Council of University of Wisconsin Libraries
Council of University of Wisconsin Libraries Meeting
UW-Milwaukee
November 5 and 6, 2009
November 5, 2009
Present: John Pollitz (UW-Eau Claire), Ewa Barczyck (UW-Milwaukee), Anita Evans (UW-La Crosse), Deb Nordgren (UW-Superior), Mark Rozmarynowski (UW-Colleges), Valerie Malzacher (UW-River Falls), Jill Markgraf (UW-Eau Claire), Ken Frazier (UW-Madison), Jean Gilbertson (UW-Madison), Mary Rieder (UW Colleges), Zora Sampson (UW-Platteville), Kathy Schneider (WiLS), Paula Ganyard (UW-Green Bay), Kathy Pletcher (UW-Green Bay), Lisa Jewell (UWSA), Michael Doylen (UW-Milwaukee), Terri Muraski (UW-Stevens Point), Paul Roberts (UW-Stout), Vanaja Menon (UW-Parkside).
Absent: Myrna McCallister (UW-Whitewater), Michael Pickart (UW-Stout), Peter Gottlieb (Wisconsin Historical Society), Patrick Wilkinson (US-Oshkosh), Kathy Davis (UW-Stevens Point), Jon Mark Bolthouse (UW Colleges), Kristin Eschenfelder (UW-Madison), Jeffrey Alexander (UW-Parkside), Bill Gillard (UW Colleges).
John Pollitz called the meeting to order at 12:10 pm with introductions and campus announcements. Ewa Barczyk gave a welcome and presented a 4-minute video promoting the new Daniel Soref Learning Commons at UW-Milwaukee. Rieder provided the following corrections to the October 8, 2009 CUWL teleconference meeting: Jon Mark Bolthouse under attendees, and the UB Policy Recommendations were presented by Jill Markgraf rather than Jon Mark Bolthouse. Sampson moved and Roberts seconded approval of the minutes from the October 8, 2009 CUWL meeting and Executive Committee minutes from October 7 and 28, 2009.
UW System Report – Lisa Jewell
Jewell gave a report from UW System on behalf of Ed Meachen. Ed would like a draft of the CSRG presentation to go to him and Lorie Docken by the end of December. The January 2010 CSRG presentation by CUWL should lay out a business case for a pilot to improve access to research for students, faculty and staff to find and retrieve materials that is vastly superior than what we have now. We need to develop a robust pilot with results by November, 2010. Ed suggests that the presentation be no more than ½ hour and that we include Steve Frye as a presenter. The CSRG has two major projects for FY11: A new budget system (new interface, procure new system and get off of main frame) and a new service center.
Jewell reported that she would like to arrange four campus visits: Green Bay, Whitewater, Platteville and Stout. Please contact her with dates that work for scheduling these visits. The CUWL Summer Conference will be held at the Doubletree in Madison. Jewell will co-chair this committee. SFX training will be held in December, with MetaLib training to follow. The training sessions are being funded by UWSA. DoIT issues include getting pricing for Eau Claire to join the Hub, reviewing and revising service level agreements, outstanding Voyager upgrade issues, and Hub costs for this and next year. The LAMs have been tasked to work on resolving the social security number issue in coordination with Jim Lowe. UWSA is making $30,000 available for flexible spending by CUWL, to invest in strategic areas. The South Central Library Service contract for materials delivery has been finalized and will be in effect for another five years.
Coordinating Committee Reports:
CRS (Rieder): The report was emailed prior to meeting: Library Dynamics Report -- Jewell and Diane Passafaro are missing from the list of committee members. The working group looked at the most heavily used sections of LC headings within the UW System, and evaluated how many circs per title. They determined that the optimal number of copies for use within the System is 4 copies per title and would like to set that as the benchmark across the system. This number could also be used as a benchmark for ordering within Blackwell but staff also need to check the Voyager catalog. A link within Blackwell can be configured to simulsearch so that staff time is minimized. Will there be an assessment within a year as to how this works? Oshkosh has just dropped its Blackwell approval plan. Can we do an override in Blackwell to prohibit purchasing a 5th copy? A resolution was moved by Menon and seconded by Ganyard as follows. Resolved: Adopt the Library Dynamics Working Group recommendation as a general guiding principle to stretch acquisition/collection budgets and to allow for individual exceptions in purchasing. Motion approved.
