“UM System establishes task force to promote use of open educational resources”
The Maneater, Oct. 11, 2017
Staff news
Staff Advisory Group Notes, 10/10/17
- General announcements & introductions: Kevin McFillen
- Director’s report: Ann Campion Riley
- Depository: We are on the approved capital list from the Board of Curator’s last meeting. Once Facilities gets subcontractors, they will bring their plans to the Board in Feb. Following that, we will get the final approval. We will get the money July 1st. Thereafter, we will start construction. We renewed the annual lease at the current UMLD II facility. We plan to move in late fall ‘18 or early spring ’19.
- Lowry Mall construction: they are hoping to get open by the Homecoming parade.
- Homecoming Open House 9:00 a.m. -11:00 a.m., game at 11:00 a.m., parade starts at 7:30 a.m.
- Congratulations Barb Jones for Achievement Award for MCMLA and to Grace Atkins for Missouri Library Association: Outstanding New Librarian Award
- Ann will attend the Dean’s Council strategic planning and retreat with Chancellor’s staff on Oct. 31.
- Marketing and imaging campaign: retention and freshmen ACT is the highest in MU history.
- Job Placement rate at Mizzou is above the national average.
- University will be doing a large national job placement survey across campus in coordination with the Alumni Association.
- Engineering Librarian and Head of Special Collections searches are going to be reposted.
- Bird delay: the birds are not in as good of condition as we had thought. The campus photographer took pictures and we will put them on online auctions through Procurement. Ann hopes to get enough from the birds to pay for the move from UMLD2 to the UMLD expansion.
- Some libraries are unhappy with iii and Mobius, specifically with available features and pricings. MU is staying with iii and there is a common libraries meeting in October to discuss their plans in continuing or changing these services.
- RAIS quarterly report: Jeannette Pierce
- Ithaka Survey launched last Monday to 6,543 graduate students and 3,090 faculty. We have a 5% completion rate as of last Friday. Oct. 27 is the end date of the survey. We hope to have a 20-25% completion rate. Ithaka will send out reminders, but our word of mouth is important as well. The Gateway announcement can be sent out to inform people of the survey.
- The question project: Jeannette is working to collect questions that are frequently asked so they can do some training with librarians and desk staff.
- A new Senior Information Specialist and a part time employee to focus on the Hathi Trust materials have been hired.
- Adrienne Arden is retiring Oct. 20th and the position description is in process.
- There is a Life Sciences exhibit with a related lecture in Ellis 114 at 2:00 p.m., tomorrow, 10/11.
- Microform readers have been moved from 403 to 404. Room 403 is closed for now with the hope of opening it in the future as office space.
- Marie is helping to coordinate the Missouri State Government Information Conference on Nov. 3 in Jeff City.
- Our Latin American student group is going to create memorials on Nov. 1 to be placed in an Ellis display cabinet.
- GWLA white paper: information literacy paper shows positive correlation with library support and GPA / retention rate.
- Nav is involved with badges and micro credentialing on campus.
- Nav attended Campus Identity meeting specifically working with how we use our web image.
- Joe Askins hosted an instruction forum and reported 120 instructional sessions were held this semester.
- Cindy is doing tours and user engagement through user access instead of through instructional services.
- RapidR is going into effect this week.
- LGBTQ month posters and articles about court cases are up to celebrate Coming Out Week, Oct. 9-13.
- Specialized Libraries quarterly report: Dorothy Carner
- Reviewed fax machines and phone lines this fall.
- Michelle and Kate are doing outreach for first year students, newsletter submissions and COE digital signage.
- Noel met with evaluators from the Accreditation Board for Engineering & Technology, to answer questions about how the people and resources in Ellis and the Engineering Libraries support the educational needs of the College of Engineering’s students.
- Our HSL is hosting MCMLA in Columbia for the first time since the 1970’s.
- HSL is working with a School of Journalism Strategic Communication Capstone project this fall.
- National Network of Libraries of Medicine, graduate assistant started this week to lead this year’s NNLM project.
- Journalism working with AdZou to remarket JAM program.
- Edward and Dorothy have been collaborating with IFLA and IIPC colleagues on an international survey of national and state libraries concerning current legal and electronic-legal deposit laws.
