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Library Assembly Minutes 9/23/2014

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Minutes can also be viewed on the MU Libraries Staff Website: http://library.missouri.edu/staff/committees/libraryassembly/

 

Present: Adrienne Arden, Wendy Batson, Jack Batterson, Rachel Brekhus, Jim Cogswell, Kevin Cossey, Ruth Feldkamp, Matt Gaunt, Tammy Green, Dana Houston, Dustin Hoffman, Dana Houston, Shelly McDavid, Jeannette Pierce, Ann Riley, Sandy Schiefer, Bette Stuart, Sheena Waggoner, Deb Ward

  • Matt Gaunt on Development

Leadership at the campus level is pro-libraries

  • Gaunt spoke to Tom Hiles, MU Vice Chancellor for Development and Alumni Relations, about 8-figure prospects for the MU Libraries

Tom Hiles was supportive last year, but stated that he gets his priorities from the Chancellor

MU Libraries is now on the radar of Hiles as a potential target for 8-figure prospects

  • Chancellor Loftin

On board to increase funding for MU Libraries through student fee and is supportive of efforts to include the libraries in large proposals such as endowed chairs

  • Fiscal Year 2015

     

     

    • The library’s FY15 Annual Plan for Advancement focuses on prospects the library will present proposals to this year, and the amount of those proposals.
    • In addition to the library advancement team, there is a team of representatives from Planned Giving, Corporate and Foundation Relations, Regional Development and Advancement Research that meets quarterly to discuss library prospects from those units of advancement.
    • The team has identified 28 prospects who should receive proposals from the library this fiscal year
    • Based on those proposals a goal of $1.31M was established for FY15. Early commitments have increased the goal to $2M.

Will and Jan Trogdon increased their estate commitment to the libraries by $1M, (to a total of $3M), and are also considering a significant gift to remodel the north portion of the Ellis Library colonnade

Mellon Foundation grant received last year will be counted this year as the funding is spent

There are 3 other known candidates for estate gifts this year

  • Fiscal Year 2014 (July 2013-June 2014)

The MU Libraries FY14 fundraising goal was $465,000. We raised $745,000, with $374,166 in cash, and the remainder in pledges and planned gifts. This total does not include the Mellon grant, which will be counted in FY15

  • University of Missouri Capital Campaign

     

     

    • The MU Libraries goal is $10 million. Total university goal will likely be between $1.2B and $1.4B
    • Health Sciences Library Renovation of 2nd and 3rd Floors is a large portion of the library goal, with initial estimates of $4M to $5M

Deb Ward has been working hard over the past year to produce detailed plans for the HSL renovation

Matt Gaunt states, donors want solid plans that show their donations will have a major impact

  • Endowments for positions are included in the case statement, but there are no current discussions with donors for those opportunities
  • The aftermath of Renew Mizzou will present opportunities for space renovation. Grand reading room and west reading room renovations are included in the case statement.

     

     

    • Collection Enhancement Fund

Our goal was to raise $50,000 to assist with mold remediation, currently at $41,000 in gifts and pledges, $34,000 in cash

  • St. John’s Bible

This project is reaching people that otherwise would not be thinking about donating to the libraries

$62,500 raised so far, including a $12,500 matching gift

  • Upcoming Meeting

Will and Jan Trogdon have helped connect Jim Cogswell and Matt Gaunt to R. Crosby Kemper III, Head of the KC Public Library Board

Gaunt, Cogswell, and the Trogdons will meet with Kemper next month

  • Centennial

     

     

    • Opportunity to raise money to support centennial events
    • Advancement office is hopeful this will also stimulate general giving to the library
    • Centennial also provides opportunity to improve the library visually.

Banners, floor decals, and custom wallpaper could be used to mark the centennial and provide inspiration for students

Landscaping around the library could be improved

An architect has suggested exterior lighting for Ellis

This could help with security if we move to 24/5 study hours

Need to maintain awareness of our carbon footprint while obtaining this goal

  • Library Ambassadors Fund

We currently have approximately $13,000 in a spendable account for the Ridenhour Library Ambassadors Endowment. This funding can be used to fund student activities associated with promoting the libraries, which could include efforts to pass a student library fee, or student centennial activities.