Emerald vote (Pollitz): passed 11 – 3 to renew as recommended by CRS. It was suggested that a comment section be included in survey if using an email vote for next time. Remove $4655 from SEC budget as a result of this vote.
A working group has been formed to look at ProQuest Central as a replacement for Lexis Nexis. The group needs a member from the Law Library to be on this committee.
Scientific American: Richard Reeb is putting together a group to look at this. If a campus doesn’t participate we will need to look at another way to split the costs. Decision to be made by the end of the calendar year.
User Services Coordinating Committee (Markgraf): The report was emailed prior to meeting.
UB and patron record retention--recommend retaining at least one transaction. Motion made by Evans and seconded by Malzacher: CUWL recommends the retention of at least one transaction for the most recent circulation for any given item. Motion passed.
Future of UB – Markgraf and Bolthouse will work together to examine how to effect enhanced unmediated UW system borrowing, i.e. assess universal borrowing, as it relates to the Charges and Next Steps.
Resource Discovery – a webinar has been scheduled for November 19, 2009 at noon. USCC and REDTF have pulled together resources on the CUWL wiki so that people have a basic understanding of what resource discovery is prior to the webinar. Directors are encouraged to encourage their staffs to explore and to request feedback for how this is happening and being promoted on each campus.
LTCC report tabled for 11-6-09
DICC report (Doylen): pursuing no special projects at this time but do continue to meet and discuss proposals as they come forward. Doylen has received feedback from Peter Gorman regarding the merger of Minds@UW with the UWDCC, that he is pleased with progress so far. Currently working on workflow development and comparing their proposed practices with other institutions. When will the launch of the Fedora platform occur? Contingent with launch of new resource discovery interface. Continue to be involved with Forward on issues of resource discovery.
Charges to CUWL Coordinating Committees
Pollitz distributed a draft document for discussion by the group. This was developed using feedback from the Coordinating Committee reactions to the Next Steps document created at the August 2009 CUWL retreat. Original charges came out of the Executive Committee. Assign committees each one or two items to take action on and measure progress on by August 2010. Need to bring in administrative people so that it’s not just a library-centric project – must bring in academic elements. What process will we develop to select campuses to participate in pilot, especially in light of the $30,000 pilot money provided by UWSA in order to minimize competition among some campuses? Campuses will still need to invest some money locally in addition to the seed money. Each director needs to decide whether they can commit to the time commitment required of staff. USCC needs to look at the user aspects of product, LTCC needs to look at the technical implementation aspects. The Executive Committee will refresh the committee charges. The Executive Committee will set priorities and update charges as necessary. The Coordinating Committee’s tasks are outlined in the Next Steps document. Each Coordinating Committee will need to discuss how to assess their part of the Resource Discovery criteria. The Executive Committee needs to communicate with each chair what the short-term activities of each group should be and then cycle that information back to CUWL. This will have to be clarified by the Executive Committee by December.
Research Fellows Program (Frazier)
This program will have the outcome of creating authorized users of UW Madison licensed databases. It will use special ID management using partners identified by CUWL as authenticated users within the UW Madison user community. It is not a back door for licensing Madison content for whole UW system. There will be a limit of 8 authorized users per campus initially, and will require the library to act as an agent that confirms the research activity that supports the decision to have faculty authorized with the appropriate password to have access to research databases. 2 campuses that will pilot the project are Oshkosh and River Falls are initially chosen. If procedures and sign offs are in place the program can roll out very quickly to every campus. The term for participating fellows will be for one year. Library Director will decide which 8 fellows are appointed from each campus. It is crucial that the Madison ids not be shared among faculty. If not willing to do this, do not participate in the program.
Forward Project update and discussion (Gilbertson, Frazier)
The UW-Madison Web Services Team is managing the development of Forward on behalf of CUWL and UW Madison Administration. Lee Konrad is the point person if you have questions. The Forward Development Task Force has established priorities and firm requirements for the initial build of Forward as a resource discovery tool. The initial rollout in outline form will be completed by December, 2009. They have identified functionality and target dates for delivering the Forward application for Fall 2010. The first version will facilitate the discovery of UW System MARC data. Other data types will be considered but are not committed to at this time. Once the road map is complete, the task force will seek out development partners from other campuses. Areas of help needed are coding, cataloging and metadata, and interface design. In terms of user testing, the task force and the USCC will coordinate opportunities for patrons and librarians to test the initial rollout. CUWL will have the opportunity to include people with technical skills to help build before the rollout. This will give us an example of a tool we can evaluate. The Web Services Management Team is the oversight body, and are charging the Forward Development Task Force.
