Management Council Minutes - February 6, 2008

Present: John Blosser, Frank Cervone, Beth Clausen, Russ Clement, Charlotte Cubbage, Steve DiDomenico (for Stu Baker), David Easterbrook, Jeffery Garrett, Catherine Grove, Scott Krafft, Morris Levy (for D.J. Hoek), Harriet Lightman, Lucy Lyons, Katie Melody, Bob Michaelson, Laurel Minott, Sarah Pritchard, Patrick Quinn, Suzette Radford, Clare Roccaforte, Roberto Sarmiento, Roxanne Sellberg, Denise Shorey, Andrea Stamm, Claire Stewart, Robert Trautvetter.

Facilitators: Lucy Lyons, Katie Melody
Recorders: John Blosser, Bob Trautvetter

1. Announcements and Introductions

Roxanne Sellberg introduced Steve DiDomenico, attending for Stu Baker, and Morris Levy, attending for D.J. Hoek.

Bob Trautvetter made the following announcement:

I have distributed to the Management Counsel list an updated version of the PC Liaisons for each department. We are requesting that each department head take a look at the list and let us know of any changes to who is serving in this capacity. LITSS is looking to reactivate the PC Liaisons in the Library to assist us in testing Office 2007 prior to a rollout to staff. Any changes can be sent to myself or Vince McCoy.

As a follow up to Denise Shorey’s departmental report at Management Counsel back in December, LITSS would like to let public services departments know that we can provide statistics on both computer and printer usage for your areas. This data is collected by virtue of our software metering application. We can’t tell you how many students sat at all your desks, but we can provide, if requested some useful data.

Some of the stats we can tell you how many users used your workstations, for how long, at what times, and what applications they ran. Printing statistics can tell you how many print jobs, how many pages, peak times of printing, number of users printing.

John Blosser made the following announcement:

Lucy Lyons has been selected for the ALCTS (Associations for Library Collections & Technical Services) Blackwell’s Scholarship Award. The award honors the author of the year’s outstanding monograph or article in the field of acquisitions, collection development, and related areas of resources development. Lucy’s article, “The Dilemma for Academic Librarians with Collection Development Responsibilities: A Comparison of the Value of Attending Library Conferences versus Academic Conferences” was published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship, Here is the link to the article:Journal of Academic Librarianship v. 33, issue 2, March 2007, pp. 180-189.

The award is a $2,000.00 scholarship donated by Blackwell to the U.S. or Canadian library school of Lucy’s choice. Lucy has chosen her alma mater, the Pratt Institute. Lucy thanks Jeff Garrett for approving the research time, and Harriet Lightman for reading the manuscript for editorial review. Congratulations, Lucy!

Stu Baker made the following announcement:

It brings me great pleasure to announce that Bill Parod will be joining our staff on March 3rd as a repository developer. Bill along with Steve DiDomenico will be the chief developers of our Digital Repository.

Bill has been with Northwestern since 1988 and is currently an Architect for Scholarly Technologies with Academic Technologies. Bill is certainly no stranger to our library. He was a key collaborator on the library's SGML initiatives, including the Electronic Text collections and the online Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Bill has worked on our earliest digital library projects including, Siege of Paris, WWII Posters and Video Encyclopedia of the 20th Century. More recently he has worked on projects such as Vesalius' Fabrica, DLF Aquifer, Winterton Collection, and Arabic Manuscripts from West Africa. Bill was part of the NOTIS replacement task force and was also a member of the Digital Library Committee. In addition to his work at Northwestern, Bill has worked on many high-profile projects with research libraries, museums, and archives (e.g., Chicago History Museum, ArtStor, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Digital Library Federation). Bill has B.A from Southern Illinois University in Mathematics and M.S. from Northwestern University in Computer Studies in Music.

Bill is highly respected in the developer, library and humanities communities. He has a national reputation as a leader and innovator within the FEDORA development community. He was on the initial FEDORA steering committee convened by Cornell and the University of Virginia. Bill has been an integral part of the Library's repository planning, serving on several working groups and committees.

We are excited about having Bill as part of our team. Please join me in congratulating Bill and welcoming him to our staff.

