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July 16, 2007Management Council Meeting Minutes - June 6, 2007Facilitators: Harriet Lightman, Katie Melody Attendees: Jim Aagaard, Lori Arp, Stu Baker, Leslie Bjorncrantz, John Blosser, Beth Clausen, Russ Clement, Charlotte Cubbage, Scott Devine, David Easterbrook, Jeff Garrett, Catherine Grove, Alex Hernandez-Herrera, DJ Hoek, Harriet Lightman, Lucy Lyons, Russell Maylone, Katie Melody, Cunera Buys for Bob Michaelson, Laurel Minott, Julie Patton, Sarah Pritchard, Patrick Quinn, Suzette Radford, Clare Roccaforte, Roxanne Sellberg, Denise Shorey, Andrea Stamm, Dan Zellner for Claire Stewart
Cunera Buys was welcomed as the representative for SEL in the absence of Bob Michaelson, and Dan Zellner was welcomed as the substitute for Claire Stewart. Dan Zellner announced that the week of June 11 is Bike to Work Week. Activities will include a workshop as part of Library Enrichment Day on June 13, and a 1K to be held on June 14. Sarah Pritchard announced that the Board of Governors’ lecture on June 12 will feature Russell Maylone showcasing materials from Special Collections. Katie Melody announced the need for two new Management Council Facilitators. Facilitators serve a two-year term, and are exempt from taking Management Council minutes during their term. Interested parties should contact Katie Melody. Jeff Garrett announced that Collection Management is hosting an intern this summer from the Mellon Librarian Recruitment Program. Her name is Eush Tayco and she is a junior at Oberlin College, majoring in Greek Language and Literature. While at Northwestern, Eush will be working on a number of projects involving our Classics collection and also the planned publication on the Schulze-Greenleaf Library, currently featured in the main floor and Deering exhibit, "An Admirable Nucleus." Also planned is for her to spend time in a number of library departments related to her study and potential career interests. The CM Office will be in touch to set up these site visits, which may last about 45 minutes, or longer if both parties wish. Jeff Garrett requested that we make Ms. Tayco feel at home and “give her a great impression of the profession and of our library.” Andrea Stamm reminded the group that her Humanities workshop on the two Chicago world fairs will be repeated on Monday June 11, at 4:00. Please RSVP so that the location can be firmly decided. It will probably be moved from the Humanities Institute to the Program of African Studies. Stu Baker made the following announcements and provided the following text: We will initiate a content lockdown on the server on Tuesday June 12th. More detailed information about the lockdown will come in an another announcement to staff We are confident that all systems and protocols are in place for the June 13th deployment. Will be triangulating activity between NUIT units and DLSD staff early on the morning of the 13th and will provide staff with updates to LIBSTAFF once the switch has been made to the new server. We anticipate it will be online before 8:30 a.m. on June 13th. In general staff and patrons will not notice anything different. However, on areas of the site that require NetID 'authentication' (e.g. Virtual HelpDesk, Gartner Portal) you will now be directed to the University's Single Sign site for authenticaion (which we already do for EZproxy) instead of having an authentication window come up. The "Blog" software that we are using has also been updated and the interface may have some subtle differences for blog adminstrators. The schedules for the Voyager Upgrade and Fiscal Period Close operations have been finalized. At this point we are not sure which release of Voyager we will be upgrading to (either 6.2 or 6.5 which is not yet released). On the first day of the Voyager upgrades, Friday the 17th all Voyager staff modules will be offline. United Libraries Fiscal Period Close Voyager Upgrade Northwestern Fiscal Period Close
Elimination of Fines on “Regular Loan” Items (Suzette Radford) Sarah Pritchard had requested the Circulation Services Committee to consider eliminating daily fines on regular loan items as a way to improve public relations and decrease the amount of staff time currently needed to negotiate and explain small fines to patrons. The new policy has been approved by Library Administration and will take effect September 1, 2007. Elimination of Fines on “Regular Loan” Items The Circulation Services Coordinating Committee has agreed to eliminate daily overdue fines on regular loan items at the Northwestern University Libraries (including Law and Health Sciences; the United Libraries already has this policy in place). Daily overdue fines will continue to be in effect for Reserve, Core, Media and recalled items. The daily overdue fine rate of 10 cents has been in place for decades and is not a tremendous incentive for patrons to return their books on time. Daily fines on “regular loan” items account for approximately $26,000 per year in revenue. Doing away with fines will provide a tremendous boost to feelings of goodwill towards the library as well as reducing the staff time currently spent discussing, negotiating and collecting fines. NU Libraries will continue to send out 2 overdue notices (the 1st one will go out the day after the item is due, the 2nd one will go out 14 days later). To implement this plan, we will maintain our policy of billing patrons for items that have gone well past overdue, but will shorten the point at which we bill from 50 to 30 days. By shortening this timeframe, we are anticipating a more prompt return of our materials. Currently, a bill consists of a replacement fee and a $25.00 billing/processing fee. We are proposing that instead we charge a replacement fee and a $10.00 billing fee. If a billed book is returned within a year of the due date, all of the fees will be waived except for the $10.00 billing fee. Library records for NU faculty, staff and students will continue to be blocked automatically when there is an outstanding balance of $100.00 or more, except for Evanston borrowers who are blocked at $50.00. Borrowing privileges are automatically blocked when a recalled item becomes overdue. NU students who do not pay their library fees will continue to be reported to the Office of Student Accounts through PeopleSoft if they have an outstanding balance of at least $25.00. The new policy will be publicized through a bookmark outlining the new fine/bill structure and flyers at the circulation desks. Information will be placed in Library Briefings, and in “What’s New” on the website. The revised policy will also be posted on the Circulation website. All members of the Circulation Services Coordinating Committee have agreed to implement this new policy shortly after the beginning of the new fiscal year which begins in September. This is a good