Minutes of October 5, 2006 Meeting

Present:

Grace Agnew, chair; Ka-Neng Au, recorder; Ellen Calhoun; Rebecca Gardner; Erika Gorder; Ron Jantz; Rhonda Marker; Mary Page; Francoise Puniello; Robert Sewell; Jane Sloan; Gracemary Smulewitz; Li Sun; Mary Beth Weber

Excused:

Ann Montanaro.

Guests:

Shaun Ellis, Christina Roest.

DRAFT

1. AUL Report

Announcements:

• Grace will be attending the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) meeting next week.
• The Library of Congress has hired RUL to develop a bibliographic utility based on our workflow management system. Version 3.0 of the WMS was recently released with new enhancements. The repository's public interface will be available by January 2007.
• The Fedora Project has received major funding from the Moore Foundation (in addition to the funding from the Mellon Foundation). The current journal management system at the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is migrating to a new Open Source system based on the Fedora Commons application framework.
• More evaluators are needed for the New Jersey Digital Highway project; the goal is 350.

Report from an RLG invitational workshop at Harvard to plan for "From Discovery to Delivery" - a conference to be held March 14-15, 2007 at NYPL. Some highlights:

• Libraries are part of the information ecosystem, and not to be fenced off from users
• UCLA study on undergraduates found fairly high levels of searching competency
• Need to develop collaborative collection development policies especially with digitization projects
• Worldcat will be further developed with selected features from RedLightGreen
• Also, there is general discontent among ARL members about ARL statistics: cost of data collection, inaccuracies (numbers are "not real")

2. Proposed Name Change for the Cataloging Department.

Mary Beth presented a proposal for the name change to reflect the current nature of work in the department. This proposal "Cataloging and Metadata Services," was endorsed by Council and will be announced at Cabinet.

3. Demonstration of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations System.

Shaun Ellis demonstrated the use of the ETD System, first as a typical graduate student and then as a reviewer for the Graduate School of New Brunswick. Members of the Council offered suggestions for textual changes to improve the clarity of the instructions and to facilitate workflow. Use of the ETD will be mandatory for May 2007 graduates.

The meeting adjourned at 11:30am.