Coordinating Committees

User Services Coordinating Committee (USCC) Meeting
Minutes, December 14, 2007, 10 AM – 11 AM

Present: Steve Frye, Barb Bren, Renee Buker, Ella Cross, Dave Dettman, Leigh Dorsey,
Jill Markgraf, Jana Reeg-Steidinger, Nick Weber, Valerie Malzacher

Absent: Paul Moriarty

Call to order: Meeting began at approximately 10:10 am. There were no corrections or additions to the Minutes of 11/9/07. Minutes of November 9, 2007 of the USCC meeting were approved and will be sent out to the larger group and posted on the CUWL Website.

Announcements:  None

Agenda Items

CUWL Wiki:  Steve Frye asked that all members go to CUWL Wiki, noting that some of the USCC members had already joined the Wiki. Others were asked to join at this time. Steve has changed the status of members to moderator which gives us more rights to do certain things on the Wiki such as add or delete pages, move things around. By the end of the day all should have moderator access. Add whatever you want to your page such as pictures. As far as naming convention, it was decided that members can choose whatever user name they want. If it becomes a problem, we can go back and change things.

Chairs of various coordinating committees are organizing the Wiki and adding pages. All pages will coincide with action items, with projects, with the group that is working on something. All pages will be linked right from Wiki homepage for easy navigation, regardless of which coordinating committee or group is working on it.

The CUWL Wiki as used for educational purposes is ad free. You can also close any boxes that aren’t useful to you. You can make it as simple as you want in terms of navigation.

Click on User Services link on navigation menu.  This takes us to our home place for the entire group. Links to other pages are available here. As moderators you can edit pages and start any threads you would like. Steve will post items on User Services pages in next few weeks.  Actual work will be done by the working groups we’ve created that align themselves with our action items.  Clicked on  the Information Literacy Assessment Working Group as an example. Members are posted for this group.  At this time they are Dave Dittman and Ella Cross.  If a group has only one member then they are the chair of that group.  Action item(s) are listed. There are also links out to the Public Documents page.  Steve will be working on this link.  It is not working quite right at this point. 

The Public Documents is the link where working groups can put documents that they want to share broadly.  Placed in this public directory makes it available to public, where anyone can just click on the link to the document and it will open up.

This system is working on Xythos system.  Question: Do other campuses have this implemented yet?  Valarie stated that UW-RF is implementing it now but it won’t be available for faculty and staff until some time in March. Most members did not know if this was available yet on their campuses. This is a web-based server space that people can access in a variety of ways.  On the public side, anyone can access any of the documents uploaded there.  A private directory is also being created.  This will be a ticketed system where a password is needed. Here we will be able to upload and delete documents to share with members of working groups.

Click on User Services, then Information Literacy, then Working group draft and other documents, bringing us to a page where one needs to enter a password. Steve gave out temporary password so committee members could see how this space functions.  He demonstrated how this will work by uploading of a document and demonstrating other functions within this space.

A directory has been created for CUWL, with a subdirectory for USCC and within that directory a subdirectory for each of the Working Groups has been created as well. Each working group will have their own Wiki space and will have their own space on the Xythos server where they can upload public and private documents. The Public side can be seen by everyone. Everyone on the Coordinating Committees has read/write and delete access to everything within these directories. The type of password access and level of security has yet to be decided on. The chairs and executive committee will have to figure out. Who actually has delete access still needs to be worked out. Suggested that maybe it be just the chairs that have this type of access.

Each of the working groups will have their own front page. They can do all their work on this front page, create additional pages that are linked off their front page.  Pages will appear in menu on the left as pages are added.  Threaded discussion can be used to have discussions within user groups  or to whole CUWL user group and ask for input in threaded discussion. You can locate threaded discussions by clicking on Discussion Forum.  At this point, don’t want to be too prescriptive.  Want to see how this will be used. To participate/post in threaded discussions, you have to join the Wiki.  This was in response to a question raised as to whether anyone can post or participate in the CUWL Wiki? Anyone can join, but the administrator can delete or block people. Steve doesn’t think this will be a problem and we want the Wiki to be as open as possible. We don’t want it to be onerous to join a threaded discussion.  This means we are making it possible for anyone to join, but didn’t want to lock it down and make it difficult for people to use it. There were no other questions on the Wiki. Jana  thought it looked great.

