University Librarian's Cabinet: Minutes of the November 22, 2005 Meeting

Present:

Boyle, Fetzer, Fultz, Gaunt, Mullins, Puniello, Sewell

Absent:

Agnew, Golden, Zapcic

Guest:

Ann Montanaro

University Librarian's Report – Gaunt

• Puniello and Gaunt attended the University Senate meeting on Friday, November 18. President McCormick did announce that they feel very positive about the bond issue for capital renovations being passed, but would not give a dollar figure. He said it would only be for academic buildings, which includes the Libraries. Gaunt sent the annex document to Vice President Furmanski last week and alerted him it was our highest priority; he said there was a generic placeholder for the Libraries. We will need to talk with the Provost in Camden and Newark about priorities on their campuses including the Libraries.
• Gaunt attended a VALE finance committee meeting on Monday on a discussion of the contract language for VALE databases related to archiving. Vendors need to have preservation and archiving strategy. We know that Elsevier has a strategy; the national library in the Netherlands is preserving their data. VALE will bring a statement to the executive committee but may want to discuss in Collection Development Council.
• The glossy annual report is at the printers; Golden, Mullins and Francoise should let Gaunt know if they are interested in a supply for their own campuses.
• Gaunt and Orin Puniello will manage the Development Office during Zapcic's maternity leave. Any donor information should be sent to Gaunt with a copy to Zapcic.
• Gaunt has been meeting with various individuals and groups on the New Brunswick director position and reorganization documents. Met with collection services and will meet with access services on November 30. Met with New Brunswick library faculty last week; told them that I am hoping to have the input by the end of November. May discuss the findings at the December 6 Cabinet meeting. A very strong working relationship across all three campuses has been recommended by both collections and access services. One of the recommendations is to have functional team heads involved in the pay for performance reviews for staff across the three campuses since their responsibility is system wide. Need to consider how that might happen and to insure staff is treated equitably. They think things are going extremely well and the staff on all the campuses is very positive. Any comments should be to Gaunt by the end of November.
• A Cabinet meeting is scheduled for December 20, which is the holiday week. Keep on the agenda for now, but we may cancel the meeting. Will decide at the December 6 meeting.
• Nancy Hendrickson asked Gaunt to remind Cabinet about the importance of signoffs for payroll. Especially during the holidays, some of the time periods are different. During this time as well as regular time periods, please make sure your supervisors are signing off on payroll and have a back up available if they are going to be out. Also remind your supervisors to check the accuracy of the time cards and make corrections as needed. The payroll office is spending a great deal of time calling supervisors to ask them to sign off or make corrections.
• Deans Council is scheduled for December 5.

Review of Goals for 2005/06 - All

• At the November 8 Cabinet meeting, it was decided that Cabinet would think further about the goals and make changes or ratifications at the November 22 meeting. The same categories as last year were kept and a few items were carried over. Tried to include some of the things that came out of the LibQUAL+ survey. The question had been asked as to whether Cabinet might consider goals for more than a year. Cabinet decided to review each goal separately and determine if they should be specific or long term; following the discussion, it was decided that Gaunt will revised the goals and send to Cabinet for one final review before sending to rul_everyone.

ARL Digital Asset Management Conference - Gaunt/Montanaro

• Gaunt, Montanaro and Bernice Ginder attended the ARL Digital Asset Management Conference in Washington, DC in October. The forum explored the strategic implications of repositioning research libraries to manage digital assets for their institutions. Donald J. Waters, Program Officer, Scholarly Communication, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, opened the meeting with a broad overview of several issues and developments surrounding digital-asset management. Three program sessions followed on institutional policies, emerging federal policies, and the state of tools available to take on the role of digital-asset management. Gaunt noted that Waters' paper was stimulating in thinking about the future and in thinking about possibilities; the Libraries need to play a leadership role. Gaunt indicated that it might be beneficial to invite Waters to come to the Libraries and make a presentation. Discussed Ann Wolpert's presentation on "Managing Digital Assets: Institutional Policy Issues." Wolpert emphasized that policy is as important as technology and should be worked on first. Montanaro pointed out that she said that policies are needed with regard to platform; open access; copyright; creative comments; look and feel; design for promotion and discovery. Talked about the key policies required; who can submit; characteristics, who can use; privacy; overlay; exit strategy; revenue sharing; cost sharing; licenses; added services; and being able to articulate rationale. There was an interesting talk about cost sharing. May want to think about the role we might have on the administrative side of the house and whether we think departments should pay for a service for preservation and archiving or if the university should pay. Jim Mullins did a presentation on "Managing Long-Lived Digital Data-Sets and Their Curation: Interdisciplinary Policy Issues." He focused on datasets working with scientific communities, and he think that researchers want consistent access to their own data. Dale Flecker discussed "Museums and Digital Repositories" and how the images and the culture are different in the museums than the libraries. Jerry McGann discussed "To the Nines: Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship," and issues related to humanities and open source tools that we might want to look at. The tools are not available very broadly and not all faculties are teaching with technology. When asked how we will get the faculty to change, David Greenbaum said, "We will advance funeral by funeral."

Developing Policies for the Institutional Repository - Gaunt

• In an effort to get a process by which we develop a policy, Cabinet discussed the things they might want to have included in a policy statement, and how we set up a process by which we select what goes into the repository. Would like to develop a timeline that we will make available by fall 2006 and have policies in place by then. Big question is whether we have a vision for what our repository should be doing and what role we want it to play within the University. Should we keep it broad at this point and focus on university resources; and will it all be available to the public. Cabinet discussed scholarly output of our faculty; administrative data sources created at the university; the digitization and preservation of unique resources of the libraries; how aggressive we want to be; providing a self-archiving policy. Should use this as the basis for our vision for what goes into the repository. Should think about general guiding principles: preservation and accessibility to the university as a number one priority and have the tools needed to develop it. What about papers of our own faculty that are published elsewhere? As Don Waters said, we don't have the assurances that some of the things will be preserved. When picking projects to go into the repository, we will be prioritizing based on what we know are the research needs of the university and establish priorities. We might say we could run the repository end of it, but as a service with a cost. We may have to say somewhere in our policy statement depending on the magnitude we may ask for cost sharing. Have to think about whether we want to say we'll accept only things Rutgers has copyright over. Is the institutional repository being built to preserve information created at the university or is our vision to build a research and learning repository at Rutgers based on unique resources we have at the university? Gives us a focus on what we're going to seek and prioritizing how we will work. Gaunt, Sewell and Montanaro will draft a vision statement based on the Cabinet discussion and send out prior to the December 6 Cabinet meeting for discussion at that meeting. Will ask Cabinet to reflect on the process.

Announcements

Boyle

• The second week in January is being targeted for the undergrad education task force meeting.
• Looking into web logs bulletin boards is an assignment for Cabinet.
• The ISC is using Sakai collaborative space for having chat space and posting resources; shows some promise for us
• A public and collection services group will be studying blogs.

Sewell

• The state funds have been allocated in IRIS and a few non-state funds in New Brunswick.