Coordinating Committees

User Services Coordinating Committee (USCC) Meeting
Minutes, November 9, 2007, 11am-Noon

Present: Steve Frye, Barb Bren, Renee Buker, Ella Cross, Dave Dettman, Leigh Dorsey, Jill Markgraf, Nick Weber, Valerie Malzacher, Paul Moriarty

Absent: JanaReeg-Steidinger

Housekeeping items

  • Terms – Committee members must be assigned terms of either 2 or 3 years. Leigh Dorsey and Nick Weber volunteered to serve 2-year terms. The rest expressed no preference, so Steve Frye will assign them.
  • Minutes - Steve Frye’s proposed alphabetical rotation for taking minutes (except for Renee Buker and Jill Markgraf, who already took minutes) was accepted.

Agenda items

Brief overview of the October CUWL meeting (10/31 & 10/31)
The USCC report was accepted. Steve Frye highlighted a few items from the meeting:

  • A modest amount has been budgeted for iSkills (about $8000 each year of the biennium). Paul Moriarty will be contacting directors to see which campuses have interest in it for spring 2008.
  • A summer conference is being planned. Details will follow as they are available. It may be that different groups are invited each year.
  • MetaLib will continue to be funded by System and campus libraries for the foreseeable future (until something superior appears). The assessment will involve more than one of the coordinating committees. Colleges asked Madison to give a presentation on its implementation of MetaLib and the assessment done at Madison. Possibly other campuses could have access to this presentation.

Circulation and Access Services issues - which coordinating committee(s) are responsible for these areas.
Valerie Malzacher suggested that the committee’s charge might be amended when the coordinating committee structure is assessed. There was general consensus that circulation and access services issues should be written into the USCC charge. Other committees have raised issues recently that are of interest to USCC (UB being used as a campus pull service and patron blocking for lost UB items). It was suggested that relationships between committees and dealing with overlapping issues might be facilitated by regular conference calls for the committee chairs. The question of committee membership changing to reflect changes in the charge was raised. Adding a column on the committee member lists showing members’ main area(s) of responsibility might be helpful.

CUWL Wiki – one shared wiki among the four coordinating committees
Steve Frye displayed http://staff.library.wisc.edu/wiki/cuwlcc/, which is entirely password protected right now. It could be used by all the coordinating committees. The committee agreed that it should be open to anyone with part of it restricted (access password protected) for works in progress, etc. There will be an announcement when it is set up.

How do we follow through on our action items?

One or two committee members volunteered to take responsibility for the action items below, except for documenting user service tools and the wiki, which will be joint projects. Outside of this meeting members will consult Steve Frye about getting these subgroups started. Outcomes for each will be discussed at a future committee meeting.

  • Investigate new models of reference services while focusing on services for remote users, the role of students and paraprofessionals in providing reference services (staffing issues), the integration of reference services with other academic support services, training issues, assessment issues, and the future of the reference desk. (Jill Markgraf & Renee Buker)
  • Explore information literacy/library instruction assessment tools and make a recommendation. (Dave Dettman & Ella Cross)
  • Document user service tools, resources, and methods currently employed by UW campuses and facilitate the sharing and use of these tools, resources, and methods across the UW System.  The open source reference statistics software developed at UW-Madison (PS Stats) is one example.  The use of student response systems (clickers) at a few of our campuses is another example.
  • Explore the use of Web 2.0 tools in the provision of user services.  (Barb Bren & Nick Weber)
  • Create a system-wide user services wiki to share information, tools, resources and teaching materials.
  • Investigate and recommend ways to assess our user services focusing on our shared resources and parallel services. (Valerie Malzacher)
  • Identify the desired/required functionality of our next generation OPAC. (Leigh Dorsey)

Clarification about lists
There are two discussion lists, user@maillist.uwsa.edu is for the committee’s internal communications and cuwluser@maillist.uwsa.edu is the open list. It is advisable to pay attention when replying to an email to know where the reply is going.

Use of Xythos for sharing and editing of documents. – not discussed

Use of Wisline Web for (a) our meetings; (b) UW System-wide presentation(s). Are there other (less expensive) Web 2.0 tools that we could use for this type of collaboration?
WisLine was very easy to use for everyone on the committee, but because it doubles the cost of a teleconference (phone only), it is desirable to find less expensive alternatives. Free Skype, for example, only allows 9 attendees, which isn’t enough for this group.

Future meetings
There may be times when the committee invites other campuses/staff for portions of its meetings, but at most there will be 1 line per campus. Steve Frye suggested Dave Dettman provide a presentation on iSkills for the December meeting.

The meeting adjourned at noon.

Recorder: Barb Bren