April 21, 2014 Meeting of Administrative Council

1. Conversation with Roger Schonfeld –  Discussion of future library hiring trends and the relationship between assessment activities and developing strategy for serving library user needs. (1 hour)
2. Implementation of GREAT guidelines – Discussion of options and brainstorming ideas for implementing the guidelines at the division and unit levels. (Sue Searing – 15 minutes)
3. Oak Street transfer workflows and permissions – Discussion of possible changes.  (Mary Laskowski – 15 minutes)

Sue Searing, acting-chair; Susan Avery, Jenny Johnson, Greg Knott, Mary Laskowski, Chris Quinn, Lisa Romero, Lynne Rudasill, Mary Schlembach, Jeff Schrader, Tom Teper, Sandy Wolf; Visitors-Lisa Hinchliffe, Roger Schonfeld

1. Conversation with Roger Schonfeld – Discussion of future library hiring trends and the relationship between assessment activities and developing strategy for serving library user needs.

Roger Schonfeld is from Ithaka. Ithaka is a strategic consulting and research service that does research about users and libraries and how our environment is changing. The most recent public research project they have released is a survey that focused on academic library use and directors across the US. There are about 1500 directors of four-year colleges and universities selected. The survey was run in the fall with a 33% result rate. Roger gave an overview of the results.

Roger discussed the different surveys Ithaka is involved in. These surveys include information about research, academic libraries, staffing, future demands for librarians and others and the next generation of librarians.

Members of AC gave Roger suggestions for other questions to be added to surveys, such as what do libraries plan on adding in the future; in the last three years, which categories have had the most growth; and what has actually happened versus what they predicted would happen.

s4-increased funding not very high, take data to shape narrative about why they need more funding. Correlation between this question and my librarian has a well developed strategy, more likely to have high confidence in sp.

ss-full report available on line

lr-used desk tracker to collect statistic on when peope are asking question, what king of questions tjey ar asking, level of difficulty for questions. Useful for staffing purposes. When thing are the busieis when more expertise is needed at the dest. Nothing to take us beyond that. Other things we need to kow about, quality, how people feel about coming into L

rs-doesn’t have eexpertise in this area. Tryinmg tu ounderstand what sorts of data are ebeing collected. Many many service points each one is tracking and gathering  the info a little bit differently. Objective to track demand for these services and th impact. What types of staff eed to b involved.

Lr-what is the quality of question and quality of answer, real challenge. Less reources being present for reference services. What kind of resources do we need to have abailablel for user foming in with questions.

ss-faculty and student surveys tell us how people are sunig our services .

rs-big gap in perception of the directors and the faculty. Staffing, presence in L, we haven’t hasked questions.

Gk- dirctors want this vs the decision – wish list vs reality.

Print to –collections. E-journals  directors are totally alighende transitionling from pring to e. faculty member are much more mixed.

Rs-perceptions. Gaps between facuty membrs and library directiosr on collections

Gk-is it because digital is so fast, skill set may be because of what you needed before, skill set of staff meeting the current need, skill set kepping pace.

Rs-directors feel staff constratings on moving forwards. Constrainits  lack of financial resources, staff skills limiitations

Sa – disconnect with facutluty, tlling students that ave to find things in print.

Gk – age range in faculty,

Rs- age for faculty, not sure about directors

ml-journals digital direct replacement, e-books used differently

tt-nuance, ire 3-books a good replacement, can we ill the ebook, don’t necessarily have that capability. Impages withheld, erodes in the mind of rhe responding populations ofin the value of the materials in the aggregate.

Ssww-directors might have a narrower etal imag. A fculty member may be any online ref tools. We are onlyu easireomg amd catireog use of a narrow.

Rs-library faculty would see be likile to thing of googl or kindle. Whether ebook ecosystems (scholarly) taking place outside the l channels. E-Journals, collections we license.

Use of kindles, ipad, tablets. Different kind of ecosystem developing what does that mean for the L.

Rs-issues AC has on the agenda

ss-implement customer services guidelines

ml – high densisty storage

ss-wg privacy

av – discovery, where are we going, what will we do

rs-what we know from survey research. Locals surveys  wild swings from school to school, faculty who perceive that they start at the L catalog. Chapel hill, duke, nc state, shared catalog-discovery-faculty get the value of that and perceive thaeselves starting at that more commmony. Missing piece – no L knows what share of it’s discovery the user are using come from the sharing channels they provide. The share of us of google, well over 50%.

Effort through nico to draw out where there is bias introduced into webscale discovery services.

Sa-trends, L moving more towards discovery or away from

Rs-3 yrs ago, discovery services charted high. That didn’t make the first slide this year. So many L invested in thse indexed discovery services in the past few years. 4-5 say that is the primary search box on their home page. Huge shift in that direction

Gk-article and he use google most of the time

Lh-discovery-if they are working so great why wouldn’t they spend more on discovery

Rs-directors don’t really know what they want to do with discovery or what the role of discovery is in L. Strategic important the L be seen by users. Don’t see it as a solved problem.

tt-mattrer the starting point that we thought was going to help doent do what we thought it wa going to do. How o you retool now that you’ve ivested in this.

Rs-a little bit of oops. All invsted a lot of resources in certain services. No one want to say they failed or this is a failure. Directors nationally – trying to –what’s realistic for what will happen, how to define discovery now

Sa-see where that goes in a few years down the road. More you look at it, the more you realize how mucked up things are.

Rs-enourmous improvement in those services, based on what came bfore. Hug improvement yet it may not acutlayy make a strategic impact.

Lr-evidence based decision making, facyulty don’t understand assessment and statistics.

Rs-art history project, will be out early/mid next week. Few more to follow. History, chemistry and now art history. Key issue – personal collections matter tremendously to everyone, L don’t know how to support researchers personal collections digitally.

2. Implementation of GREAT guidelines – Discussion of options and brainstorming ideas for implementing the guidelines at the division and unit levels. (Sue Searing)

The Staff Development and Training Committee(SDTC) are developing a training program around the GREAT guidelines. Training is just one piece of implementing the guidelines. Another step is talking about how they are incorporated at the level of the unit and service points and how the guidelines are used in assessment and individual performance.

It was determined that the best way to move forward it so have SDTC or the Advisory Committee to the AUL for User Services visit each unit to answer questions about how the guidelines relate to the work in the unit and give examples of how the guidelines can be implemented.

3. Oak Street transfer workflows and permissions – Discussion of possible changes. (Mary Laskowski)

A lot of people randomly transfer to Oak Street and a vast majority are transferred by CMS. CMS will be doing a review of permissions and will be pulling specific location permissions. CMS will continue to be the main unit it do transfers, which will save the individual units from having to make transfers. Mary will develop procedures that she will send out before changes are made.