- Dorothy presented parts of the survey at the most recent CRL eDesiderata webex conference on digital news last Wednesday.
- ACTS quarterly report: Corrie Hutchinson
- We have a lot of work to do to get ready for the expansion; cleaning out duplicates and working to clean out cataloging projects; Dan will be moving to the Depository to help with this project.
- Ruthe will be helping with some projects at HSL.
- Geoffrey Preckshot from UMLD recently retired; we wish him the best.
- We are looking to get a new Link Resolver.
- We are thankful to the Provost’s commitment to filling our deficit in the collections budget.
- Corrie is the Chair of Merlin Standalone Taskforce with Julie and we have new products that are being installed.
- Unexpected Sierra upgrade: please email Corrie with problems.
- Site coordinator duties have been transferred from Wayne to Corrie.
- Our new problem ticketing system, called JIRA, will start in January.
- Encore is coming to Merlin at some point. Rhonda is our campus representative for that project.
- Ellis/facilities updates and reminders: Kathy, Dana
- The cameras are being installed on the exterior of the building. They are working on wiring before they install cameras.
- ID Card upgrade starts on Thursday. We will get cards with chips, strips and iClass notation.
- We hope to have the doors converted to read these cards at the end of Thanksgiving break.
- Nametags will be ordered soon. They will be metal and magnetic.
- Steam tunnel repairs should be completed Oct. 20 and Hitt street should be open for the Homecoming parade. 9th street will be closed soon, with expected completion April 1st.
- ULSAC is working on new furniture for room 114. Grace is getting feedback from students to hear what they want. We hope to get the first set of furniture by spring break and the second set by summer break.
- The Museum is displaying vases in Ellis cabinets.
- New One Cards process will be implemented Oct. 31st
- 1st we will have Amazon implemented on ShowMeShop.
- Ellis location signage should arrive any day. They have been delayed due to staffing changes at Campus Facilities.
- HR Updates, upcoming events: Sheryl, Sheila, Ruthe
- Ruthe: we will have a Halloween Party. More details will come soon.
- Denise Atkins presentation on The Allure of Romance Novels or, Why Sex Sells tomorrow, October 11th at 2:00 p.m.
- 18 at 5:00 p.m., Mizzou One Read Program: How Fear Leads to Atrocity, MU faculty panel discussion.
- Annual HR training conference will come out soon.
- United Way Campaign Oct. 16-27. Oct. 17 is Chili Cook Off and Cookie Bake Off
- Penny Wars: Change collection and departmental competition
- Candy guess jar
- Chair closing remarks: Kevin McFillen
- Chancellor Cartwright will be visiting the Libraries at Ellis on Nov. 6th and will be meeting staff and students from 2:15 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. in 114A.
- Next SAG Town Hall – Thursday, November 16th at 2:00pm
Dia de los Muertos craft session – You are invited
In November, the MU Latin Graduate & Professional Network (LGPN) will have a display in the Ellis Library colonnade for the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos or “Day of the Dead,” and they are holding a community craft-making event with library employees especially invited.
The LGPN’s craft-making session will be in Ellis Library Room 4F51A on Wednesday, November 1, from 2:30-4:30 and it is open to all.* Bring a picture of the person you want to memorialize — a printout or color photocopy is fine — along with one or two small objects. For example, you can bring a piece of their favorite candy or a trinket that represents something they enjoyed in life. Favorite foods (represented by an empty wrapper), soap and grooming items are traditional items to include with these memorials. The group will be making lots of tissue paper flowers that contribute to the colorful display.
You may bring craft materials and supplies if you have some at home – brightly colored tissue paper, scissors, magic markers, tape, etc. Large shoeboxes can be decorated and used with these displays.
This is a chance to participate in a traditional Mexican observance. It is considered a time of joy in remembrance and can be part of grieving process as well, for losses that are recent. We’d love to see you there!
*Library employees should seek supervisory permission.
University Libraries: United Way Festivities!
Happy Friday!
Sheila, Gwen, Sheryl and I are gearing up for the University Libraries United Way festivities! We want to let you know a bit more of what is being planned and how you can participate and #MizzouLU.
