Management Council Minutes - October 17, 2007

Present: Jim Aagaard, Stu Baker, John Blosser, Elayne Bond (for Scott Devine), Paul Burley (for Roberto Sarmiento), Frank Cervone, Russ Clement, Charlotte Cubbage, Stacey Devine (for Catherine Grove) Peter Devlin, David Easterbrook, Liz Fraser (for Beth Clausen), Jeffrey Garrett, Alex Hernandez-Herrera, D. J. Hoek, Scott Krafft, Harriet Lightman, Mary Linke (for Katie Melody), Lucy Lyons, Bob Michaelson, Laurel Minott, Sarah Pritchard, Patrick Quinn, Suzette Radford, Clare Roccaforte,Denise Shorey, Andrea Stamm, Claire Stewart, Louis Takacs (for Beth Clausen). Steve DiDomenico also attended as a guest speaker.

Introductions

Sarah Pritchard welcomed Claire Stewart, Harriet Lightman, and John Blosser in their new roles. All of the big reorganization changes have now been made. Harriet introduced several visitors.

Departmental Reports—Public Services Division

Laurel announced that she was glad to have a chance to talk about what’s happening in departments, and that this report was about some of the things that Public Services had done since the beginning of the school year.

Beth Clausen (read by Laurel): Dealt with the question of how to get involved with people who come into the library, thus the idea of “greeters” was born. The greeters were very popular, talking with both students and parents. They were able to point out areas of interest in Main and Deering, and handed out keyring giveaways. Public Services people from Media, Resource Sharing/Reserve and SEL worked the work study job fair at SPAC. They recruited a number of great employees, but it was also a good PR presence as there was quite a crowd and interest in the library.

Suzette Radford: Document delivery for faculty began October 12; over 100 items have been sent so far. There has been a positive response to the elimination of daily fines and to the extended hours. Clare Roccaforte’s brochure for new faculty includes these updates. Sarah Pritchard said that she has been trying to get the remote book drop set up, and it looks as though it will be on north campus location outside of the Searle Center. The location is important since handicapped access is so difficult. People need to be able to drive up to it, without blocking traffic.

Denise Shorey: Reference staff participated in all of the orientation sessions for students and parents (e.g. International Grad Students, The Grad School, Carnival of Resources, as well as SCS faculty and student orientations). New Student Week was extremely successful; we had added another slot on Thursday afternoon and it was very well attended; departments sponsoring exhibits found many creative ways to link their exhibits to “Go Tell it on the Mountain”, this year’s OBON. The department has been engaged in collaborative activities: For the first couple of weeks of the quarter, IC students worked with Circ staff at the Lantern entrance to provide additional directional and informational assistance; it also collaborated with the Registrar’s office to provide a venue for returning students to get oriented to the new version of CAESAR. In Chicago, tutoring options have expanded with the establishment of the Math Place, along the same lines as the Writing Place, and building on its success; it is due to open at the end of October.

Claire Stewart: The iPod tour has gone very well. DMS sponsored a successful Teaching and Learning with Technology program. Media reduced their fines from $5 to $2. Circulation of media items was 30,000 last year. DMS has just passed the 1000 mark of material digitized or streamed.

Laurel invited everyone to become involved with New Student Week planning. Sarah Pritchard said that the visibility is enormously important and makes a huge difference to parents. We might consider drop-in sessions for parents next year. She emphasized that this is a priority area for her and encouraged creative ideas.

Hours Page

Steve DiDomenico presented the updated the Library’s hours page. The current page is considered problematic, and useability testing has confirmed this. The group wanted to make the page easier to read and understand, easier to update, and less prone to input errors. The data are all in a database so that changes will automatically show up. Departments can thus pull the data from the same place. The pages also work on an iPhone. A go-live date is yet to be determined.

Electronic resources discovery project

There are two main areas. Charlotte Cubbage noted that the group has already invited speakers on this topic and encourages all staff to provide input. We should also include technical as well as front-end people. She wants the staff to think locally and globally. The Library Web Services Group (LWSG) will propose several scenarios for the redesign of our website. Sarah added some background. This revision was a goal given to the LWSG. The Library’s home page is confusing and it is hard to find information; we have several overlapping tools but no one of them does everything well. It’s important to determine criteria for functionality of the site and to decide what we want people to be able to do on or from that page. The best thing is to find a way for people to be able to get to what they need; thus the LWSG is exploring answers. This is a functional goal and we may not always know when we’ve found it. It will require a shift in thinking about what’s necessary. We do not need to do it all in-house. We may want to have the page professionally designed. This project could go on for a year.