Action Items

How will we accomplish our action items?  Discussion centered on the process for adding members to the working groups and creating or using an existing charge template.

  • What is the process for adding members to Working Groups to accomplish goals?
  • Should we create a charge template and then fill it in as pertains to each of the Working Group’s action items?

Valarie suggested that creating a charge template would help to give us more structure.
Jill asked whether each of Working Group should come up with their charge, or should the whole committee work on this? Steve Frye stated that his experience has been that committees with no charge tend not to get much done. Recently, groups tend to get charges now that are very specific. On Madison campus, some of the groups have created charge templates so as not to recreate the wheel each time.  Work of that particular group is plugged into that charge. Working group then makes changes to the template. Nice of all working groups using a similar template. 

Valarie asked if Steve had an example for templates, noting the one he shared with charge for the Research Discovery Exploratory Task Force (RDETF).  Steve asked members to look at an email he sent with the charge template for the RDETF. Valarie suggested that all Coordinating Committees might want to use the same template. Actual content would be specific to each working group. Chairs should talk about this. The USCC members agreed that using the Research Discovery Exploratory Task Force charge will be useful.

  • Creating the Charge: Chairs will create a charge based on the RDETF template and send out to rest of committee members by our next meeting in January. Keep the charge short and simple.  We may need to add fields that aren’t in the Research Discovery charge, so our boiler plate may change as well. Working Groups should try to have their charge done by the next meeting and post on the CUWL Wiki as a draft before the next meeting. 

  • Adding members:  Discussion centered on what process to use to add members to the working groups.  It was suggested sending a central email message out to ask for volunteers.  Steve Frye will send out one message to the CUWL user group and other groups as well, listing the different Working Groups, Chairs or Co-Chairs.  Interested people will be asked to contact the chairs.  The initial email message will also include the information that not all interested people may be appointed to a Working Group, as the size of the group needs to be keep workable.  Those people not appointed can still participate in the threads and read posted documents at the CUWL Wiki site.

At the January meeting, we will go over the list of who each of chairs thinks should be on the working groups and finalize the list at that point.  Question raised as to which comes first, the charge or the members.  It was decided to go ahead with both at this time and have the charge and list of members by the next time we meet in January. 

Question arose again as to whether we needed to make a statement about the limited membership of the Working Groups.  It was decided that it is important to limit the membership and to include that in the email asking for volunteers.  USCC members are already hearing from people who want to be on the certain committees. There is a need to be able to make decisions on who is or isn’t on a group.  We will be looking for certain things in putting together each group, such as who will represent the system well. This is also a way to bring in non-represented campuses. This aspect should be taken into consideration when forming the Working Groups. We will try to get non-represented campuses involved but do still need to state that volunteering doesn’t necessarily mean you will get appointed to one of the groups, but said in a nice way.

Action items to work on will be to have both charge and list of members by time we meet in January.

Other items Discussed

The next generation OPAC is not one of our action items.  Most likely this would be considered by another group.  As projects come up and action items are created, some will cross boundaries of the various Coordinating Committees.  There won’t be multiple groups doing the same work. One group should be doing the work and that group needs to be organizationally under one of main Coordinating Committees.  For example, Metalib assessment.  Technical Initiatives is very interested in this as is User Services.  Executive committee decided that that group will be under User Services. We will be charged with that.  There will need to be members from Technical Initiatves. 

Anther example would be the future of the OPAC. This group would need members from other committees. The Resource Discovery Task Force is a Madison group that has just been created and is looking at public side of our catalog/OPAC.  They’re looking at future of the OPAC, but calling it Resource discovery, not OPAC. This is happening on Madison campus.  Don’t want to reinvent wheel, so as far as the OPAC is concerned is to take a look at the work of the Madsion group does and see where it puts us and go from there.

Also is also a whole other side of the future of the OPAC which has to do with the non-public side such as circulation services, the staff side of the OPAC.  This side will probably have a working group created under the Technical Initiatives group. Just to give everyone a sense of how this is all working out.

Valarie: If I understand it correctly, the group on Madison campus – we’ll see once they are done how we can dovetail on that.  Parallel with that, the Technical Initiatives Committee will be looking at other types of modules of a traditional library system.

iSkills presentation by Dave Dittman will be at 11:15 am.

Meeting Adjourned at 11:00 AM.
Recorder: Ella Cross