Minutes of February 24, 2005 meeting

Present:

Anne Butman, Patricia Libutti (Chair), Sam McDonald (recorder), Kevin McGuire, Patricia Piermatti.

Guest:

Jazmine Faherty (for Access Services, formerly Penny Weniger)

1. Minutes approved with small amendments to dates.

2. Reports

Anne Buttman
No report (No equipment).

Jazmine Faherty
Brought up the topics of:
- Binders available by equipment for all access services staff.
- Training offered again for access services staff.

Discussion of binders, keys, passwords and training access services (who change locations often) was discussed.

Pat Piermatti
- LSM has a lockbox that contains the passwords (on 3x5 cards) for various workstations.
- Written instructions prepared (in a binder).
- Headphones are at the reserve desk (because that is the desk that is open the latest).
- Pam and Michelle are coordination
- The Kurzweil machine was observed being used (so we know it works).

Kevin McGuire
- the 1st floor bathroom (unisex) will be made compliant.

Sam McDonald
No report (No equipment).

Patricia Libutti
- Asked Judy Gardner that an access services representative be permanently assigned to be a member of the Advisory Committee on Library Services for Persons with Disabilities committee .
- Requested that members submit missing information for equipment inventory.
- Announced that there may be a possible tour/walk-through/event of libraries with diversity committee.

3. Action Plan

• Currently in draft form. Pending review by chair.

• Pre-July actions
  • Equipment inventory
  • Write up proposal for funds to update/replace equipment.
  • Prepare for "Transitions..." conference.

4. Old Business

A. Equipment

• Inventory is the top issue.
• Discussion of electronic reserves, PDF's and photocopies.
• Decided that poor quality submissions (by instructors) are the concern of the instructor. Students should address their complaints to their instructor as Imaging services cannot make clear PDF's from poor facsimiles.
• Recommend that perhaps the "Reserve Services, A Guide for Faculty" could clarify upon "Poor quality photocopies will not be scanned." and explain that the resulting PDF's from poor facsimiles are unusable by people with vision disabilities.

• Comments that most study carrels that have PC's installed in them are not wide enough to use a laptop alongside (or even a notepad in some cases).
  Recommend: If new carrels are to be purchased, some for each library/facility, should be purchased to be accessible (or at least adjustable to accommodate wheelchairs).

• Chair will contact from Greg to find out if students have reported anything about library facilities and equipment (so we can add that to our data for the proposal).

• Headphones. Discussed quality, hygiene, buying in bulk, storage. How do we get more?
  Is their a stockpile in the Libraries? Probably useful if we had a bunch of "disposable" headphones.

4b. Materials for new employee orientation.

We decided that the brochure was not suitable for the employee orientation. A 1 page MSWord document addressing how to deal with situations and hot contact committee members/local equipment experts, would be more useful.

5. New Business

Materials for Transitions confernce.

• We will submit out usual brochure and the URL of our "Library Services for Persons with Disabilities" page.

• Libutti gave us a tour of the resources in the Sakai site that she created.

Respectfully submitted
S. McDonald