Present: Maggie Bartley, Peter Cohn (Chair), Remlee Green, Lisa Horowitz, Angie Locknar, Heather McCann, Georgiana McReynolds, Alan Rostoff, Lisa Sweeney, Mark Szarko (Minutes)
Announcements:
IM Reference Pilot (Lisa Horowitz)
The IM reference program that we had hoped to pilot with IS&T is not going forward at this time. Those librarians who have the Spark program installed on their machines can contact their LTE's to remove it.
Printing Scanning Task Force (Heather McCann)
Heather provided an update on the Printing/Scanning Task Force.
3.091 Assessment Update (Angie Locknar)
Angie is still waiting to get survey results from her Fall '06 students. The TLL has promised that June will be dedicated to compiling results of this and other surveys. By the end of June, Angie hopes to have data and will present it to RISG.
Reference: Statistics Subgroup (Lisa Horowitz)
The subgroup has been working on a new mechanism for gathering reference statistics, but has decided not to make any changes to the statistics we gather until this new system is in place. Alan Rostoff volunteered to help with some of the data entry problems we're currently having with the Excel forms.
Instruction Assessment Group (Lisa Horowitz, Angie Locknar, Mark Szarko)
The group is making good progress and should have something ready to present by July.
Automated Harvard Card System (Remlee Green, Georgiana McReynolds)
A draft of the input form is being reviewed. If this new automated system works, we can consider transitioning Countway cards to it as well.
Spring Seminar Update (Heather McCann, Anita Perkins, Mark Szarko)
The subgroup has set a deadline of Thursday, May 29 to find a speaker. If no speaker can be found, the seminar will be cancelled for this year.
Tutorials Maintenance Group (Heather McCann, Peter Cohn, Remlee Green, Angie Locknar, Mark Szarko)
All of the general tutorials have been divided up among the group members with an August 1 deadline to review them. After that, they will meet to determine which tutorials need to be updated. The committee discussed getting more user feedback through surveys. Steve Gass is open to the idea of using incentives for users to complete them. Darcy Duke is investigating adding Google Analytics to the tutorials themselves, which might also give us some useful assessment data.
Agenda Items:
Membership
The committee discussed membership for next year.
LibGuides Implementation Team
The group has formed, and will include Maggie Barley, Peter Cohn, Remlee Green, Angie Locknar, and Georgiana McReynolds. They've met with Nicole and Darcy. The hope is that the LibGuides project will merge with the Vera descriptions updates. The group will be responsible for creating policies about how to use LibGuides. They will look at subject page guidelines that are currently on staffweb. They will also play with how the guides might work in different formats (for use in Vera, course pages, etc).
Marion Leeds Carroll will move all the current subject pages into LibGuides so all the selectors will have a place to start. Not everyone will be forced to use it---people can keep their regular web pages if they want.
Timeline---finish by June 15. Training for staff will start in early July.
Reference Vision Discussion
The committee discussed the reference vision itself and whether we want to revise anything. Some questions and discussion points raised included:
How does the System-wide Instruction Plan relate to the Reference Vision?
How do our usability goals relate to reference?
Is it a reference and instructional services vision?
We need to talk about extending the availability of real-time assistance on evenings and weekends. Previous efforts with digital reference were reviewed.
We need to be careful about how we use our staff---we shouldn't bend over backwards to provide a service if our users won't appreciate it.
Do we have information about when our users need help and when they use reference services? What are the different patterns between graduate and undergraduates?
People as trusted sources---undergrads trust each other first, not strangers.
We should look at user needs not just in terms of technology, but also in terms of reference service.
What role does the image or stereotype of librarians play in how users perceive reference services?
Staff will need more knowledge in how to support different digital formats.
How will we answer interdisciplinary reference queries that span several units?
We need to build user awareness of reference services into the reference vision.
We should talk about our current print and electronic reference collections and how they relate to reference services.
There is very little data on the usage of the Ask Us phone line. Should we do some kind of assessment of when calls come in on Ask Us? Perhaps with the new VOIP, there might be a way to gather this data.
Agenda Building:
Topics we'll want to revisit soon:
LibGuides
Instruction Assessment
Statistics Gathering
Reference Vision
Review Goals List