Coordinating Committees

CUWL User Services Coordinating Committee (USCC)
Meeting Minutes
July 11, 2008 10 am-12 pm

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

1. Announcements:

  • All USCC meeting minutes are on the CUWL wiki.
  • UW Superior’s library has moved into its temporary space in the student center during the library’s renovation. The collection is at another site. Requests (by Superior patrons or others) for items in the collection are filled once or twice daily.
  • The UW-Madison campus is considering using direct linking in SFX this fall (clicking on the “Find It” button would go directly to an appropriate full text resource, if available, with a configurable banner at the top for other links, rather than going to the SFX intermediary menu of services). It might be necessary to rank full text resources to facilitate this, e.g., to favor resources providing pdf instead of html full text.
  • UW-Madison is also considering configuring the CitationLinker differently to improve student success. Right now they teach students not to supply the article titles, to reduce the likelihood of not getting an available full text link due to user error in filling various fields on the form. They are considering removing some fields altogether to a “more options” tab.
  • Ella (Superior) asked to be sent the open source reference statistics program from UW-Madison.
  • UW-Milwaukee is implementing LibGuides and UW-Superior is considering it also. Is this a resource we should recommend be provided at the System level so all campuses would have access? Could all campuses reduce duplicative effort by collaborating on their subject guides and making them available to all System students?

2. CUWL Conference Follow-up

Steve sent the link to the survey responses. The timing of the conference seems to be good, feedback is mostly positive, and it’s likely that we’ll have another conference. It would be a good opportunity for committees to have face-to-face meetings also, though that might require committee members to overnight. Steve will check on whether the wiki has RSS capability. It would be helpful to presenters if pre-conference questions were submitted. It might be possible to go to a presentation proposal model too. There was mixed reaction to roundtables, which might be improved by incorporating some presentation followed by discussion. Coordinating Committee chairs will meet with executive committee members on Monday to discuss the conference. Any ideas are welcome.

3. Working Groups/Standing Committee Reports:

a) Information Literacy Assessment (Ella): Preliminary report on three tools is on the wiki. They are working on revision of the final report.

b) MetaLib Assessment (Steve): They’ll be meeting soon. The assessment will be done this fall (probably in September) and the protocol to be used is being tweaked. They anticipate a report by the end of October.

c) New Reference Models (Renee): They met this week and they are going through the survey results. Some members are working on the literature review. Their next meeting will be at the end of July.

d) Web 2.0 Tools (Barb): They plan an analysis and better presentation of the survey results by the end of the summer.

e) Distance Library Services: They met once (in May) and their next meeting is July 21st. They are reviewing a list of issues to identify key expectations. They are working on a web page to provide a common site for multi-campus programs. The group saw no need to revise the System policy on Library Support for Distance Learning at this time.

Steve is not asking working groups to produce reports now. He’ll write his report from the meeting today and the wiki, and working group chairs will be contacted if more information is needed.

4. Discussion - CUWL USCC... What's working, What can we improve?

The wiki works well to facilitate group work, but better communication across the System (including people not on committees) is still needed; not much communication is happening with the discussion lists. There was a suggestion to form lists of campus functional group contacts, like reference and instruction, and use those in addition to the discussion lists to ensure feedback. We could do more presentations (like WiLS Hours and Dave Dettman’s iSkills presentation) to encourage feedback as well. The committees are available as a resource for questions arising on individual campuses also, but it takes time to foster that. A question is how prescriptive the committee should be (should the USCC make recommendations for best practices for all campuses). Steve will seek guidance from the directors.

Meeting adjourned at noon.
Recorder: Barbara Bren