Minutes of May 5, 2005 Meeting

Present:

Ka-Neng Au, Ron Becker, Jeanne Boyle, Gary Golden, Judith Grassle, Rhonda Marker (recorder), Meredith McGill, Roger Smith, and Myoung Wilson

Discussion of events attended

Marketing 101 workshop

• Purpose seemed to be to get buy-in for marketing
• It was to train the marketing team
• Introduced key concepts
• Strategic plan will be central
• One of the issues was who the audience is: marketing to ... whom?

Learning spaces

• Well attended from all 3 campuses
• Classrooms are either enhanced or they are not (all or nothing)
• Roger Smith, Kayo Denda, Bobbi Tipton talked about what libraries are doing and our own learning spaces
• Attendee from SCILS said she would rather not use technology for teaching; technology enhances learning, it does not replace teaching

Student learning focus group

• Roger brought in a small group (12) of undergraduates, open-ended discussion questions
• top 5: cafes, group study rooms, OIT computer labs in libraries, wireless access, library orientation as part of new student orientation

Question:

how do we handle changing goals of the University? The moving target

Answer:

The library has to have a seat at the table

Early notification and early involvement

Talked about the invisible communities that develop around the new, pulled-together areas, e.g., global studies. Au is on the listserv for that new area of emphasis. However, sometimes there is not as much coalescence, e.g., transportation. At the beginning, the engineering and public policy groups were thrown together without prior involvement of both parties.

Libraries need to develop a more agile workforce.

New recruitment/hiring for new areas of emphasis

Re-deployment of existing staff: Discussion earlier this year at which faculty strongly voiced their preference for developing expertise from existing workforce. Part of the motivation was that they did not want existing workforce to be relegated to obsolete practices/skills/etc.

University goals and our strategic plan

University goals under five major areas: Academic excellence, Students and campuses, Service and constituency relations, Resources for Rutgers, Leadership and administration. We need to make RUL explicit in these, not merely implicit

Consideration of an aspiration report as a model to use for our strategic plan report. E.g., budgets of aspirant institutions and ours over the next [n?] years

Aspirant institution libraries: $18 million

RUL: $14.9 million
There will be a growing gap unless we address it, and do something about it

We reviewed the Format for Plan that Judith, Jeanne, and Gary drafted. (ICR=Indirect Cost Recovery) Among the suggestions were:

Resources

• under (3), expand to "develop new programs and priorities"
• strategic collections-budget decisions, whether reductions or expansions
  • not always "across the board"
• develop collections in specialized areas that other institutions will want to borrow
• look at how best to organize our collections to better respond to our constituencies and reciprocal borrowing opportunities

Physical space:

• we have already done some consolidation of collections, this seems to be a continuing trend (will we accelerate this?) - e.g., Ceramics, Microbiology, Herbarium, etc. all closed
• idea of spectacular unified library (on the Busch campus)-not just for science, technology, medicine but for all collections
  • reasons why this is desired
  • deliver resources more quickly
• "Centralized collections - Decentralized services"
• At the least, move toward more rationalized collections ["rationalized" as the term was used to describe the Douglass Rationalization project]
• Add cafes - this already envisioned in some libraries
  • Douglass Library phase 2 or phase 3
  • Dana third floor: will include a café
  • Alexander Library: has floated idea of enclosing the portico
  • Including a café will encourage use of the Library as more of a commons
• Will we need more space in the future?
  • Most definitely if we do not expand Annex (Annex II)
  • We think we WILL need more space: more books, more study space
  • If we are thinking of the future and how we can plan for it strategically, we should focus on acquiring many more trusted full-text electronic resources that can replace older print collections, e.g., JSTOR 2, 3
• Renovate facilities

Human resources:

• Increase diversity

Digital library:

• Content
  • Output of University itself
  • Digital library is much bigger than just the repository
• Components
  • Metasearching
• Digital resources
• Put into the report what we would like to see developed
• There have been meetings about choosing, prioritizing digital projects
• We need to strategically select
  • Guiding principles for selecting; others are looking to this report for these principles
  • These are guiding principles for the whole report
  • Can they be re-iterated here, for developing the digital library?
• No more digital silos
• We need to develop new resources
• Highlight the materials/resources of the University Libraries and our collections, including special collections
• Highlight current initiatives
  • They also need to be reviewed
  • To date, our digital projects have been opportunistic. We need to become strategic.

Writing The Report

Jeanne, Ron volunteered to draft

Follow the outline/structure of the University's Strategic Goals

When will RU be up for reaccreditation? [N.B. Rutgers had its last Middle States reaccreditation visit on Mar 28-Apr 1, 1998. It is a 10-year cycle, so we can expect our next visit ca. spring 2008. That would be within our 5-year planning cycle.]

Respectfully submitted,
Rhonda Marker