Attending: Peter Cohn (minutes), Remlee Green (Chair), Bill Helman, Lisa Horowitz, Heather McCann, Linda Sobottka, Lisa Sweeney.
Announcements:
Research guides went live today. Libguides trainings and drop in sessions are in process.
JulyAP is in full swing. This Friday Bioinformatics for Beginners is taking place.
Stephen Skuce is leaving Ask-Us! because of responsibilities of his new position.
PCS -Scanners will be coming in early August. New printers are arriving August 1st in divisional libraries. Branch library machines will be ordered soon.
Some RISG members do not have access to the R Drive. Remlee is working on resolving this.
Libguides:
When a new database is ordered, Kim will send out a note to subject specialists. Subject specialists, upon hearing about a database, can ask Marion to add the database to their subject areas. She'll update the central list which will update the list on the subject page as well, as long as it's a link. Subject specialists can also copy the information to their own subject pages without going through Marion but then they will have to update their pages if changes occur to that database centrally.
Vera changes:
The Vera multisearch beta will become the default Vera sometime around August 13. This change is significant enough that we need to alert frontline staff. There are upcoming training sessions on the new Vera. We should encourage staff to attend.
Changes in Vera mean we need changes to tutorials! We have a subgroup working on central tutorials but there are many database specific tutorials that people are updating. Alas, many tutorials start at the home page for Vera which is changing. Angie suggests that tutorials begin from the Vera shortcut URL so that tutorials won't need to be redone every time changes are made to our home page/Vera.
Instruction Assessment for Graduate students
While we have a pilot for undergraduate instruction, what shall we do to assess instruction sessions for other groups of users like graduate students? The assessment subgroup is recommending that we continue to use the relevance survey for non-undergraduate sessions as appropriate.
Does the perception of relevance actually give us useful knowledge that we can act on? Is it important to continue this? Is it good to keep having stats that continue to confirm our relevance? We decided that this was worth continuing. Perhaps we might focus on numbers of users who don't perceive the sessions as relevant to see if there are actions we can take. We agreed that we would continue to use the relevance survey for non-undergraduate sessions where appropriate (ie not for tours and orientations.) Angie will check with Anita and Maggie to make sure they agree before this decision is final.
We discussed some enhancements to the zoomerang form to make it easier for us to sort and analyze data. Last spring we made some adjustments like adding department names in a drop down menu. (Cutting down on free text entries that can't be sorted.) Angie is going to add a list of regularly offered sessions to a drop down --again to aid in sorting. As new courses arise they can be added to this list as well.
Angie will send the excel spreadsheet of relevance data from IAP and Spring 2008 to the committee.
Next meeting:
Remlee will lead us in revisiting goals.