Announcements

1. MSL has done the user survey for three hours leaving one more hour to complete. Carol Drum said the results are interesting. On Monday night it was graduates/undergraduates, primarily undergraduates. Tuesday afternoon showed primarily the same pattern. On Saturday they had less than 10 patrons during the hour that was surveyed that would have required separate authentication. It appears that MSL serves primarily UF patrons with the majority being undergraduates.

2. Carol Turner has discussed with the PSSC committee the possibility of posting a similar, yet shorter survey on the web page. There would be a series of short surveys where they had no more than three choices or a yes/no answer. These surveys were instituted to get a better idea of what we are facing with authentication.

3. The Information Technology Coordinator interviews are next week on Monday and Wednesday. The schedule has not been finalized. It looks like it will last about half a day. The open session will be at 10:30am.

4. Lori Driscoll is scheduled to start next Friday, November 9th.

5. There will be large tour groups of students on the first, second, and third floor in Library West on November 1st & 6th. These students are in the First Year Florida Freshman Experience class. Its similar to the Preview Tour the library did a couple of summers ago. There will be 8 groups of twenty students.

6. RefeXpress has had 329 questions since the 27th. Two-hundred eighteen were this month. It appears to follow the same patterns as seen at the traditional reference desk. Patrick has received positive feedback concerning the service. We can determine repeat customers for the service. There is a feature that notifies you when you start the service that you have a customer and it can provide you with a history of that user. Rich has designed a header for the UF catalog page with a link to RefeXpress. Carol T. noted that she is still unclear as to what it looks like from the patrons view and if there are things that she tries to push that they might have trouble receiving. Jana has a partial list of such items. Carol Drum noted that the web collaborating system does not seem to be efficient. The default is for you to follow the patron so you have to remember to change that at the beginning. Secondly the patron has trouble following you. She did a session with someone that allowed her to be the patron so she could follow them and see what the patron sees. She didn’t care for it at all. You have to be careful about what you are collaborating with especially with the EBSCO host. She didn’t know if it’s a function of EBSCO or the net agent that we do not have set appropriately. Jana believes that it’s a function of JAVA. Jana noted that WEB LUIS pushes and collaborates really well. The committee needs to derive what works and what doesn’t with the system so we can be aware of it when working with patrons. It’s difficult to work with more than one patron at a time. The system will allow two a time. Its good to let patrons know if you are working with more than one at a time so they can expect some delay. At the end of the semester (or sooner) the committee should meet to discuss what is working and what is not. Jan suggested that a report about the Virtual Reference Conference be provided to those that are not able to attend.

7. The 911 resources page that Alice, Patrick and students have been working on was posted yesterday under current events and under subject guides.

8. Ann suggested checking links before teaching classes. URL’s can be sold/purchased and the content changed to undesirable subject matter.

9. Alice and Carol T. went to a meeting at the Hippodrome about the Reading One Book program. The Hippodrome is heading up this event. It will involve libraries, clubs, schools, bookstores, radio stations and churches in the Gainesville community. They have begun to advertise this event in their playbill. They will put on a play starting March 1st called “One City One Story” about the Diary of Anne Frank. They have a lot suggested activities to go along with it: lectures, panels, displays, readings, discussions, essay contest, art contest, psa’s on the radio, articles in the newspapers, a website, and the reading of excerpts from the play. Jana suggested that we could do something in the Plaza of Americas, perhaps a reading or an excerpt. Lauren Caldwell, the Director for the Hippodrome was at the meeting. She said the actors are actor’s equity so she doesn’t know what the union would require. They also have interns from all over the world that may be available to do this. They are looking for volunteers to design posters, make and distribute buttons, create bookmarks and banners, and fax press releases. Carol T. suggested that we provide a supporting role such that we can distribute information and perhaps bring in a speaker.

10. People Awareness Week is January 14th – 18th. There was a campus wide meeting last week to discuss what the purpose of people awareness week is and what some of the activities will be. The basic purpose is to celebrate diversity and to provide an opportunity for staff and students to focus attention on human diversity, promote interaction and positive relationships, encourage acceptance, encourage discussion, celebrate in various ways, work toward a campus climate where human diversity is encouraged and celebrated. They will have grants up to $500 for program expenses. The deadline to apply for a grant is December 1st. The planning committee will do the publicity. In the past the library has had displays, lunches and speakers. Carol T. has suggested bringing in Bill Maxwell. He recently had an article in the Gainesville Sun entitled “Read and Make a Difference.” It discusses educating ourselves through reading. David Hickey has worked on this in the past and will do so again. Alice asked for more volunteers.

