Minutes of December 15, 2004 meeting

Present:

Roger Smith, Eva Kalamotousis, Irina Loutchkina, Dean Meister, Jan Reinhart, May Chin, Ramon Negron, Fred Onorato, Eugene McElroy, Myriam Alami, Kristen Ko, Mike Mansouri, Dave Warner

Excused:

Peter Anderson, Zohreh Bonianian, Rita Post.

Agenda

1. Syllabus Format.. progress and plans
2. Fall removal process
3. Goals review 2004/05
4. Minutes
5. Info Sharing

The December meeting was held as a holiday gathering at Buzzy's, in Piscataway on Stelton Road. I was glad to see so many were able to join us, and the group enjoyed the food and camaraderie.
I wish everyone a healthy, joyous holiday season and happy new year.
Roger.

Syllabus Format.. progress and plans

The group discussed progress on the syllabus format. A subgroup has been formed, Myriam, Dean and Kristen. Their charge is to develop the three main areas of focus that the ERES committee determined to be the next step in development/roll out of this new format: 1. A complete demo of both print and multimedia syllabus formatted lists, 2. A good set of directions/documentation for staff processing material in this format and 3. A set of guidelines and suggested texts for edits necessary to all online and print documentation for patrons and faculties using reserves as a result of this new format. Thank you to Myriam, Dean and Kristen for agreeing to work on this project.

The syllabus format represents the next evolution of the electronic reserve format, and offers the patron advantages in layout and presentation of material in a much more simple interface. Staff will benefit from far fewer brief records to create. The subgroup will meet shortly after the new year and hopefully have material ready for the next ERES committee gathering, tentatively scheduled for some time in February.

Fall removal process

Dean has run "preview lists" and distributed them. Please use these for inventory, organization and statistical purposes as the removal process continues.

Removal of fall reserves is scheduled for early in the week of January 11th, and this has been coordinated with Systems [Chris Sterback] and Image Services [Darryl Voorhees]. The removal process with take down files from the webserver and U:/ Drives, as well as remove brief records and control record from the fall semester. This week was decided upon after consulting with a number of reserve desk staff members who routinely encounter difficulty when fall reserves stay on for too long and collide with spring reserves coming on board. We will need to make a permanent change to the reserve calendar of events.

Goals review 2004/05

The group reviewed goals for the year at this halfway point. We based our review on the annual report for 2003/04.

Completed goals include:

1. The cessation of paper copies for articles...a resounding success with little or no problems; opens the door for implementation of the syllabus format.
2. Review and complete procedures for "see also records".
3. Assessed and confirmed role of Image Services in ERES:...they continue to be principle "stewards" of U:/ drive maintenance, play a consultation role for file conversions, and play a central role in tracking software and hardware needs in support of eres scanning. Image Services will also continue to scan for SMLR and Art, and can handle "overflow" in peak times or when staffing shortages present themselves.
4. Explore the Syllabus format: with the successful move away from paper copies, this format is poised for adoption as our principle layout for electronic reserve articles. See agenda item#1 for more info.

Ongoing goals include:

1. Review and potentially standardize "overnight" loan procedures at the units that still do this.
2. Complete review/revision of RUL and NBL Reserve documentation and directions.
3. Complete conversion of old minutes to HTML format...note, Rita Post is working on this now.
4. Training need: an extended session covering PDF document management, linking to external sites and file type conversions. This is being explored for February.

Minutes

We are going to initiate a change in minute recording for the group. Kristen and Rita have agreed, starting in January, to share the responsibility of taking minutes for the group. Kristen and Rita will cooperatively take minutes in the meetings, send a draft to the coordinator for edits/circulation as a draft, and then Rita will finish off the final copy with correct HTML formatting and send on to Marc for posting to the NBL Access page. Thank you to Rita and Kristen for agreeing to take this on.

Info Sharing

Still some problems with Adobe V6.0 and IExplorer. If in doubt, council patrons to use Netscape. V.6.0 scanning software should be rolled out in January. If you receive 6.0 documents from faculty, and have trouble processing them, you can open them in the 6.0 reader [free download] and save as 5.0 and process from there. Thanks for the tip Dean.

We will not be doing counts of paper/no paper copies this term. No longer necessary.

Next meeting Wednesday, January 19th, place and time TBD.