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Library Assembly Meeting, 3/15/16

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Present: Adrienne Arden, Alla Barabtarlo, Wendy Batson, Angie Burroughs Kelly, Sheryl Cullina, Tammy Green, Terri Hall, Steven Hammer, Dustin Hoffman, Jeannette Pierce, Ann Riley, Sandy Schiefer, Marcia Strong, Bette Stuart, & Deb Ward

Next meeting scheduled for April 19th

  1. Guest Speaker – Alla Barabtarlo

    • “What is so special in Special Collections?”
    • Alla spoke about the items to be found in Special Collections
    • She told how some of these came to be part of our library
    • She showed examples of clay tablets with cuneiform writing
  1. Director Announcements (Ann Riley):

    • University budget

      • There will be a 5% across the board cut expected
      • Cuts will be at the discretion of each department
      • Possible layoffs & non-renewal of some contracts
      • No raises unless for promotion or for those considered below the bottom of their job’s salary range
    • Effects on libraries’ budget

      • Libraries hoping to avoid layoffs
      • Many open positions may not be filled (Those that will be must be justified as essential to the operation of a department.)
      • Proposed closing Ellis Library at midnight rather than current 24/5
      • Possibility of shifting staffing to cover open positions
  1. Departmental Reports:

Digital Services Report (Adrienne Arden)

We continue to accomplish a lot of work, digitizing and adding material to the MU Digital Library, and keeping up with submissions to MOspace.  Following are brief details on recent activities of note. 

SCaRB gave us a flat-bed scanner that they no longer needed.  We did some re-furbishing of it and have found it useful for a couple of recent projects.

We continue to migrate content from the legacy digital library to the MU Digital Library.  Some collections that we are close to finishing are:  Savitars, Ag Experiment Station publications, and Alumni magazines. 

In addition, we are undertaking some small digitization projects in support of teaching and research, including a copy of a handwritten volume called the Lucubrator from 1797.  For those not familiar with the word, Dictionary.com lists “lucubrate” as a verb meaning, “to work, write, or study laboriously, especially at night.”  Our volume contains essays written by James Noyes on such topics as hope, envy, public character, bad neighbors, and friendship.  A class on 18th century literature is studying the text and will be providing transcripts of the content, which we will include in the digital library.  Kelli Hansen and Anne Barker are also working with the class. 

We also are digitizing the Paisa Akhbar, an Indian newspaper from the 1890s.  A doctoral student is interested in access to this paper.  WorldCat shows two holdings worldwide:  MU and a library in Germany.  We have four bound volumes with incomplete holdings from 1891-1989.   

MOspace is getting a lot of our attention as well.  Material from Cyberinfrastructure Day 2016 will be added to MOspace, and we will also post the winning essay in the MU Libraries Undergraduate Research contest.  We have been spending some time enhancing metadata for theses and dissertations.

LTS continues to work on the HathiTrust processing script.  We have a stockpile of digital items to contribute to the HathiTrust when the script becomes available. 

Felicity has been busy with SISLT search committee work.  Three candidates were on campus for interviews in the last two weeks.  Felicity is taking a five-week course through Coursera on data management plans.  She is finding it very useful and is excited about it because the instructor, Helen Tibbo, is well-known in the field of digital preservation. 

Tammie Busch, a member of the Campus Library Committee, has attended their recent committee meetings, and reports that they have been discussing the journal review process being undertaken by selectors and the units with which they liaise.   

Adrienne and Felicity attended the Difficult Conversations workshop sponsored by SDC.

MULAC Report (Sandy Schiefer)

Data Curation Librarian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Chris Eaker, will visit MU April 7-8. His presentation is April 8th at 1-2 pm in room 213.

April 13th is the Cyberinfrastructure Day workshop.

RAIS Report (Wendy Batson)

  • The Libraries are looking at different discovery tools and would like your input on our current service, Summon.  All library staff are encouraged to complete a survey about Summon, which was sent out in an email to All Staff by Rhonda Whithaus.  The survey closes at 5:00 pm March 16.
  • The Libraries will be piloting a chat reference service made available through MOBIUS, called ChatStaff.  The service will extend our chat service to 24 hours.  RAIS will continue to use our current chat service through LibChat during our regular chat hours, and when our librarians go offline the ChatStaff professional librarians will take over to provide chat services.  The service will extend our total chat hours from Sundays at 10:00 am to Fridays at 5:00 pm and Saturdays from 10:00 am to 10:00 pm

Administration (Steven Hammer)

A “Working with Students” workshop will be conducted by Noah Hartsfield on March 24, 2016.  The emphasis of the workshop is creating positive student work environments.  There will be time allotted to sharing experiences and problem solving exercises.

Mark Ellis, Executive Staff Assistant, has announced he’s accepted a position at the Retirement Programs Office.  His final day in the Administration Office is March 25, 2016.

Cataloging & Metadata Department (Angie Burroughs Kelly)

The 202 indexes & abstracts transfer project continues.  Indexes A-TX are completed and in place.  The abstracts A-TX are being pulled, transferred, & labeled.

We continue to replace Y4 documents of Congressional hearings.

We’ve also been working on some Special Collection transfers and cataloging.

The RAPID ILL holdings update has been completed.

Selected files have been pulled from MERLIN for our trial of Ebsco Discovery Service.

HSL (Terri Hall)

Mike, Caryn & Diane have been working on the collections review database.

Taira won another culture of yes service strip from MU HealthCare

Rebecca was a key member of the team that won the Medical Library Assn”s chapter project of the year award for holding the first ever virtual chapter meeting.

We’ve been working on a way to recognize our authors publishing open access and have created a blog with pullout quotes form recent articles about the OA and the scholarly publish crisis.

Don’t forget the heart kudos word cloud you & Chris created for Valentine’s day.

Acquisitions & Collection Development, Accounting-ACTS Division, and Consortial Resources Report (Bette Stuart)

  1. Due to a lack of staffing resources, we have ended our WMS project that enhanced table of contents, summaries, subject headings, etc. for our records.  This was a joint project between MS&T, UMKC, and MU.  All libraries, not just MU, are unable to provide the needed staff time to clean up the records after loads.  We will finish the clean-up on the two files we still have and that will be all for this project for the time being. 
  2. The new LSO accounts payable feeder system, which allows financial data to be sent from Sierra to People Soft, is now fully implemented.  Special thanks to LTS for their technical support and programming efforts.
  3. Cost data in 360 Counter is up-to-date through FY 2015.