  • Matt Gaunt comments

He makes contact with a lot of people that love this library and love what we do here for the campus

The users love us!

 

  • Meeting date changes (Nov 25 & Dec 23 are holiday weeks)

Provided there is a room available, these meetings will be changed to take place the week before the holiday

  • Possibility that December’s meeting will be cancelled outright

Director Announcements:

Renew Mizzou, four months into their stay – How are things going?

  • Still plan for them being in Ellis Library at least another 7-8 months
  • Estimating they will be leaving sometime around May 2015
  • No major incidents

Restrooms are being utilized more heavily than previous years (especially the 1st floor restrooms)

Recognized need for another round of custodial service during the day between 10am and 3pm, Monday through Friday.

Possibility of hiring a female custodian for this would be best, easier for her to access the women’s restroom during this peak time

Bookmark Café showing more business activity

Surrounding area around the café looks like it could use an additional sweeping too

  • Pat Jones and Jim Cogswell met

Both Jim and Pat Jones are aware of the above stated problems (1st floor restroom and Bookmark Café)

  • Ellis Library Carpet

It was pointed out that there are more stains on the carpet on the first floor of Ellis Library.

Essentially just a matter of time, space and a person to get this taken care of

 

Student Library Fee

  • Leadership team at the campus level is currently pro-libraries

The Chancellor is thinking long term

Expecting to have a student library fee

He will be helping the libraries by promoting it

  • The MU Libraries is currently working to take steps toward making this a reality

A working group has been established, that meets Tuesday afternoons from 4-5pm

The group’s deadline is December 2014, for this proposal to go before the Board of Curators during their January 2015 meeting.

  • Narrative of the proposal, 3 principle areas

     

     

    • Renewal, renovation of library spaces

A suggestion was made to utilize this virtual conference recording to plan: Designing Your Spaces, Services and Organization Around Your Users Elliot Felix http://seflin.adobeconnect.com/p9t3pswj8v4/

  • Enhancing Library Services and Staffing to provide these services
  • Collections

Need to pitch this to the major student groups on campus

Incentive for students and the Board of Curators: Student Tuition and Fees will increase; the fee will focus an increase on libraries, a proven student priority.

It is projected that 2 town hall meetings will take place to promote fee. Letters of endorsement will be sent by the leading student groups to Board of Curators.

The student fee amount is yet to be decided

Incrementally increasing over five years; unsure at this time of total amount of increase.

Revenue from the fee will make needed renovations to Ellis, including an all-night study area.

 

  • Department announcements:

     

     

    • Sandy Schiefer: MULAC: Communication Audit Update
  • Informal meeting was held with Dr. Rebecca Meisenbach, an Associate Professor in the MU Department of Communication, who teaches in the area of organizational communication.

     

     

    • Rebecca Graves, Sandy Schiefer, Darell Schmick, Rebecca Meisenbach, Edward McCain
  • Dr. Meisenbach asked the MULAC members at the meeting about their experiences with communication issues at MU Libraries. The discussion ranged from communication of MU Library goals to formal and informal communication channels. It was agreed that staff should be included in any audit, in addition to librarians and the Library Management Team.

     

     

    • Comprehensive audit from the International Communication Association could range from $30-$60K in cost. That obviously is out of our price range and Dr. Meisenbach will look for other methods that are less costly.
    • Possibility of hiring a GRA under Dr. Meisenbach’s supervision to save on some of the labor cost involved.  GRAs for fall already assigned, and assignments for most determined for the spring as well.  May take a while to go this route.
  • Need to know what outcomes we want – email Sandy with ideas
  • Internal vs. External:  Jim and Dr. Meisenbach mainly addressed internal communication as the main issue, but discussion of mold and other issues with communicating to faculty and news sources/campus journalism is an issue to consider as well
  • Cynthia Frisbee, in Strategic Communication, is working on a similar communication project with the athletic department.

 

  • Tammy Green: Access Services Report for Library Assembly

Update on MOBIUS’ inclusion of Tulsa City-County Library System (TCCL) and Prospector.