University Librarian’s report

Concerning construction in the Library, there are regular meetings with Facilities Management about the “Life Safety” series of projects. They are building an outer enclosure to allow an elevator to go to the plaza. It will be computer controlled to ensure that it stops in the Lantern. Pathways and lighting are being constructed behind the Periodicals room, and an entire new exit will be put on the south (glass wall) side of the 1st floor main corridor, as the building does not meet current codes for fire and ADA access. Many changes will be carried out in the towers as well. Questions about this should be sent to John Blosser or Peter Devlin. The vehicle entrance gate by Norris now has a time-delay mechanism, which was found to be a better compromise for access.

We have many searches going on right now: Head of GGIDS, Head of Special collections, and the Scholarly Communications librarian. Other positions, including within Library IT, will probably be scheduled later. The new ALS head will have to determine what’s needed to fill Leslie Bjorncrantz’s line.

Sarah spoke about the successful grant from the Mellon Foundation to improve the Kirtas scanner workflow, markup, and searchability. Items will be marked up so that they can be read electronically, and the digitized titles will be included in NuCat. We will stop generating paper replacements. We currently have 500 files that need to go to the “digital laundry.”

Sarah attended an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) meeting last week. The main topic was scholarly communications. An additional topic was university publishing.

Sarah and Harriet Lightman attended a program that focused on library services to graduate students. Behaviors of faculty and graduate students were discussed in some detail. What they learned fits well into the strategic plan. We are looking at space as a goal to meet their needs.

Sarah volunteered NUL for another ARL project that picks up on the issues related to the communications audit mentioned in our Program review document: ARL’s Organizational Climate and Diversity Assessment tool. ARL will open this to the second round of participants; it is especially interested in institutions that have already done LibQual. The focus is on internal staff workplace issues including diversity and communication.

The Board of Governors meeting is next week and Sarah is working on four projects. 1) The Library’s strategic plan will still be in draft form. She reminded us that the Board of Governors is primarily a donor group, but one that also offers advice on general library directions, so our report needs to be of the kind that will help them make informed decisions. 2) Sarah is assisting the Board officers in writing their annual letter to President Bienen and Provost Linzer reporting on the Library’s collections and campus initiatives. 3) Sarah is going to make a presentation to the Board of Governers focusing on “a day in the life” of the library. The report and accompanying photos may be on SharePoint, and could also be put on the website.4) The 75th anniversary of Deering begins next year. A book will be published next spring. Alex Hernandez-Herrera is working on securing outside funding for the event. There will be a reenactment of the opening the Deering Library.

Sarah will attend a CIC Directors meeting in two weeks. They will continue to discuss the shared digital repository, its governance and location, and the management of the Google project.

Sarah updated the group on the Google project, which was the main topic of discussion at CIC Directors meeting. Google is getting more technical information from everyone. Sarah emphasized that information shared with us MUST be kept internal and confidential. Even the number of volumes to be sent at a time must not be shared externally.

Concerning Qatar, the contract has not yet been signed. There will be 40 students (20 freshmen in each program) for the first year, with an additional 40 each year; thus our total support once the new campus is in full operations will probably be limited to no more than 200 students. NU will probably have to share space with Texas A&M for a while until facilities are ready.

Sarah thanked the visibility of library staff who are out there and active on the campus. She cited residential college fellows as an example.

We are moving forward with hiring a space planning consultant. Facilities Management wrote a document that Lori Arp and Sarah have revised. Sarah is waiting to hear from Ron Nayler now. Space planning will tie into the strategic plan.

Sarah is working on the budget and space capital requests for FY09. They will be wrapped in the strategic planning envelope. For space, they are SEL, Schaffner, off-site storage, and Deering. There is a cluster of automation initiatives such as ILLIAD, electronic reserves, web content management software etc. For collections, we need to build support Middle-Eastern studies. Sarah does not see the opportunity to redefine any positions, so she will need support for their collections and staff.

The Deans Council will meet on Friday – the first meeting with Dan Linzer as Provost. There is an external search for the Dean of Weinberg and also for the Vice President for Research.

Q&A
The Plaza: some new benches have already been put on the south side of the lantern; but the original design for the renovated main plaza turned out to be too expensive, so other solutions are being considered.

Re equipment requests, Frank Cervone said that computer requests have gone through, and they are trying to move the cycle up before the fiscal year changes. They are now working on recommended upgrades for the next year. New software allows them to get better reports on aspects of computers, such as which printers should be replaced, etc. Other non-computer equipment requests are in process. There has been some special funding for the transition of the art library.

Other business
Laurel announced that the question of noise zoning will be on the next MC agenda.