University Librarian's Cabinet: Minutes of the February 1, 2006 Meeting

Present:

Agnew, Boyle, Fultz, Gaunt, Puniello, Sewell, Tehrani

Videoconferenced:

Golden, Mullins

Absent:

Zapcic

University Librarian's Report – Gaunt

• Deans Council will meet Monday, February 6, 2006.
• Cabinet should have received announcement from Vice President for Student Affairs Greg Blimling on the RUID conversion, the new student identification number that will replace the Social Security number as the default student identification number.
• Gaunt and Golden attended the New Jersey Council of Library Directors, Deans and University Librarians meeting on Friday, January 27 at The College of New Jersey; Council discussed a possible change in their name in an attempt to make it easier to remember; a large part of the meeting was devoted to a report from three VALE institutions that participated in LibQual+; the focus was not so much their own individual responses but comparing the norms for the group and how they will roll out the findings to the community. Cabinet will continue their own thinking on rollout; VALE will try and come to a decision on how often they might want to do LibQual+ -- possibly on a three-year cycle.
• Vice President for Academic Affairs Furmanski has called a meeting of a small group of individuals on February 16 on communication and collaboration in the areas of media.
• Gaunt and Norma Blake, State Librarian, have arranged a meeting on February 7 at the State Archives to discuss potential funding for the New Jersey Digital Highway (NJDH) once the current grant ends in September.
• Gaunt attended the opening of the exhibition "Institute for Women's Leadership: Changing the Face of Leadership from Rutgers to the World" on January 31 at Douglass Library. The reception was followed by a project presentation by the students in the "IWL, Young Leaders & Social Change Program." Kayo Denda created a beautiful exhibit on the history of women's leadership and centers.

Repository Mission Statement – Gaunt

Cabinet reviewed and finalized the description of the repository mission statement for RUCORE. Gaunt will send a separate e-mail to RUL_Everyone with the statement:

Hourly Employee Task Force – Hendrickson

Hendrickson met with Cabinet to discuss the review and upgrade of the hourly employee payroll process, which is the result of security issues and an audit of business practices by the University's Internal Audit Department. A task force of 25 people was charged to review, test, recommend, document, train, and implement changes to hourly payroll processes, policies and procedures. The task force has broken into three groups: policies and procedures committee, a training committee working on documentation for both students and supervisors as far as the hourly employee process and for using the system, and a testing group which is testing the new version of time TimeTrak and its functions. The targeted date for the upgrade of TimeTrak is February 28. Supervisor training is scheduled for February 21-27; all supervisors having TimeTrak access are required to attend a training session on both the new Policies and Procedures and the upgraded TimeTrak software.

Debriefing on ALA – Boyle, Gaunt, Puniello

• Boyle, Gaunt and Puniello attended the American Library Association Meeting in San Antonio in January and gave a debriefing on the meetings they attended.
• Puniello attended several meetings related to library as place. Some discussions targeted Millenials, people born after 1984 and the newest generation of workers, with criteria that include multitasking. Attended LAMA meetings related to buildings and equipment; discussions about how undergraduate libraries were a thing of their time; many of the big traditional libraries were closed stack and unappealing for undergraduates. The needs and behaviors were different from faculty and graduates. Interesting whether we're going back to closed stack or remote big collections. Online services and an information commons are important in maintaining a connection with library users. We all collect the same things but are unique in our Special Collections and University Archives; should not all archive the same material. Dan Greenstein from California Digital Library said we should be looking for leverage when thinking about digital technologies and high digital storage and public access storage; know the way our users demand digital, how much physical has to be there. Individual research libraries should be looking at their role as a national collection; more attention should be paid to single formats instead of multiple formats for the same information; looking at persistent and comprehensive collections rather than shared.
• Boyle attended a shares roundtable meeting; we are getting loaded but were told that records were being loaded on the basis of who was the largest contributors. Saturday morning was taken up with the Washington office. One breakout session was a panel on mass digitization that was chaired by Cliff Lynch. One of the interesting things they discussed was that we have to come together on what is core in terms of the strategic use of staff. Core is what we have in common: preserve the core in common; access it in common; have a common use of scale. Attended a subcommittee meeting on intellectual property as part of an ALA legislative group. Attended a meeting about six different libraries that had adopted WebFeat; showed their screens, what they were doing, each had all found different ways of approaching assessing information; Princeton decided to do federated searching over core databases. Attended public services big heads group; discussed roles and the need to look at topics from an administrative point of view. Attended an RLG collection and public services meeting attended by 12 people on the topic of blogs using Moveable Type software. Binghamton's newspapers are being managed by the equivalent of our WAC group. Minnesota is providing blogging space for the entire university.
• Gaunt attended the ACRL President's Program, which was an information literacy debate; did not debate the need and value of information competency but the way librarians teach. Is it a role and are we doing it in a valuable way? Gaunt attended a CRL meeting related to digital archiving; the meeting was two-fold – they have a grant where they are testing the trusted archival repositories and were interested in hearing from the directors; the other is related to CRL's role as to whether it wants to be an archive or facilitator. Focus is on commercially produced serials – what is the publisher's archiving and preservation policy – if we stopped getting it, could we get access to it. Talked about Portico and LOCKSS and questions about both of them – should the libraries be paying for this? Out of this meeting came more questions than answers. Gaunt attended the Ebsco Seminar on Transforming Libraries that ARL directors were invited. Sul Lee, Dean of Libraries at the University of Oklahoma, was a speaker. This seminar was a conversation between Susan Nutter, Director of Libraries at North Carolina State University, and Sarah Mihalick on transforming libraries. Both are seen as leaders who have transformed their library. Felt they were risk takers and people who test assumptions; in order to transform you have to act quickly and most processes are incredibly slow. Strategic planning doesn't work in this environment. A lot about not doing everything by consensus; can't transform that way. For important things and administrative decisions that are needed, can't get everybody on the same page. Need to surround yourself with people who are positive and feel very strongly about change. What you need is to take all of these people on the bus and not put any negative people on that bus. Find a way to get them off. The other is that librarians are their own worst enemy in transformation. They are people who don't want to transform. Leader has to be strong and push ahead. Perspective is traditional and based on what they know without paying attention to what the user says they need or want.
• Gaunt encouraged everyone to attend ALA in the future.