Malzacher moved to adjourn the meeting, seconded by Roberts. The group was given a tour of the library by Barczyk.
November 6, 2009
Present: Present: John Pollitz (UW-Eau Claire), Ewa Barczyk (UW-Milwaukee), Anita Evans (UW-La Crosse), Deb Nordgren (UW-Superior), Mark Rozmarynowski (UW-Colleges), Valerie Malzacher (UW-River Falls), Jill Markgraf (UW-Eau Claire), Ken Frazier (UW-Madison), Jean Gilbertson (UW-Madison), Mary Rieder (UW Colleges), Zora Sampson (UW-Platteville), Kathy Schneider (WiLS), Paula Ganyard (UW-Green Bay), Kathy Pletcher (UW-Green Bay), Lisa Jewell (UWSA), Michael Doylen (UW-Milwaukee), Terri Muraski (UW-Stevens Point), Paul Roberts (UW-Stout), Vanaja Menon (UW-Parkside), Jon Mark Bolthouse (UW Colleges), Peter Gottlieb(Wisconsin Historical Society).
Absent: Myrna McCallister (UW-Whitewater), Michael Pickart (UW-Stout), Patrick Wilkinson (US-Oshkosh), Kathy Davis (UW-Stevens Point), Kristin Eschenfelder (UW-Madison), Jeffrey Alexander (UW-Parkside), Bill Gillard (UW Colleges).
CUWL Organization Assessment (Malzacher): report emailed prior to meeting; Summary presented. Survey findings were previously presented at CUWL. CUWL members are most satisfied with the committee structure of those surveyed, as well as with the Coordinating Committee chairs participation. CUWL members were also the most dissatisfied with the CDC and LAMs roles in the new structure. CDC and LAMs predominantly responded they felt they had a productive role. Communication is an ongoing problem among CUWL and its subgroups, and the committee work and recommendations focused predominantly on that issue. 40% of librarians are not willing to be involved in CUWL subgroups. Need to look at modifications necessary to address in terms of committee structure.
Recommendations highlighted for discussion in the report. Main themes: Awareness of CUWL; Committee structure; Communications methods; and Workload issues. There will be additional work resulting from these recommendations if it is accepted by CUWL. Library directors and the Executive Committee will need to be more intentional in making appointments to include more diverse functional areas (tech services, etc.). Concern was expressed regarding involvement of staff vs. governance issues within CUWL. High level of participation needs to be balanced against the strategic initiatives outlined at the CUWL retreat. Ganyard moved to accept the report, seconded by Menon. Motion passed and report accepted by CUWL.
WHS Report (Gottlieb): 2 documents distributed. The first is a Photo Agreement that WHS is asking each ARC to sign, and asking each library to implement and will keep photographs in local collections. 8 have signed out of 12, all need to sign so that a uniform policy can be in place. The second document is the Preserving the American Historical Record Act – federal legislation for improving preservation and access to historical records. Archivists need to contact congressional delegation to sign on to this legislation. Response has been good – 3 Wis. Legislators have signed on so far. If it passes with an appropriation, it would bring $930,000 per year to Wisconsin to be used for a variety of projects to ensure important collections are readily accessible for users. Douglas County collections moved back to UW-Superior after 18 years at Superior Public Library. Preservation storage facility in Madison is moving ahead. On November 16 the kick off planning meeting will be held. This will be both a collection facility and staff facility. Projected to open and be occupied in 2013. WHS staff are working on selecting and preparing collections to be moved already. Library reading room renovation project on schedule and should reopen in mid-February. Gottlieb invited CUWL to come visit after its completion. They are planning several opening events, one of which will be dedicated to university partners. UW-Madison has been a generous contributor. Question: What is the overall vision for collection storage at WHS? The vision is that storage facility will maintain access to materials, and not be dark storage. Operations are still under discussion but plan regular retrievals that will minimize amount of time users wait for collections to come to campus buildings for use. Still discussing user space in the building as well as digital delivery capability. Plan to move ½ of volume of archival materials kept in Madison to this new facility and ¼ of volume of library materials. Will change everything at WHS and how access is provided. Storage within the WHS building needs to be repurposed to public service areas.
