August 17, 2015 Meeting of Administrative Council

Q and A session and provide the opportunity to bring forward questions divisions and division heads may have for John

John Wilkin, chair; Melody Allison, Susan Avery, Tom Habing, Joanne Kaczmarek, Cindy Kelly, Greg Knott, Chris Quinn, Lisa Romero, Jeff Schrader, Jennifer Teper, Tom Teper, Sandy Wolf

Agenda Committee

Joanne will continue as the AC representative on the Budget Group. Lisa Romero has graciously agreed to serve as the Agenda Committee.

 

Q and A session and provide the opportunity to bring forward questions you and/or your division may have for John.

John encouraged the Division Coordinators to get folks out for Library Update on 8/27 from 2-3pm to hear about the budget.

 

John announced that the last Deep Dive for the Strategic Planning will be held on August 26, from 8:30am-12:00pm in the ACES Library, Heritage Room. Tom is the AUL responsible for fostering the connection for the last one. After that, the Library will move into a phase of articulating plans.

 

John announced that the next Library Update will be held on August 27 from 2-3pm in 66 Library. John will speak in detail about what comes next. Greg will do a more thorough review of the budget reductions. We do have the final budget from campus along with our allocation letter. Things may change once the State balances the budget. The reduction in the budget letter is the amount we planned for. The bulk of the reductions came from central sources; very little coming from the units so the impact will be broadly felt.

 

Hiring plan – we secured the positons we hoped to and several we did not think we would get approved, which situates us well.

 

The things happening on campus are unfortunate and a distraction, but we must remind ourselves of the kind of enduring mission and responsibility we have to do the work we’re doing. We are in a position of strength. The hiring plan is strategic. It is important that we continue to build. We will keep planning to situate ourselves for the next budget.

 

What are the immediate and long-term plans for Suzanne Chapman’s and Aaron McCollough’s positions and IDEALS?

John felt these would be good questions to put to the AULs for User Services and Research, but was glad to share some points from discussions he has had with each. Chris Prom will begin to segue some web-related responsibilities to Suzanne. It will take time to get her feet on the ground in terms of the User Experience regarding web and discovery. Aaron, in regards to IDEALS, has been talking with Beth about the structure of the research division. Beth put together a plan to formulate distribution of responsibilities. IDEALS, Scholarly Commons, and copyright was a lot for one person (Sarah Shreeves). Beth has a repository manager position to fill and has identified search committee members. She has asked Aaron to manage this positon. We restructured repository work with a triad of responsibilities. Kyle Rimkus is focused on preservation function; Bill Ingram is focused on the technology.. The Repository manager will be responsible for the “service” function for all of the repositories we have and report to Aaron. Aaron is responsible for scholarly communications and publishing, though publishing will happen in many areas. For example, Merinda works with undergrad research journals and Lisa Hinchliffe made a proposal for an innovation fund grant around reflecting research done in Library publishing happening in a number of areas. The copyright faculty position that has been approved will also be in Beth’s and Aaron’s area.

 

How will the AUL for User Services’ responsibilities be handled until the position is filled?

John asked Sue Searing to put together a transition interim plan and presented it to the Executive Committee (EC). A lot of the duties will fall to Tom or Beth or a network of people responsible for some of the duties. Susan Avery is working on the disability webpages, in consultation with Jeff Schrader and JJ Pionke. Sabbatical requests are being handled by Beth permanently. John hopes the interim time is very short and doesn’t want to prepare an interim strategy until we know how long it’s going to be. This subject will be on the EC agenda.

 

What is our travel budget?

John will speak about this at the Library update. Something will be sent out after the update. There will be a reduced travel budget. This is based on the 5% budget reductions we planned for, which ended up being about $870,000. The implications of this reduction are real and we will feel it in a number of ways, travel allocations are one area. We were able to leave the AUL’s programmatic budgets in tact, so they are able to help out where needed. There will need to be less travel, only attending the most important things that have direct benefits to the Library. We will not have the freedom we’ve had in the past. If you have grant funding for travel, it will not be affected at all. We have no information on campus funding for travel.

 

The School of Medicine proposed a committee; who is involved?

The Committee will be formed from the two campus.’ They will be working on a transition from the current Medical Library on campus. UIC operations will be closed in Urbana and they are figuring out what they need to do to make that happen. They hope to have a smooth handoff for those using the services. We will be investing in Medical Library support. Additional staff and collections money are coming to the Library from campus for the College of Medicine. There is no set timeline. We already have requests for journals we didn’t have before. We need some one-time money from the Provost, to fill the gaps.

 

Are some faculty getting salary increases?

John is not aware of any increases being given except for promotion and tenure increases. There is a flat prohibition on changes to salary right now, in part because of Rauner pressures and in part because of salary pressures. The Council of Deans message and the message in Swanlund is that there are no adjustments to salaries being made.

 

Greg wanted to make sure that everyone knows that John really went to bat for Library and his negotiation strategies on campus cannot be overstated.

Greg also announced that Campus is rolling out a new financial system. The system will give unit manager more information. It will replace the wage report and save a ton of time. The bugs aren’t all worked out yet, but we should have a new version at the end of the year. Greg is also working on eliminating the need for a physical signature on the phone bills.

 

Where does OBFS get their estimates for the cost of what we can spend on hotels?

Greg stated that the government has a travel board that sets the rates, higher ed adopts the rates, but those rates don’t work for a lot of places.

 

Tom announced that the legislative exemption that gave us some more flexibility for procurement of Library Materials has expired. There is currently no anticipated date of renewal, putting significant additional pressure on our acquisitions personnel. This means that the dates that we have outlined in previous years as being critical are just that much more important. We need to make purchasing decisions earlier and work with Acquisitions to go ahead on procurement. Tom sent out and email on July 29 detailing the dates. Tom also wanted to remind people that when they place orders without a purchase order in place, John has to write a letter promising that we won’t do that again, so please follow the procedures for placing orders.

 

John again encouraged everyone to come to the Library Update on August 27.

 

Cindy Kelly reminded everyone that the interviews for the AUL for User Services are next week and hopes we have a good showing at the meetings and presentation for this important position.