Agenda
Meeting Notes: Kitty
- E-classroom policy
- Instruction Forum update
- Project SAILS
- Reference Forum update
- Web update
- Test Pilot trials
- Geographic Information Services update
- Reference services hours on the Heard web page
- Discussion topic: What web services do we need to highlight/promote/offer?
- Google Scholar from the Heard Web
- 'Find in a library' through Google
- Ingenta Connect
- Ref Works
Meeting Notes from Kitty Porter
Present: Teresa Gray, David Carpenter, Leslie Foutch, Flo Wilson, Jason Battle, Robert Rich, Amia Baker, Melinda Brown, Sue Erickson, Kitty Porter. Absent: Janet Hirt, Amy Limpitlaw
E-Classroom Policy: Melinda passed out the revised policy that was developed by Melinda, Teresa, Amy and Kitty. There were a few small wording changes made to cover the instances of librarians teaching for credit classes. She asked that anyone with other suggested changes get in touch with her. She reported that a proposal has gone to the Reassessment Committee for a laptop cart that would make it possible to use any wireless classroom for hands on teaching. This would help to alleviate the pressure on the E-Classroom which has become intense with the expansion of librarian teaching responsibilities. The proposal calls for 20 laptops on a recharging cart and a projector. The proposal is in the review stage. Procedures will have to be worked out, but it is anticipated that sign-up procedures will be like those for the E-classroom.
Instructional Forum: Melinda reported on a session she attended at ALA on Project SAILS, a program that come from Kent State University. It is a literacy skills assessment test that is similar to the one from ETS presently used. SAILS is based on the ALA standards. An institution can set up an account. Cost is $3/student up to a cap of $2000 per administration (defined as a term from August through Dec. 15, with some question about it also covering spring term). A student logs in and is presented with 45 questions from a bank of 250. Each set of questions is unique to eliminate the possibility of students text messaging each other results. Two questions can be customized to allow for collecting class specific information. Melinda is working on setting up a group here to decide if this is something we want to pursue.
She also reported on changes at the Writing Studio. Amy Hodges Hamilton, the director, has left and Jennifer Holt appointed acting director. A new director of undergraduate writing has taken over the responsibility for pedagogy and faculty connections. Melinda will arrange for someone from the WS to come talk to librarians about the changes and what they do and how we can cooperate with each other.
Reference Forum: Sue announced that there would be no session for August. For July she will conduct a workshop on QuestionPoint July 25 at noon in the Central 6th floor classroom. Topics to be covered: Clarification vs answer; how to edit patron response; how to reject assignments; how to add notes; how to build and use scripts. There will be time for discussion at the end. If there are other topics people want covered, let her know.
Web and Test Pilot Update: Flo asked everyone to take a look at the comments people had made on the Test Pilot site about the new refreshed web pages. The team is still shooting for an August 1 date for having everything wrapped up as it will take time to move all lower level pages over and make all the links work.
GIS: Brian Christens will be leaving at the end of July. Rick Stringer-Hye, Sue Erickson, and Amy Stewart-Mailhiot have been helping to plan what will happen when Brian leaves and will serve as resource people for any GIS questions that come up before a GIS specialist is hired. Sue and Rick are on the search committee. VU is getting a site license for the GIS ARC software so we should be listening for anyone mentioning that they are about to buy it themselves.
Web Content changes: Flo brought up the issue of content changes to the web site and who is responsible. A good example of a current void is Google Scholar. How do we get out the word to people about resources like this that we know they would use? Now that there is no more web content team, is it the business of our group to prepare content and then find out where to send it? Other examples are library hours. Rutgers has a single page giving all the libraries with the hours reference service is available, and another page for open hours. This led to a discussion of how we define reference hours in the different libraries. Some of us no longer have a “reference librarian” at the service desk. It is important to know who is available when for referral. Amia mentioned she would like to know what procedures for that are in other libraries. Sue said it was one of the topics listed for discussion at a Reference Forum. We decided that would be good for September as we plan to rotate workshop/product demos with discussions.
Flo brought up Ingenta Connect (formerly Un Cover and Reveal). She studied the number of accounts and found only 133, some of which were obviously nonfunctional, others with only single titles listed. We talked briefly about whether, in light of new developments like RSS feeds from publishers, it is worth spending $3000/year on this service. Flo will talk to John Haar. Sue mentioned that Hiliary Rudsenske has prepared a nice web page on alerting services. Any of us knowing any in our specific discipline not on her page should send her the link and a description. We talked about topics like this providing a good opportunity for faculty (and grad student) outreach. A newsletter being considered by the Faculty News Team was one possibility; another would be a library seminar series covering topics like Google Scholar, new resources, etc. Sue has worked with Bruce Barry in Sociology in his writing class on popular culture. He would be a good person to talk about Wikipedia and Google. Leslie has worked with Andy van Schaak who does an excellent presentation on Google Scholar. These would be possible speakers at a program kick-off seminar.