Access Strategy Team Charge

The charge to the Access Strategy Team is to:

• Examine existing organizational structures, policies, and practices for providing intellectual and physical access to the Library's collections and resources in all formats, and propose the design for a new organizational infrastructure to support the Library's access work, including policies, standards, workflow/work practices, staffing, and training appropriate for the rapidly evolving integrated information environment; deliver a preliminary report to the Library Implementation Task Force by November 15, 2004.
• Recommend an implementation strategy for the new federated search system and link resolver to the Library Implementation Task Force by November 15, 2004.

The Access Strategy Team will recommend a new infrastructure for:

1. developing and maintaining an overarching Library-wide access policy for all types of collections and resources;
2. determining appropriate cataloging and metadata standards for the various types of materials contained in our collections and resources;
3. establishing processing priorities;
4. designing workflows and work practices to facilitate efficient processing of all types of materials, including existing backlogs as well as newly-acquired materials;
5. outsourcing cataloging/metadata creation for selected collections and resources;
6. determining employee skill sets, staffing levels, and workgroup configurations needed to meet our access goals;
7. developing training programs and documentation;
8. providing the flexibility to adapt the access infrastructure as technologies and resources evolve;
9. pursuing grants and other external funding sources to support our access goals.

Implementation of the fedlink system will provide significant functionality for enhancing user access to all kinds of materials (print, digital, local, remote, commercial, free, etc.) and will also connect users to services from which they can request materials we don't have in our own collections. However, it's not necessarily a question of one size fits all. We may elect to implement multiple user interfaces to multiple "mix & match" sets of information resources, each designed to meet the needs of a specific segment of the user community.

The Access Strategy Team will recommend a strategy for implementing the fedlink system and ensuring that UIUC's fedlink services evolve over time to meet our users' ongoing information needs. The team will identify a project coordinator for an initial pilot project, determine the working groups needed for the pilot, and recommend a target user group. For example, the pilot implementation could focus on a set of resources and services aimed specifically at undergraduate research needs, or at the needs of another subset of users, or it could be much more general in nature. The project coordinator and the working groups will have at least the following responsibilities:

1. develop a project plan and timeline;
2. select the resources and services to be included in the pilot implementation;
3. customize the fedlink system to include the selected resources and services;
4. design and test the pilot user interface;
5. ensure appropriate user authentication mechanisms are in place;
6. evaluate the success of the pilot project;
7. recommend priorities for the ongoing fedlink implementation.