Beth Clausen made the following announcements:

March 1st Geffrey Swindells will join the Library as the new head of Government and Geographic Info and Data Services. March first will also mark a further step toward the realization of the library’s reorganization when the Mitchell Multimedia Center officially joins the department of Resource Sharing and Reserve Collections. We have already been working to make the transition smooth. Departmental staff overall seem excited by the opportunities this brings to the department in terms of cross-unit cooperation and training and working toward common service goals. Stay tuned….I think there will be many exciting service initiatives emerging from this department in the next year or two.

As a step in exploring the trend of “Gaming in Libraries” and supporting student study breaks and to strengthen library as place we have put some traditional/analog/legacy games in Core/Reserve that are available for two-hour in-library use. To see what games there are search the Course Reserve tab in NuCat and choose either Fun in the Library as Instructor or Games on Reserve as Department. We will publicize this a bit with fliers, etc. and probably a yet to be planned mini kick off.

Denise Shorey made the following announcement:

The Reference Department has mounted an exhibit of reference resources on elections. The exhibit includes a shelf of print resources related to elections, a bulletin board display, and a bibliography. This is part of a regular series of topical exhibits that the department has created in the last year. Others included a quarter-long exhibit on James Baldwin's "Go Tell it on the Mountain", as well as, most recently, an exhibit of "staff picks": reference staff's favorite reference resources. We have found that the printed bibliographies are very popular among visitors.

2. Approval of minutes

The minutes from the December 19th, 2007 meeting, distributed on January 9, 2008 were approved.

3. Administrative committee report

The minutes from the January 7, January 21, and January 28 Administrative Committee meetings had been distributed by Roxanne Sellberg. There was one question regarding the security cameras at the lantern entry that were recommended by Officer Stein as reported in the January 7 minutes. Laurel Minott suggested the topic be a future agenda item for Management Council.

John Blosser made the following clarification of the impact of removing the Serials Solutions records from the ER as reported in the minutes of January 28.

The ER has perhaps 30,000 records that were loaded from our last Serials Solutions update in 2004. Since we stopped the Serials Solutions service, these ER records have not been updated for changes to the links nor the coverage available. Some aggregator databases have dropped and added titles during the past 3 years and those changes are not reflected in the ER records.

To provide more reliable service to our users, we will remove the Serials Solutions records from the ER. This will reduce the number of online journals available through the ER from some 35,700 records to about 6,300 records. What will remain are the titles for which we have subscriptions by individual title.

Almost all of our online journals are available through the OPAC by way of our direct input and through the SFX MARCit! loads. These titles can be bookmarked in the OPAC by the persistent URL displayed in the OPAC record, or by bookmarking the title at the publisher’s site once the user clicks through to it.

There is currently a link to the A-Z title list generated through SFX that is somewhat hidden in Einstein. The direct link is http://einstein.library.northwestern.edu

4. Departmental reports

John Blosser presented a report from the ERaCA Department.

The ERaCA home page at http://staffweb.library.northwestern.edu/eraca has useful links to usage statistics, a brief "How do I...?" section, an order form you can print out and send to us, and a link to a new blog. The blog will help you stay abreast of the new online resources collected here at Northwestern University Library. Direct link is: http://neweresources.edublogs.org.

Tim Hagan created the blog with free blog software. The blog was created to be a notification system of new e-resources for staff at NUL, but may also be of interest to some faculty or students. It can provide an alert when a new resource is added, or you can visit the site from time to time. You may also use the RSS feed if you like. The resources are listed in the order of when they were added to the blog, have a short description of the title, and may have multiple subject and format categories for optimal representation on subject research guide pages. The categories used in the blog correspond to the categories established in Einstein plus one.

Only new resources are included once the access is available to users. Due to their great number, changes to resources, such as a change in provider or additions to aggregated database title lists will not be included. E-book packages and online reference works are also included.

If you would like to have automatic notices of new titles as they are added, you may quickly sign up for email alerts or RSS feeds by subscribing to the blog with your email address. The subscribe box is on the right side of the web page after the categories. You may get a lot of email during times when a lot of titles are being added. The titles are archived by month.

Rebecca Griffiths and Peter Devlin gave a brief report on how staff must now use the eDevelopment site to register for University training courses. The process is quicker than the submission of the previous paper form. An outline of the approval process for training courses was distributed.