The big event of course is the Chili and Cookie Cook Off on Tuesday October 17th. If you have not had a chance to sign up for either the chili or cookie and would like to please contact Gwen Gray and let her know. We need your chili and cookies!
We are also doing Penny Wars! Departments versus departments. I believe we broke it down as follows:
- Administration
- Circulation
- Reference
- Technical Services
- Branches including Archives
We will have jars at each of these locations including each branch (if you would like one) to collect spare change and any monetary donations you would like to make to the United Way. These are not for your pledge donations!
We’ve heard back from several branches already who would like a jar so please let us know if you would like one and Gwen and I will make sure you get one! We will begin distributing these next week on Monday.
A huge Thank you to Kate Wright for designing the jar label for us! (See attachment).
Folks can continue to add to the jars up until the Chili and Cookie Cook off and then we will collect those at the event and get a final count out to everyone in the days following the cook off. We think this will be a lot of fun.
Please keep the jars in staff areas to keep them from walking awayJ
Don’t forget to start saving that change and preparing your chili and cookie recipes!
All the best!
Sheila, Michelle, Sheryl, and Gwen
Your 2017 United Way Ambassadors
#MizzouLU
Marketing Highlight and Request
Marketing Highlight
Tara was a popular subject on our social media this week. If you’re not following the Libraries on social media, you’re missing out!
instagram.com/mizzou.libraries/
Marketing Request
Current Mizzou Made stories can be found here: www.missouri.edu/mizzoumade, currently 2-3 stories a day are being published.
These stories also will be used for future marketing purposes including newspaper advertisements and social media. You can help the Libraries’ Marketing Team identify stories. Currently, the campus is prioritizing the following:
- Mid-Missouri students (Columbia, Ashland, Hallsville, Lake of the Ozarks, etc.)
- Rural Missouri students thriving at Mizzou
- Student veterans (will be priority for last week of November leading up to the Military Appreciate Mizzou Football Game on November 11th)
- Student athletes succeeding in their sport and in the classroom
- Recent (or not-so recent) alumni with awesome jobs who credit Mizzou for their success (one of the popular stories so far on social media was Chloe’s https://news.missouri.edu/2017/from-mizzou-to-google/)
Please contact Grace Atkins, Shannon Cary, Kelli Hansen, or Taira Meadowcroft if you know of a student who would be good for a Mizzou Made story.
In addition, we will keep posting Cycle of Success stories about faculty, staff, and community. These will also be tagged on social media as #MizzouMade, but the primary marketing focus right now is student recruitment.
Feel free to contact Shannon Cary if you have questions.
Atkins Received MLA Award in St. Louis on Oct. 5
Congratulations to Grace Atkins, who received the Missouri Library Association Outstanding New Librarian Award last night at the MLA awards ceremony in St. Louis! Read her acceptance remarks below.
“Thank you so much. This is truly an honor.
I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin’s Information School in May 2015, and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, applied for a brand new position at the University of Missouri Libraries: User Engagement Librarian. Engaging with the users in fall of 2015 was a challenge. As most of you know, that was a historically tumultuous time at Mizzou. But what I saw was students who loved their university so much that they demanded it be better. And, as we discussed in many sessions today, one of the fundamental roles of a library is to empower their communities to be better. So, we had an opportunity to step up as a library.
I would like to thank our Vice Provost of University Libraries, Ann Campion Riley, for supporting the establishment of a Student Advisory Council. I am fortunate to be the liaison between student leaders and library administration. This communication and collaboration has resulted in the libraries being better able to meet student needs. For example, when the student body demanded the main library be open longer, the council worked with student government and administrators in a transparent process to draft a fee proposal. In record voter turnout, almost 80% of students supported the fee and we now have Ellis Library open 24 hours a day, 5 days a week.
I would like to quote Rebecca Clarke who, in her awesome Parks & Rec session today, quoted Leslie Knope quoting Theodore Roosevelt: “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is a chance to work hard at work worth doing.” And Leslie adds that “what makes work worth doing is getting to do it with people that you love.”
The students at Mizzou love their university, and that makes my work worth doing. I am very privileged to be in a position to channel their passion into positive change, and I hope to continue this work.
This award is as much the students’ as it is mine.
Thank you.”
