Minutes of April 21, 2011 Meeting

Present:

Grace Agnew, Karen Hartman, Qian Hu, Tom Izbicki, Laura Mullen, Cathy Pecoraro, Vincent Pelote (videoconference), Gracemary Smulewitz, Gene Springs (recorder), Ryan Womack, Ann Watkins, Tao Yang

Guests:

John Brennan, Elizabeth Leister, Rebecca Martinez,

Excused:

Andy Martinez, Michael Joseph, Mary Beth Weber

Agenda

1. Approval of Agenda
2. Approval of March Minutes
3. Chair Report-Hartman
4. Discussion with the Marketing/PR team-H. Glazer (guest)
5. Budget Update/AUL Report-Tom Izbicki
6. AUL Report-Grace Agnew
7. Web Board Report-Ryan Womack and IRIS discussion-L. Mullen
8. Drop-off Deed of Gift form-Izbicki
9. Policy for Digitization of Rare books-M. Joseph
10. Update Distributed Technical Services-Grace Smulewitz
11. Update Central Technical Services-Mary Beth Weber
12. Announcements

1. Approval of Agenda

Agenda was approved with the following changes: the IRIS Discussion (Mullen) from item #7 was moved to item #3; the chair report, item #3, was removed; John Brennan and Rebecca Martinez are leading the discussion of item #4; item #9 will be postponed to the May meeting as M. Joseph is ill.

2. Approval of March Minutes

Minutes of March 3, 2011 were approved with no changes.

3. IRIS Discussion (L. Mullen)

L. Mullen introduced a discussion item on behalf of the Web Board to deemphasize the acronym IRIS in favor of the more generic "catalog" in future development of the RUL website. R. Womack completed a scan of peer/aspirant institutions and found that only 6 were still using an IRIS-like acronym to name their catalog. No objections were raised to the proposed change. The discussion yielded a request for a clear timeline of any name changes to be disseminated to all of RUL.

4. Discussion with Marketing/PR Team (J. Brennan, R. Martinez)

J. Brennan and R. Martinez, on behalf of the Marketing/PR Team, presented on their committee's activities and goals. The committee would like to collaborate on outreach efforts as evidenced with the E-ssentials newsletter, which is an opt-in electronic newsletter targeted toward faculty. Several members of the council recommended to the committee that submission deadlines for the newsletter be widely disseminated to RUL.

5. Budget Update/AUL Report (T. Izbicki)

• T. Izbicki reported that the state purchases were underway, and that a preliminary list may be circulated to selectors in the near future.
• Collaborations with academic units may be explored for joint purchasing in the future where appropriate, such as the recent partnership with the School of Pharmacy on Access Pharmacy.
• Several large packages and vendor contracts will be up for renewal in FY 2012.
• LRC agreed to support arXiv.org, a Physics repository, for the second year in a row.

8. Drop-off Deed of Gift Form (T. Izbicki)

Agenda item #8 moved to due to T. Izbicki leaving meeting early. T. Izbicki introduced an updated Drop-off Deed of Gift form which is to be given to donors upon the dropping off of materials to the library. The form confirms that the ownership of and legal rights to the materials has been transferred to RUL. A few minor edits to the form were recommended, and T. Izbicki agreed to send a revised form to the LRC list for approval.

6. AUL Report (G. Smulewitz for G. Agnew)

G. Smulewitz read a report on behalf of G. Agnew.

• G. Agnew presented on RUResearch at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) in San Diego in early April. She will be presenting on the RUcore E-Publishing strategy at an IMLS-funded invitational meeting on E-Publishing in university libraries at Georgia Tech in two weeks.
• RUcore is now available for resource search and retrieval although we won't be able to add new objects until early next week. Kudos to T. Purger and the faculty and staff of IIS and SCC who worked long hours to restore. We have a strong, multi-platform backup strategy for images so no images were ever in danger of being lost. Unfortunately, our digital storage platform did not have built in redundancy to ensure 24/7 system availability. When confronted with massive system failure, we had to commandeer servers and storage from other activities to build a "shadow" RUcore in order to bring the system back up. The vendors were able to repair the existing system and we are currently reloading images from backup files. We will retain the shadow system, in case of further system failure, until the new storage system has been installed and is fully tested for redundancy.
• We have gone out for a bid for a new storage system, paid for in large part by our NSF-funded Video Mosaic grant. We have five bids, several of which are excellent. These systems will give us the full failure redundancy that we need as well as 40 B of storage, scalable to petabytes. G. Agnew is participating in the vendor selection, which is being led by T. Purger. We expect to award the bid the first week in May and to be installed in late June.

7. Web Board Report (R. Womack)

R. Womack provided an update of Web Board activities. Teams have been formed to address multiple aspects of the RUL site redesign, examples of which include the "search" team and the information architecture team. Bids are being considered for the design work of the site. Some changes to the RUL site can be expected in August, in preparation for the fall semester.

10. Update Distributed Technical Services (G. Smulewitz)

As mentioned by T. Izbicki, DTS is in the process of finalizing orders and subscriptions for one- time purchases. DTS is conducting a pilot project to digitize license agreements within their WMS. DTS is also considering the implementation of a tracking system to manage troubleshooting e-resource issues. G. Agnew suggested working with IIS on this implementation.

11. Update Central Technical Services (E. Leister for M. Weber)

E. Leister read an update report on behalf of M. Weber.

• Firm orders for RUL placed via OASIS (Coutts): 948 in February; 3053 in March; 1628 in April. Of this total there are 84 orders for New Brunswick remaining to be places, 42 for Camden, and 4 for Newark; all should be finished by Friday. There is not a figure yet for items ordered using the online form (for vendors other than Coutts); those orders are still being processed and selectors are still submitting these orders.
• E-book ordering in Coutts. There are two problems: 1. People order an e-book and don't realize they've selected an e-book; 2. People want to order an e-book and use the wrong holding code. Make sure what you want is electronic not print. Also, all Rutgers e-books go to RUBKONLN, not ALBYSTACKS, etc.
• I am scheduling a visit from Coutts in early May to discuss expanding our patron driven plan. Ebrary and EBL have already visited.
• C. Zimmerman and her staff processed a large number of the Ostriker gift books for the upcoming event "Celebrating Creativity" which recognized Emerita Professor of English Alicia Suskin Ostriker's gift of poetry books to RUL and the presentation of the inaugural Margery Somers Foster Undergraduate Multimedia Awards.
• LA position for J. Otto to be filled. Other vacancies (LA IIs) soon to be posted. Will replace Belinsky and Hilliker in the near future.
• Carolyn Morris has left Coutts for personal reasons to accept another position. Clare Avapoo, her counterpart who handles Canadian account, will now handle the U.S. as well. I'm working to schedule a visit from her so that selectors can provide feedback and ask questions regarding our service with Coutts.

12. Announcements

• K. Hartman announced that the May 15, 2011 LRC meeting will take place at the Dana Library, and will begin at 10am to allow for travel from New Brunswick.
• K. Hartman announced that LRC will be electing a new chair for FY 2012, and to consider self-nominations.

Meeting was adjourned at 11:30am

Respectfully submitted,
Gene R. Springs