5. Project Café – Tiffany Cleaver, Project Café Trainer

Tiffany Cleaver and Marylou Novak, both with Project Café, were guests. Tiffany explained the upcoming change in the University financial system from CUFS to the PeopleSoft product named Café (Comprehensive Access to Financials for the Enterprise). A handout of the scope, timeline, and implementation readiness approach was distributed. Some key points were discussed. On September 1, 2008, CUFS fund numbers will be retired and the Café fund numbers will be used. CUFS will remain available for reference for an as yet undetermined time. Café has new terminology to be learned as well as robust functionality. The grants module has been in operation since July 2007 with much success. The reporting tool used is Cognos and feedback attests to its dynamic capabilities. There will be transition and hands-on workshops. The hands-on 2-hour sessions (June-August 2008) are meant for those staff who will add, manage, and use financial data. There will be 1-hour general sessions for anyone who generally want to know about the new system. All were encouraged to take advantage of one or the other session types. Katie Melody is the library contact, or Local Readiness Team Lead (LRTL). Roxanne Sellberg mentioned that the hierarchy of the Café structure mimics that of the Library organization.

6. University Librarian’s report

Sarah expressed her thanks to Katie Melody for her work with the Project Café. Sarah thinks the migration to this new system for the Library will be much like migrating to a new ILS. It is a complicated process, but one with which we are somewhat familiar. Librarian evaluations need to be completed on time this year so that salaries can be sent to the Budget Office in time to be entered into Café. Evaluations are due to the Personnel Office by March 17, and the Merit Review Team report to Sarah by April 1.

Sarah expressed concern for the safety and security of staff who work at service desks alone in the later hours of a library’s operation. Department heads should schedule two people to work these desks. The first floor public service desks may have some exceptions. Department heads should look into these situations and talk with Sarah if there are budget issues.

The University has multiple video conferencing facilities which we do not use fully. Sarah encouraged committees with cross campus membership to consider using these facilities more.

The master space plan project will begin soon. Consultant interviews are in early March. The plan will take a broad look at the libraries of Northwestern University, how we can best use our spaces, will look at offsite storage needs, include in its study the currently proposed capital projects, and estimate costs for the rehabilitation of Deering Library. The architect consultants were carefully chosen to have work experience with this planning process for academic libraries. Six of eight consultants have responded.

The final strategic plan is available. A Word document was sent to Management Council in case managers would like to use snippets of it in departmental documents. A pdf version will be posted at the planning SharePoint site. The final version is much the same as the document made available in Fall 2007 with edits and wordsmithing. A matrix of how the plan and budget interact was prepared to use in budget hearings.

Regarding the budget proposal for fiscal year 2009, Sarah reported that we can expect at least the minimum 2% increase the University distributes. In addition, the proposal requests $500,000 for collections ($250K for basic collections dissemination, $50K for science journals, $100K for Middle East Studies, $75K for environmental studies, $25K for global marketing and economics); ongoing maintenance fees for several software purchases, for example, ILLiad, electronic reserves, Analyzer (reporting tool for Voyager), an ERMS (Electronic Resource Management System), and Web discovery tools; Middle East Studies librarian, Electronic Resources librarian, curatorial assistant for Special Collections. The total amount requested is fewer dollars than last year, but supports the strategic plan closely.

Sarah announced there will be an all staff meeting on March 3, 2008. One of the agenda items will be the ClimateQual survey that will open to all staff on March 17 for 3 weeks. The survey is completely confidential and is hosted at the survey site server. Individual responses are not shared with library managers, only aggregate data for categories of more than 5 people. Everyone is encouraged to participate and will have work time to do so. The survey takes about one hour to complete and must be completed in one sitting.

The 75th Deering celebration gala is scheduled for September 26, 2008. The illustrated history book will be out late April/early May. The book, largely funded by a donation, will be printed in 5,000 copies and used for donor relations here and around the country. It will also be for sale through the NU Press and Amazon. Deering will be assessed for its historical components (e.g., windows, woodwork) which will be factored into the proposed rehabilitation of the building.

7. New Business

Laurel Minott placed the discussion of security cameras in the building, particularly at the lantern entrance, on a future agenda.

8. Adjournment

The meeting was adjourned at 11:33 a.m