LTCC Report (Bolthouse): X-server implementation: The X-server is a service Ex Libris offers via MetaLib. The University of California used it to develop Xerxes, which is an open source product. We are excited to have it charged as a maintenance fee rather than a license fee, and it is being funded by UWSA this year. Jewell is in negotiations with DoIT to get it up and running. Another product the LTCC is interested in is the Bx Recommender Service, which works as in an Amazon search (“if you purchased this, you might like …”) but for electronic resources and journal articles. This works for not just searches on your campus but at all Ex Libris customers for articles that match in your database. Perhaps this could be done on a test server at the Madison campus to test and look at it. Social Security Number issue: came to LTCC but passed to the LAMs. LAMs are researching extent of SSNs within the Voyager database, Madison and Milwaukee are looking to hire Ex Libris to do this work for them. The LAMS are questioning DoIT reports as to whether there are false positives, 9 digit dummy records rather than SSN, and need to determine accuracy first and then move forward to eliminate any SSNs out of Voyager. Future of UB will be coordinated with USCC and REDTF.
WiLS Report (Schneider): Report handed out for intra-UW System lending/borrowing. Kathy will email the document delivery report separately. $12,000 has been spent the first quarter, ½ of that coming from p-cards. Everything is being treated equally in terms of workflow.
BadgerCat discussion: Oshkosh the only campus really using it. Chose not to non-renew last year. Does CUWL want to continue in July? $15,000 within CUWL budget could be repurposed in anticipation of increase in WorldCat or to the SEC. That decision will be made by the Budget Committee. Motion made by Evans and seconded by Sampson not to renew BadgerCat. Motion passed.
Informational: In process of moving Wisconsin Heritage Online to DPI. Administration and management will be handled by Reference and Loan Library.
Midwest consortia planning: Schneider is not sure where it’s going, but input indicates the high priority issues in Wisconsin are Midwest linking of physical delivery, database license pricing, and linking resource sharing systems already involved in through an open source project. They are looking for clusters of interest to move forward. Shared print storage facility is one area of interest though hasn’t risen to the top in Wisconsin so far.
Community Manager Initiative: WiLS staff will be assigned as the primary campus contact, mostly to look at local campus needs from a product research approach. Private colleges are interested in the systemwide statistical gathering that WiLS performs for UWS.
Task Forces (Pollitz): Pollitz announced the following task force assignments:
DIN: EVG, Pletcher, Frazier, Wilkinson, Pollitz, Menon in year two.
CSRG: Pollitz, David Luke, Malzacher, Lee Konrad, Jewell. Kathy Pletcher is willing to give feedback during the development process.
Efficiencies: Davis (Chair), Nordgren, Pollitz, McCallister, Barczyck, Ed Van Gemert. This group will develop a recommendation which will ultimately go to Rebecca Martin. The group discussed the lean process model for technical services business model redesign. Will this really lead to outcomes and not just process? This group needs to develop a plan that outlines a pathway to results. Identify outcomes and a time frame; perhaps use consulting services at WiLS to outsource the analysis rather than doing it ourselves? Are we stepping away from our strategic vision? We need a very specific approach to efficiency rather than a general approach. The August retreat was the first strong focus on this issue and this is our next meeting since that retreat, so it is time to take the next step. Efficiency discussion doesn’t necessarily address consolidation, maintaining staff resources, duplication of effort and the cost involved. We will look at University of California model, especially at San Diego. Perhaps include a California presentation at the February meeting?
Strategic Directions: Evans, Roberts, Menon, Ganyard, Gilbertson. Chair not identified yet, charge needs to be developed for this group.
Common Systems discussion (Pollitz): CUWL will be making a presentation to the CSRG on January 28, 2010. This presentation needs to include background information on how the libraries funded the Voyager implementation – the original common system. We should design a budget request that takes some of the burden off of local budgets. The DIN group will work on securing collections funding. The CSRG would be the group to fund infrastructure and technical applications. We need a framework to describe the new environment, we may need to sustain the old system but still need to develop new modular services that need continual funding. Next year will be the “big ask” for funding of multiple technologies from the CSRG. Right now we need to develop a big picture approach describing what we want to do from a strategic communication perspective.
Next meeting: Monday, February 15, 2009 in Madison
Spring meeting: Lisa will communicate with Brian Remer to get on the ITMC agenda and communicate the date of that meeting. WAAL is April 21-23, 2010.
Roberts made a motion to adjourn the meeting. Meeting adjourned at 11:30 am.
Respectfully submitted,
Lisa Jewell