Boy Scouts on Campus, Oct. 7
The College of Engineering is co-sponsoring the Merit Badge University with the Great Rivers Council Boy Scouts. There will be over 1,000 boy scouts in attendance on Saturday, Oct. 7 from 7:30 am to 5:30 pm. The boy scouts will be learning from counselors (instructors) a variety of subjects. Expect to see these boys all over campus.
The following buildings will be unlocked on Saturday from 7:30 am to 5:30 pm:
Middlebush Hall
Arts & Sciences
Strickland Hall
Naka Hall (previously known as Engineering Building West)
Lafferre Hall
MU Student Center
Sustainability Office inside of Virginia Avenue Parking Structure
Geology
Hill Hall
Switzler Hall
Ithaka Survey Launched
The Ithaka Survey launched as scheduled at 2:00 p.m. yesterday. E-mails were sent to 3,090 for faculty and 6,543 for graduate/professional students. If you know faculty or graduate/professional students who want to help the libraries prepare for the future, please encourage them to look for the e-mail and complete the survey.
New MUSE Posts
Meet Joseph Askins, Head of Instructional Services
The University of Missouri Libraries recently welcomed Joseph Askins as Head of Instructional Services. We are excited to have him on board. Get to know a little more about him in this quick interview.
Please tell us a little about your background and experience. What led you to the University of Missouri Libraries?
I grew up in Northwest Arkansas, not too far from the University of Arkansas and Walmart’s world headquarters, and moved to Columbia in 1999 to study Journalism. After graduating from the J-School in 2003, I spent a few years working for newspapers, magazines, and websites in Arkansas and Chicago. As I neared the end of my twenties, I decided to get a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois, even though I had never worked in a library at any point in my life. In 2011 I left Chicago and my job as an editor, moved back to Arkansas once again, and looked for any and every opportunity to work with libraries, archives, and museums around my hometown. In 2012 I took a job as a Reference and Instruction Librarian at NorthWest Arkansas Community College, in 2015 I moved to Columbia, SC, to become an Information Literacy Programs Librarian at the University of South Carolina, and this summer I traded in one Columbia for another and returned to Mizzou.
How did you come to be a librarian, and what do you find most interesting about library instruction?
By 2008 I was working as the managing editor of a small magazine and website that covered new residential construction in and around Chicago. The market collapsed that year, developers stopped placing ads in our publication (or, in one memorable instance, fled the country entirely), and construction in many neighborhoods ground to a halt. I realized at some point that tracking price cuts for imaginary condos in unbuilt high-rises was not my idea of a good time, and by early 2009 I was thinking a lot about what I did and didn’t enjoy about my career up to that point. What I realized was that I loved chasing facts, pulling files, sifting through records—I liked the research part of my job so much more than the storytelling part. So I started to brainstorm ways in which I could spend more time searching for information and solving mysteries about where a particular piece of data might be located, and I quickly latched onto librarianship as a career where I could do just that.
The very first LIS course I ever took, a full year before I entered school as a full-time grad student, was called Instruction & Assistance Systems. It was all about teaching in a library environment, and it was there where I first encountered terms like “information literacy” and “one-shots” and “flipped classrooms.” One of the things I realized as I went through that course was that I never really experienced that kind of instruction as a student; I tested out of my freshman composition class and didn’t recall any other instances in which I visited Ellis or the J-School library for formal instruction, and I couldn’t help but wonder how much better I would have performed as an undergraduate if I had felt more at ease with the library and its resources. So through the rest of library school and on into my career, I thought of my role as that of someone who could encourage and empower users, and help them develop the strategies and confidence necessary to use our collection to meet their needs.
What was your favorite book you were assigned to read in college, and what are you reading now?
I really enjoyed In Dubious Battle, which I read for an American Protest Lit class. It covers a lot of the same territory as The Grapes of Wrath, with its depiction of migrant workers and labor strikes, but it’s also a study of mob mentality—the way that humans, like other animals, behaved differently when grouped together than they would individually—which was a topic that interested Steinbeck greatly.
Right now I’m reading The Republic for Which It Stands, Richard White’s new book about the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age. I’m also working my way through A New Literary History of America, an anthology of essays about works of American literature, co-edited by Greil Marcus, who’s always been good at relating rock music to seemingly unrelated works of art and folklore.