RISG Minutes Wed., 7/15/09 10-11:45; Rotch Conference Room
Peter (minutes), Remlee, Bill, Anita, Angie, Mark, Lisa S.
1. Announcements & updates
- Peter reported that he sent the instruction statistics spreadsheet for FY2009 to Steve. The spreadsheet for staff training was sent to Steve, Keith and Robin.
- Angie reported that a group (Angie, Darcy, Courtney) is investigating other simpler options for making video tutorials including making them easily on the fly.
Angie will also work on updating existing videos for the fall. (Probably in camtasia.) - Mark reports that the undergrad assessment group has some preliminary results. He will share these at the next meeting. A brief summary has been sent to Steve.
- The online application process for obtaining Harvard borrowing privileges is almost ready! Requests will generate the pdf form needed to obtain a special borrower's card at Harvard.
If the user's patron information doesn't match criteria needed to generate this pdf the request will be moved to a circ queue in Request Tracker for further for help.
This new process should be up and running by mid August. - PSLG talked about committee activity in light of reorganization. Committees will focus on short term projects and projects currently underway.
- The Virtual Reference Collection has been converted to a libguide that loads faster and works better. Anyone having suggested additions to this collection should send them to Georgiana.
- Ellen Duranceau is working on a libguide of publishing services. Some of the information there is related to research help. Remlee will ask for feedback and get clarification from Ellen before the page goes live.
2. Finalize draft of committee self-review (Remlee, 15 mins)
Remlee asked for final comment and will send the final version to Steve today.
3. Instruction Plan implementation: progress to date, next steps (Peter, 15 mins)
We spent some time looking at where we are in the implementation of the system-wide instruction plan. Some of the things that are still in process:
Instruction toolkit - A wiki has been created for this. Mark has gotten ideas from many people and is in the process of implementing them.
Once he's added things to the wiki he'll report back to RISG. This will also be where we keep a repository of instruction materials. Mark will be addressing this when he reports back to us.
Coordinating in house training in teaching skills for library staff. -We'll put this on the agenda for a future meeting and convene a group to discuss. Barbara may be interested.
4. Subject guides awareness assessment follow-up (Peter, 15 mins)
Peter reported on some preliminary findings after he and Heather looked at the survey data related to this. Awareness of subject guides among undergrads has gone down since 2005.
For other groups awareness didn't change much. Perception of importance of the subject pages appears to have declined since the last survey.
We wondered if perhaps the low perception of importance for these pages might have something to do with the lack of awareness. If users don't know subject guides exist it is unlikely that they will find them important to their work.
We need to look deeper at the results. It would be helpful to see a scatterplot graphing both awareness and importance to see if there is a correlation.
We have lots of anecdotal experience that suggests that when people find out about subject pages they find them very useful.
Peter will check in again in September on this to update the group on any progress made on analyzing the data.
5. New core competencies: implications (Remlee, 20 mins)
Remlee distributed the new list of core competencies. Someone noted that one of the competencies is for staff to be able to assist users with all top level services on the web page. Will the home page redesign affect this? Bill will check with the core competencies group and report back. (The question seems to be whether or not staff needed to know about them because of prominence on the web page or because they are important to know.)
What should we be doing with these competencies?
RISG should be working on documentation along with all of the other public services groups. The question of how training in the competencies will be handled will need to be addressed. ISG has a subgroup that is working on this issue. For now we'll just address documentation.
Looking at the core competencies statement. Angie wondered if it is implied that we are talking about all modes of communication not just in person. The sense of the group is that the statement addresses all forms of communication.
6. Documentation Task Force: discuss next steps and get volunteers (Remlee, 15 mins)
We need to start populating the documentation in our purview. The documentation will be located here:
Libstaff.mit.edu/psdocs/reference.html
We can change all of the labels there and either put the documentation there or link to pages elsewhere. The problem with linking to information elsewhere is that the wiki search function will not retrieve pages from outside the wiki. We wondered it it may be possible to use the MIT google search on the wiki to search pages beyond. Lisa Sweeney will check on this.
We should have the organization of the page nailed down and have 2 wiki pages completed by mid August. An RISG subgroup will work on this. Lisa Horowitz, Bill and Anita all expressed interest. Remlee will also send out a call to ESL to get volunteers. Anyone else should let Remlee know.
The point was made that we'll need to coordinate with other groups to make sure we aren't duplicating effort in creating documentation.