  • Patrons’ Side –Seems to be working well.  Have not seen or heard of issues.  We just received some flyers and bookmarks from the MOBIUS office.  A few of these were kept for staff and patron use at the front desk.  The remainder were given to the Reference Dept.
  • Processing Side–Many of us are not happy with it.  The transition of TCCL into MOBIUS has been very easy.  Most of our issues are with Prospector.  We received no information on what to expect and how to handle it.  Have received very little help from the MOBIUS Office since.  We are still working on solutions that will best help us to make a smoother operation.  Specific issues are with identifying the lending library, our patron and the due date.  After a recent conversation with others, many are creating a special book band to use.  We are looking at modifying the existing MOBIUS band to accommodate our needs.

 

  • Adrienne Arden: Digital Services Report

     

     

    • All full-time staff in Digital Services attended at least one User Experience Conference session held Friday, 9/19/2014 at Jesse Wrench Auditorium.
    • Scanning work is continuing, though the volume has been greatly reduced due to the loss of our digitization technician.
    • Our upcoming website will include information on current projects and the services we provide.
    • Digital Services has undergone another recent spacial reconfiguration which provides better workstation areas for student assistants, a new location for Felicity and improved traffic flow.
    • Felicity and Adrienne met with staff at Extension to get input on our work.  Extension regularly submits Extension publications for inclusion in MOspace.  We are looking at improvements in how we organize their material.
    • Felicity and Ernest Shaw met with a psychology professor and the Arts and Sciences IT Pro to discuss the possibility of uploading research data from that department into the institutional repository on a weekly basis.  We have an agreed upon workflow and will begin uploading the data as soon as it becomes available.
    • We now have a brochure describing our two digital repositories.  It was distributed at the new faculty orientation.  Thanks to Shannon Cary, her student assistant and public services for assisting with its design and production.
    • My thanks to Mat Miller for providing the following description of a project he is currently working on.  I am including this as an example of one form of work that our department does.  Mat is digitizing and editing volume 5 of the Vetusta Monumenta [Ancient Monuments], which was originally published in seven volumes between 1747 and 1906. This type of project is more arduous than standard book digitization because it is captured in color. When digitizing any book, it is important that all the pages are the same size. This is easy to achieve with a standard book, because we capture it in black and white and the white background can easily be resized. This is difficult with a book captured in color, especially at high resolution, since zooming in can reveal the fibers of the paper; the color might not be uniform, or able to replicate, etc.  Care has to be taken to capture as much of the page as possible, and cropping and resizing needs to be minimal and undetectable. Also, the large file sizes take a long time to load while editing.
  • Dustin Hoffman: LTS Report

LTS new employee: Maruthi Donthi

  • A programmer paid for by the Mellon Grant

Going to be working on HathiTrust and other items related to the mold

 

  • Rachel Brekhus: Ellis Library Reference

Reference Spaces:

  • Room 156 is now open as a quiet study space on the first floor.  The room is off the Information Commons on the west side.

      Events:

  • Events surrounding the Lincoln and the Constitution exhibit on display at the Law Library have begun.  See http://library.missouri.edu/about/events/lincoln for more information.  All events are free but one requires online registration – the bus tours Sunday October 5 – and one requires a special invitation – participation as a member of the live TV audience for the interview and audience Q/A on Saturday October 18.  Library employees with a keen interest in the Civil War are encouraged to contact Rachel Brekhus for an invitation that that event.

                 Instruction:

  • Instruction continues apace. In August, there were 7 instruction sessions (91 participants) and 13 orientation sessions (about 400 participants) taught.  You’ll hear the September statistics next month, and those numbers will be higher. We have started a new Fridays @the Library series.  The first to sessions of that series were oversubscribed, though we expect numbers to be a bit smaller for the more specialized sessions.  We are in the process of planning another Fridays @ the Library series for next semester.

   Continuing Education:

  • Several of us participated in last Friday’s all-day User Experience teleconference. Speakers addressed the topic as it relates to websites but also to building architecture, signage, and service provision generally.

