questions or concerns.

2. Minutes from the July 6th and 20th meetings were accepted.

3. Administrative Report – Frank Cervone distributed the following via email the previous day, and members of Management Council were given the opportunity during this meeting to ask for any needed clarification.

Meeting of July 11, 2005
Katie reviewed the Library's FY06 allocated budget. Overall, there is a 3.37% increase compared to FY05. In addition to standard increases in the various budget categories, we received a special allocation to support nanotechnology collections. The central administration also made some adjustments to the Library's budget based on changes in pricing for telecommunications and other NUIT services.

Frank mentioned an issue related to the conflict of interest statement - some people had received incorrect instructions because they were sent the wrong e-mail. Eventually, the correct e-mail was sent to supervisors. The group also discussed issues related to Question 6 and reiterated the position that staff must answer “Yes” if they are using the resources of Northwestern to support activities in professional organizations. An answer of “yes” is not inherently negative.

The group discussed the program review reports to ensure that the meaning of each recommendation was clear. For those that were not, questions were sent back to the program review office for clarification.

Jeff and Laurel briefly discussed issues related to the circulation of media.

David discussed his talks with IT to restore access for all university staff to the computing facilities within the Library. The former policy, not restricting access, has been put back into place.

Meeting of July 18, 2005
Peter discussed the overall merit rating report for 2004.

David updated the group on some issues related to planning for the plaza resurfacing.

The group talked about the program review document and specifically what we can and cannot do with the resulting reports. We will attempt to provide as broad access as possible given the constraints imposed by the program review office.

Frank updated the group on issues related to the Voyager upgrade.

Roxanne lead a discussion of the ERMS (Electronic Resource Management System) task group report. We discussed the key components of the recommendation, the software products reviewed, and interim actions we can take until a system is procured. Most importantly, the group discussed what we need to do and think about in order to move forward on this project.

Meeting of July 25, 2005
Peter came to the meeting to discuss issues that arose during the performance excellence training sessions. The group discussed the need for department heads and supervisors to begin implementing the system by developing goals with each staff members. The group also discussed how the new system will shift the time-line for evaluation of exempt staff members to the “regular” staff schedule as it is maintained in the rest of the University. Further discussion revolved around issues related to the perception of non-exempt staff that their contributions are not acknowledged or valued by the organization.

The program review office will be sending notices to everyone who participated in the program review process. These will let staff know that they can now review the program review reports, but the reports cannot be copied or be removed from the administrative offices. This is a requirement of the program review office, not the Library.

Frank proposed a plan for computer equipment purchases and reallocation. Once the plan is finalized, notices will go out to staff members who are getting upgrades in the next few months. Plans for next year’s upgrades are already in the works. The plan also includes reallocation upgrades for all remaining public workstations that have less than a 500Mhz processor.

The calendar for travel requests was outlined and fine tuned and the administrative calendar was reviewed and tweaked to provide more time for processes that we know are going to take longer than we typically expect them to.

Meeting of August 1, 2005
Peter came to the meeting to follow up on the feedback he had received from the various “performance excellence” training sessions. It was clear, based on this feedback, that there are several issues that need to be addressed/resolved. The majority of the meeting was spent discussing these various issues and the various possibilities for getting input. The group agreed that a follow-up meeting to the “performance excellence” would be useful for staff to ask questions that were not addressed at the original meetings.

Roxanne updated the group on the transition plan for the Preservation department while the search for a new department head is on-going.

Jeff and Frank discussed the prior discussion of reformulating the Digital Library Committee in light of the various changes to our approach to digital library projects in the last few months. These changes are mainly related to the change in the charge of the group, which is to move more in the direction of digital collection development, rather than digital project oversight. If that is the case, the composition of the group should be changed to reflect the new charge. In general, the DLC itself was supportive of this move although there were some concerns and those were discussed by the Admin Committee.

Meeting of August 8, 2005 – no meeting

Meeting of August 15, 2005
Jeff briefly discussed a proposal being forwarded to the CIC Library Director’s group that is related to Martin Muller’s Virtual Modernization Tool for Early and Middle English Texts.

The group discussed issues brought forward from various staff members related to the recent bomb scare crank calls. An e-mail will be sent to libstaff explaining the circumstances of both incidents.

The group briefly discussed how to work through the recommendations of the program review document. We concluded that it would best to start with the recommendations that directly related to the University Library and proceed through those before tackling the inter-library recommendations.

On the recommendation of Roxanne and Frank, the group agreed to discharge the ERMS Committee (Electronic Resource Management Committee) and thank it for its work. In the fall, a new committee will be formed to move forward with the recommendations of the committee, including the launch of an investigation into the two ERMS products recommended by the committee.

The group began a discussion of issues related to the “performance excellence” evaluation process and how to address certain issues that are still ambiguous.

Frank brought up the issue of how we reinvigorate the PC liaison group. Work on this issue had been on hold until program review was complete. Now that program review is over, we need to revisit the issue and determine what we want the program to be in the future. Frank will start investigating this issue.

4. Program Review
The discussion started at the previous meeting about the recommendations from the recently completed Program Review was continued.

On September 8, David Bishop will meet with the President, the Provost, and other University administrators to discuss these recommendations. An action plan will be developed from that meeting as will measures to ensure compliance with the plan. David plans to meet with Larry Dumas before that meeting to discuss some strategies.

The group went through each of the recommendations, starting with those directed at NUL. Some recommendations were analyzed for exactly what they meant, and for what issues they meant to address. It was noted that a number of the recommendations from various parts of the document involved creating groups or committees. There was agreement that these recommendations could be bundled and considered in relation to the first recommendation of “Management and Internal Communication” that involves a review of internal Library communication practices. It is expected that this effort will begin in the fall quarter.
There has been significant progress on many of the recommendations from this document. Examples include the work on the library plaza, the replacing of the carpeting in the towers, and the pilot project involving the circulation of DVD and videotapes.

4.NUL Website Survey
Due to time, Frank Cervone will lead this discussion at the next Management Council Meeting.

5. New Business – None