University Librarian's Cabinet: Minutes of the December 12, 2006 Meeting

Present:

Agnew, Boyle, Fultz, Gaunt, Golden (videoconference), Mullins, Puniello, Sewell, Tehrani, Zapcic

University Librarian's Report – Gaunt

• Gaunt acknowledged the retirement of Lynn Mullins at the end of this fiscal year; there will be a celebratory event to celebrate her contributions to the Libraries and the University. Gaunt and Newark provost Steve Diner will have a conversation to discuss filling the position.
• At the recent faculty meeting there was endorsement for including the faculty coordinator and the chair of the planning committee, who is vice chair of faculty, on Cabinet. As a result, Jane Sloan and Michael Joseph will be joining Cabinet as of January.
• In addition to advocacy for the continuation of the New Jersey Knowledge Initiative there has been discussions of expanding its coverage to additional databases. Gaunt shared some ideas about potential sources. The marketing and advocacy committee has met with the governor's staff to discuss this possibility and is preparing a proposal for consideration.
• At the request of Vice President Furmanski we have been asked to identify any agreements the Libraries have with international institutions.
• One of the ARL directors has compiled information regarding the breakdown of library expenditures coming from tuition and state funds, student/library fees, fundraising/endowment income, ICR, and other funding sources; the preliminary report shows contrasts between public and private institutions and might be useful for comparisons.
• Boyle, Cassel, Mullins and Gaunt met with Gerry Warshaver to discuss how the Libraries will be included in the Middle States review. The purpose of the discussion was to ensure that the full range of library support for undergraduate education was represented. It was determined that we should prepare a Libraries report that could be used as an appendix to supplement what will be included about the Libraries under particular headings in the overall report.

Balanced Scorecard - Boyle

• Boyle gave an overview of the "ARL Library Assessment Conference: Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment" conference that she attended in Charlottesville, Virginia September 25-27, 2006. She distributed handouts of PowerPoint presentations from the meeting: "The Balanced Scorecard in Public Libraries (Joe Matthews)," "The People Side of Planning & Implementing a Large Scale Balanced Scorecard Initiative (Susanna Pathak)," and "Yours, Mine and Ours (Staff Involvement in the assessment process at the UVA Library)." Boyle also reviewed the Academic Excellence Quality Indicators that Cabinet had spent many hours developing. According to Matthews, the scorecard is a great communication tool for the staff so that everybody knows where the library is going. Some universities are developing scorecards and it becomes their strategic plan; you have a strategy mapping; the scorecard says how well you are doing; and you are able to measure the impact on your strategy. When identified targets are used, it was found that performance improved 16% on average. Typically, a scorecard is updated quarterly. Pathak, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, discussed the people side of planning and implementing. She referenced the University of Florida; said there needs to be an implementation workgroup; having the university librarian be a member of the workgroup is very important. Have six monitoring teams; roles are described for everyone; they have a chief data person who draws the information; reviewed the BSC Lifestyle Benefits. They had a detailed communications plan for rollout with about a dozen events and tables listing each event, location, time, persons presenting, purpose, and links to handouts, PowerPoint presentations, and web pages.
• The last presentation discussed staff involvement at the University of Virginia in the assessment process; their balanced scorecard had four perspectives; had some difficulty getting the staff to adept the balanced scorecard; they were cautious and suspicious; took 1.5-2 years to implement; they review the metrics in the spring; spend the summer collecting data; in the fall analyze and report; in the winter they educate and improve.
• In reviewing our own balanced scorecard, as it stands on our web site for the work that Cabinet did and the most recent work that Golden and Susan Beck did in eliciting comments, it doesn't totally capture everything; what we took as our perspectives is really only one - that of the user; we need a broader framework for assessment; the question is what are our next steps? Since we don't have an assessment committee anymore, need to focus on the faculty organizational changes and have a subgroup of planning and coordinating committee as the core group with Cabinet and staff representation. For this activity we need a group working with us to develop the overall questions for each of our strategic plan areas - what it is that will tell us if we are successful; has to be an iterative process. Will go back to the groups who had submitted reports to the strategic plan and ask what their priorities were; what role would they have in assessment to indicate that there are things we could do each year and ask them to indicate how they think they could determine whether we were successful. Various groups would be making recommendations on measuring particular projects; smaller groups would decide what projects to implement and whether they were successful. There will be a formal request for the group; Boyle has been asked to present to Collection Development and Public Services; will talk to Michael Joseph to get this going; Boyle will write up a proposal and charge herself; it will inform our thinking on how we want to support assessment.

Academic Excellence Fund Program - Gaunt

• Gaunt reviewed with Cabinet the Academic Excellence Fund Program (http://orsp.rutgers.edu/aef). The maximum that may be requested for any one project is $250,000. All proposals must be submitted through the appropriate dean; proposals are due in the Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs (for New Brunswick/Piscataway proposals) or in the offices of the Newark or Camden Provosts, as appropriate, by 5:30 p.m. on Friday, January 19, 2007. The thrust has always been for academic initiatives that needed seed money to start a project that might attract a larger grant. Do we have ideas that would be appropriate for the Academic Excellence Fund Program; should we try to connect a proposal to the capital campaign goals. Gaunt will send out a message to the Libraries' faculty asking for ideas for proposals that fit within the guidelines sent by Furmanski. Anyone who has an idea for a proposal should send it to Gaunt (with a copy to the appropriate AUL or Director) by December 17, providing a brief concept statement. Once a proposal has been approved, it should be in Gaunt's office no later than 5 p.m. on January 12 to be considered in the proposals sent to Furmanski.

CNI Update - Agnew

• Agnew discussed the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall 2006 Task Force Meeting that she attended in Washington, DC on December 4-5, 2006. In the opening plenary, Clifford Lynch provided an overview of the 2006-2007 CNI Program Plan; he discussed trends and how everybody wants integrated information; talked about the importance of bringing data into the repository. Agnew attended the session on "LOCKSS/CLOCKSS and Portico: What Does that Archived Content Look Like" that was led by Geneva Henry, Carolyn Walters, Phyllis Davidson, and Kerry Keck. She attended the "Analog to Digital Audio Reformatting" session given by Eric Weig; during the session Agnew was asked to be on an ARL task force for audio formatting; Agnew attended the "Introduction to Zotero" by Daniel Cohen, Roy Rosenzweig, and Joshua Greenberg; Zotero is a next-generation scholarly research tool that runs in the Firefox web browser; would like to demo at a Public Services Council meeting. Attended the "Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Update" by Martha Crawley, Mary Chute, Stephanie Clark, Dan Lukash, and Barbara Smith. Agnew presented on "Incorporating Rights and Preservation Information into the RUcore Metadata Platform" and her session was well attended; the moving image community was heavily represented and gave her good advice. Ron Jantz is meeting with Princeton; they are eager to be the first user of this. Agnew attended the Closing Plenary: The NSF Cyberinfrastructure Movement and the CNI Community presented by Daniel Atkins, from the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure. Proceedings from the conference can be found at http://www.cni.org/tfms/2006b.fall/.

Announcements

Zapcic

• The capital campaign package was delivered to Furmanski's office; notifications will come in April.

Mullins

• Suggested that Cabinet consider composing a statement or a report on how the Libraries should operate if there is a merger. This statement/paper would allow us to be prepared in the event a merger is proposed.

Puniello

• RefWorks now has direct export capability from IRIS; an announcement will be sent to rul_everyone.
• Howard Dess has an exhibit on artificial gems in the Library of Science and Medicine.

Tehrani

• FASIPs are due on Thursday.