   Outreach:

  • Many campus committees have begun meeting, with members from our department in attendance, including the Honorary Degrees Committee, the Environmental Affairs and Sustainability Committee and others.
  • The September circulating display books (topic: banned books) will soon be returning to their shelves.  If you haven’t stopped by to check them out do so before September 30 when the display will change to the October display which will be the Mizzou Must-Reads.  These 175 influential books were chosen by professors at the University of Missouri to celebrate its 175th anniversary.

 

 

  • Wendy Batson: Branches

No announcements at this time

 

  • Bette Stuart: Accounting, Acquisitions & Collection Development, and Consortial Resources

     

     

    • Abbie Brown on maternity leave, will return in November

 

  • Ruth Feldkamp: Collection Services

     

     

    • Work study students are currently being trained, helping to move the workflow along

 

  • Ann Riley: Access, Collections and Technical Services

     

     

    • Swets, one of the MU Libraries suppliers for subscriptions orders has filed for bankruptcy

It is unclear at this time what impact this will have on MU Libraries, it came as a surprise to many libraries

  • Hopeful that an investor will come forth and buy Swets

     

     

    • WashU, MU Law Library, University of Chicago purchase through them as well.

Their annual report was constructed in August, but was just released a few days ago, this showed them in bad financial shape

  • UMLD and Mold

The first load of books came back from Texas all clean from the mold

  • Approximately 20,000 books; they look pretty good. Currently busy unpacking and assembling them.

Another load is expected to arrive from Texas by the end of the week

  • Mellon Grant

Using the money to remediate, place and store items

The status of the project has moved from an atmosphere of despair to one of control over the situation

Continuing to work through the plan established by the project team

  • The hope is to be filling requests through the MOBIUS system by the Spring 2015 semester

Bringing those unavailable records back up in the catalog

 

  • Deb Ward: Health Sciences Library

There will be an HSL Forum on October 30, 2014 to share the plans for the renovation of the 2nd and 3rd floors of the library.

  • The HSL Space Planning Committee engaged in strategically planning for library services of the future and analyzing how libraries might change in the future

Planning involved conversations with faculty representatives appointed by each dean of the three schools the library serves, as well as a student survey toward the goal of meeting the needs of the population the library serves

Deb and the HSL Space Planning Committee have been working through this process with Matt Gaunt and Jim Cogswell

  • Deb, Matt, Jim and the HSL Planning Committee have been methodical in the process of planning for this upcoming project and capital campaign
  • It all depends on money, the projected cost of the project is between $4 and $5 million dollars

Gayle Mooney is now working 2 hours/day in the afternoons in the HSL Admin Office

  • She is filling in for Mandi Davis, a full time staff member that left HSL Admin August 1, 2014

MU Libraries Chili Cook-Off and United Way 2014 campaign

  • Ellis Library Staff Lounge, September 25, 2014 11:30-1pm

     

     

    • Prizes will be awarded for the three most favorite chilis
    • There is also a raffle for door prizes for those in attendance
    • Representatives from United Way and the Food Bank will be guest speakers.

 

  • Dana Houston: Ellis Library Security

     

     

    • Two new Security Officers hired

Kevin Cossey, Security Office Supervisor of the North and West Security Officers of the desk

Shomari Wellington, is the new part-time Student Security Officer

  • Security has been inundated with massive complaints about the restrooms in Ellis Library

Out of paper towels

Commodes overflowing

Water fountain leaking – to be fixed this week

Dirty

 

Sheena Waggoner, Administration Office

  • Renovations from the fire have now been completed in Administration
  • All the décor is now matching and it looks very nice
  • Admin has 3 new students starting September 24th, 2014

Jeannette Pierce, RAIS

Assessment Committee is beginning to create the FY2014 (July 1, 2013 – June 30, 2014) statistical report

  • Any questions or input may be directed to Jeannette Pierce

 

Shelly McDavid, Veterinary Medical Library

The weeding project and the shifting project is nearing completion

  • 1 range of books remain to be weeded and shifted
  • Once the weeding and shifting is completed, 3 stacks in front of windows are slotted to be taken down to provide more natural light into the library and provide an additional soft seating area for patrons to enjoy.

 

Jack Batterson: Cataloging & Metadata

No announcements at this time