RecycleMania2006 – Fultz

Fultz discussed with Cabinet the message from Karen Kavanagh, Executive Vice President for Administrative Affairs, announcing the University's participation in RecycleMania 2006, a national recycling competition open to colleges and universities. As recommended in Kavanagh's message, Fultz contacted Ms. Magda Comeau, senior department administrator for the Purchasing Department to find out the Libraries could become more involved. The basic idea is to educate and make students, faculty and staff aware of the importance of recycling, and the Libraries represent some of the main student congregation areas where the RecycleMania 2006 campaign can really be promoted. Cabinet discussed ways to participate such as cleaning files, placing larger bins in the libraries, and publicizing the University's participation with signs and tent cards on the tables. If any New Brunswick library would like larger containers for recycling, Puniello will make a request to Facilities. If Newark or Camden would like larger containers, Mullins and Golden should contact their Facilities departments. Fultz will make tent cards available to the libraries on all campuses and participation is encouraged.

Announcements

Golden:

• As a point of information for meetings that are videoconferenced, Golden noted that participants should be cognizant of paper shuffling, which is picked up by sensitive microphones and transmitted to the other locations.
• Robeson is in the first week of a reservation system for group study rooms; starting slow but well received; reservations have been made through the weekend. Students in groups of four or more can reserve a room, pick up the key, and renew if available. The room will have a whiteboard with computer. A second room will be available soon.

Mullins:

• Mullins, Golden and Boyle attended the OIT Strategic Planning Steering Committee meeting yesterday at the University Inn & Conference Center.
• Mullins attended a meeting at Science Park High School in Newark yesterday; a new Science Park High School is being opened in September 06. There was discussion about mentoring, research, programs, and the roles individuals could play; will write a mini document about the kinds of services that we can provide to their faculty, students, and librarians.

Sewell:

• Many new electronic resources are being ordered. The networked electronic resources teams have been working very well and have made decisions on many requests. A Web site was created to track requests and status; message was sent to rul_everyone with the URL.
• We have obtained some interesting faculty collections and hope to get more. Dave Cohen has donated his history of pharmacy and medicine collection; a number of rare books related to the history of pharmacy and other very good general more recent books on pharmacy and medical history. Ardeth Burke has donated his collection and correspondence from WW II, diaries of his travels in East Asia, and some very good Japanese history and culture that we do not have.
• David Kuzma's resource guide on the history of New Jersey has gone up on the Libraries' Web page under Subject Research Guides.

Boyle:

• Set up a working group to look at LibData; University of Minnesota developed back end for presenting materials on Web pages; Ryan Womack is the chair.
• Boyle, Gardner and Golden have been invited to participate on Continuing Education committee looking at the new site in Atlantic Cape. A large group meeting is scheduled for later this month.
• AULs have been discussing representation on various groups OIT is trying to set up. Montanaro will represent the Libraries on the software evaluation group.
• There is a small working group working on potential credit card implementation. Members include J. Gardner, McDonald, Millerand, Voorhees, Ellis, and Boyle. Working on identifying requirements for our storefront.
• Rewrote our UMDNJ data transfer agreement to expand it to include other schools and campuses. Cohn and O'Rourke from UMD are writing in their requirements. Will contact NJIT.
• LinkSource will not charge us for this year; Mary Page negotiated a waiver for A-Z listing.
• "You Can't Do That on Television! Using Videoconferencing to Support More Effective Meetings" was held on Friday, January 27, 2006. The program facilitators were Richard Novak, Associate Vice President, Continuous Education and Distance Learning, and Peter Mattaliano, Director, Instructional Technologies and Television. The program was very well attended and will be repeated in March.

Puniello:

• Semester started with a bang; access services are doing many new things; received good publicity about the discontinuation of bag checking.
• Gaunt and Puniello attended a fundraiser for "How Women Artists Invented Postmodernism, 1970-1975."
• Kevin Mulcahy has an article published in the latest issue of C&RL News.
• Puniello and Tehrani had their first meeting for media resources at Douglass; Montanaro has joined the group.

Agnew:

• Agnew attended a Media Dimensions meeting with Montanaro, Gonzagas, Bogus, Nahory and Beard on state-of-the-art video coding; the Libraries need to provide leadership in the state in this area.
• The New Jersey Digital Highway (NJDH) is doing well; consistently between 4-6,000 visits a month. Multimedia templates that educators can reuse were created; you can immerse yourself in the life of an immigrant; Web site features a teacher who has been recognized by her profession and is one of the New Jersey teachers working with NJDH to develop and test the EMM – E-Learning Module Maker, a tool that allows teachers to teach using the digital primary resources of NJDH to teach history.

Fultz:

• A student from North Brunswick High School spent 12 hours in Libraries Administration this week earning hours for National Honor Society. He worked on posters for RecycleMania 2006 and was given a tour in Special Collections & University Archives.