time to make a change in policy and to insure smooth operations at the beginning of the new academic year. The roster for the Circulation Services Committee appears below: Elizabeth Adamczyk (Schaffner) Facilities Update Representing the facilities upgrade group (Lori Arp, John Blosser, Peter Devlin, Dave Strain), Lori Arp reported on upcoming facilities projects for the library this summer. Although all the details, such as starting dates and contractors, have not been worked out, the following projects are planned: Repair loading dock: Begins directly after Graduation 2 ½ year project. Contractor selected by last week in July. Preliminary plans underway. Russell Maylone noted that there appear to be problems with the north side of Deering Library and also asked when the door between Deering and 3South would be repaired. Lori responded that the problems with the north side of Deering will be reported to FMO, and the door between Deering and 3South is in the schedule, as are the first floor Deering Library doors. Laurel Minott questioned whether there would be an impact on the use of the back door during upgrades, and Lori answered that the door may occasionally be closed to staff access. Denise Shorey wondered why the Plaza Café glass is in need of upgrading. It turns out the current glass is not fire proof, so it needs to be replaced. It was agreed that communication on these projects will be via email to the library staff to keep them apprised of scheduling and possible disruptions. Any questions that come up should be directed to Lori Arp or John Blosser. DIGITAL CURATION—REPORT ON THE DigCCur CONFERENCE Roxanne Sellberg summarized the highlights from the DigCCur International Symposium, which she attended in April. The symposium was one step in the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science's investigation of the need for, and content of, a proposed new graduate curriculum in what they are tentatively calling "digital curation.” The symposium was attended by a lively mix of librarians, archivists, information technologists, pundits, and library educators. It was arranged into a series of informal mingling events, presentations of papers clustered around specific topics, and plenary sessions. Each speaker in every session was asked to relate whatever they were talking about specifically to the questions, "what do digital curators do?" and "what do digital curators need to know?" After attending the symposium, Roxanne defined digital curation for herself as curation in the context of digital information resources. It encompasses all that librarians and archivists do, but places these activities in the digital environment. The point of even talking about digital curation, she said, is to draw attention to this reality: in order to do curation of digital collections in a digital environment we need a different set of skills and a different knowledge base than we need for non-digital collections. We need to solve problems that are a little different and we need to develop different partnerships than in the world of non-digital resources. Developing a workforce of people who have specialized knowledge relevant to digital curation and a work force whose members have a broad and deep appreciation of the digital curation context is a big and very worthwhile challenge. One can't imagine much of a future for libraries and archives if we don't develop that kind of work force. We all, as library specialists, need to learn as much as we can, and we need to bring people who have or can develop the skills we currently lack into our organizations. Emerging programs of education and training, like the one UNC is contemplating, could potentially help on both scores. For those interested in exploring this topic further, she recommended the symposium's web site, http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr2007/program.html. UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN’S REPORT Sarah Pritchard stated that the agreement between Google and the CIC to digitize library materials would be announced on June 6. An email was distributed to all Northwestern library staff that morning with the press release, FAQs, CIC collection highlights, and an internal key messages document. The public documents can also be found on the CIC website at http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/digitalbooks/. The Provost has provided funding for three additional staff members and some equipment for the Google project, but there are many operational details still to be worked out. Google will be making two digital copies of everything scanned, although the university-owned copies not yet in the public domain will remain on Google’s servers. Items in the public domain will be part of a CIC shared digital repository. Russell Maylone asked whether these public domain items will be searchable in Northwestern’s local system. Sarah noted that will probably not be the case, as the storage needed would not be worth the cost of storing the materials in two places. Andrea Stamm wondered what the impact on the Kirtas operation would be. Sarah responded that the Google project is a mass digitization approach, while the Kirtas operation is for those items too fragile, special, or expensive to send to Google for digitization. The Library received official notification on its budget for the new fiscal year, which includes funding to make the slide library administratively part of the Art Library. Existing slide library staff will remain in their current office locations in order to continue the same services to faculty, and a new position is being created to build a digital image library. The goal is to gradually reduce faculty reliance on physical slides as digital images become more readily available to them. The library also received a 5% increase in the collections budget, with a special emphasis on building an East Asian studies collection. In order to respond to a request from student government, funding was provided to increase library hours. The library also received additional funding to cover the increased student wages due to the minimum wage increase. Based on the budget this year, the Library will not be able to renegotiate the budget structure with NUIT, raise salary floors, or pursue capital projects (SEL, Schaffner, off-site storage). The Library will be starting a space planning study in late summer that is needed before funding will be allotted for capital projects. All these issues are still on the table, but are unable to be addressed with this year’s budget. ARL statistics are seeing some changes this year, including counting serials by subscription rather than by title. The ARL index score is based on expenditures and staffing in order to assess which libraries most resemble each other. NEW BUSINESS None.
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