11. Carol T. and David attended the RLG Original Shares meeting in Atlanta. The meeting was divided into two days.
    1. Day One
       • RLG shares – whats working, what needs improvement
       • Net lender reimbursement – Is the net lending fee to low? If we lend more to libraries in the US then we get reimbursement of $7.00. If you lend twice as much as you borrow than that fee goes up to $7.00 per item. They recently increased the fee to $21 per item if you lend overseas. We have always been a net lender so we get money back from Shares.
       • RLG Shares Executive Group Members – Should they be actively recruiting national members? They are currently looking at bringing in the National Library of New Zealand and of Austria into RLG Shares to make those collections more accessible to Shares members.
       • Digitizing on demand – Should we take things we get from ILL and make those digitized and then make them available in electronic format.
       • Sharing staff expertise and information about services, products and technologies among Shares members to build a sense of community among Shares.
       • Providing access to non-circulating collections and non-print format materials. A benefit of being a Shares member in ILL is having access to materials that typically don’t circulate in ILL. Such as, special collections materials, reference materials, ad format, etc. As a member of Shares it is important that each institution remembers that when we get a request for something that is a special collection item that you don’t just say no. UF’s special collections staff are very good at providing these kinds of items and accommodating our commitment to RLG Shares.
       • What are the five top challenges facing our RLG Shares operation in the next three years. Our five were renovation, new library management system, increased use/demand for ILL services, budget cuts, and ? What are five things that Shares can do to help us meet those challenges? They have been thru the renovation process so they could give us information on what worked/didn’t work for them.
       • They gave a PowerPoint demo for the Cultural Materials Initiative. There are twenty plus libraries that have agreed to have materials from special collections digitized and made available.

    2. Day Two
       • Reports on the different committees that are out there: Share Net Lender Committee, International ILL (brings international universities and museums into Shares), Shares Practitioner Council (looks at improving directory information and providing training, educating Shares on licensing and contracts for electronic resources). They also gave an update on Shares planning and technology updates.
       • Demonstration of electronic delivery component of ILLiad. It will convert TIF files to PDF files, send that file to a server and automatically email the user that he/she has an article at a given URL address. We can determine how long the article stays up. The default set at 15 days.
       • ILL Manager – It’s a system like the traditional RLIN that we use now except it’s for ISL compliant. It’s the version of ILLiad they are offering. David believes that ILLiad is a better system and OCLC is making ILLiad ISL compliant.
       • They are coming out with a new version of ARIAL 3.01 that will save a scanned article as a PDF file. We expect a high volume of traffic with our ARIAL machine therefore we are requesting another copy of ARIAL for the ILL office and we may request an updated version of ARIAL for science.
       • Round robin discussion about future enhancements.
       • They mentioned a couple of projects at Stanford and Library of Congress that when they get a request for materials that are out of copyright they are digitizing those materials. They are using this as a tool to decide what types of materials should be digitized.

12. MSL has been discussing services during the renovation. Noise and parking may make West uninviting. Crossing training for RefeXpress and upcoming renovation might be beneficial. Jana is concerned about the environment when trying to teach classes in West during the renovation. Rich wondered if Room 100 in East could be utilized during this period to offer some services that are usually offered in West. Carol Drum noted that statistics have gone up and renovation could have implications on that. Jana noted a concern about quite study space. Carol T. said we may have to adjust hours.

13. The kick off meeting with the architects was cancelled as they are still negotiating the contract. The firm selected seems to be very focused on communicating with users and staff.

14. LMG will meet next week to determine where we are with the balanced scorecards. Carol asked everyone to start looking at the scorecard documents. The staff was really involved with the planning sessions and we don’t want that to diminish. Staff from all levels should be involved in looking at the scorecards and implementing the objectives.

15. Sue Marsh from RLG will be here on November 19th & 20th. She will provide and overview of RLG activities, discuss the Cultural Materials Initiative, EUREKA searching, ILL Manager, and digitizing. They have found a new way to complete dataloads in RLIN. They will list the record and provide a link into our system. If anyone is interested in meeting with her contact Carol T. The Collection Management Chair interview is on the 19th. Carol is trying to work around this schedule.

16. Authentication is still slated for December. Carol will contact Bill Covey to get an update. There is still a lot of work to be done on the policy and procedures prior to authentication. There is a tech coordinator meeting scheduled for Tuesday afternoon at 2:00p in Library West that Carol is welcome to attend. A lot of the public machines will require memory upgrades prior to authentication.

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