Heard Library strategic planning group

1. Library Surveys – Reports from Vanderbilt Police Department (Andrew Atwood)

Andrew Atwood advised the group on VUPD’s security review of the libraries. He shared his recommendations for reducing the risk of criminal activity in the libraries based on observations made during the review. Recommendations include training of staff and student employees on safety and security measures; implementing protocols for emergency situations and cash and key control; standardizing the public use policy; and the need for a third party security presence and installation of interior security cameras, among other overall security suggestions.

2. Update on the Open Library Project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Marshall)

Marshall updated the committee on a proposal by Duke and various other partners to do conceptual work on the design of an Open Library Management System based on Service Oriented Architecture for the higher education community.

3. Proposal to Add Suellen Stringer-Hye to Strategy & Planning Council (Jody)

Due to her role as Chair of the Communications Committee, Suellen was recommended to be added as a member of the S&P Council. Because the council is dissolving and regrouping as the Library Council, the group decided not to add new members at this time. A decision was made to periodically provide reports to other committees for review in an effort to keep them abreast of items discussed.

Jody recommended moving the Tenn-Share web site from UTK to Vanderbilt, in consideration of Jodie Gambill’s two-year position working with the initial development of Drupal. Vanderbilt would provide a webservice base during the development of this system. The committee agreed to host the site.

1. Consistent Formatting for Annual Reports (Suellen Stringer-Hye)
Suellen Stringer-Hye, chair of the Communications Committee, proposed a consistent formatting style for annual reports in an effort to increase the effectiveness of the library’s internal communications. She recommends that the annual committee reports follow the easy-to-read format used by the Communications Committee for this year’s annual report. The reporting format is very simple and lists in bullet points the committee’s accomplishments for the year and the goals for the following year. The information documented in the report can also be used to create more detailed reports as needed. Once finished, it is then easily available for staff to review on the Committee Wiki. A sample of the Communications Committee annual report is available here: http://wiki.library.vanderbilt.edu/committees/pmwiki.php/Comm/AnnualReportWorkingDraft .
It was also recommended that when posting minutes to the staff news, Committee Chairs include important highlights in their news article so staff will be able to see “at a glance” what the committee is working on without directly accessing the Wiki.

2. Offering Four Day Work Weeks to Employees (Paul)
Due to the rising energy costs and in special consideration of staff who make long distance commutes, the committee discussed the possibility of offering both exempt and non-exempt staff the opportunity to reduce their work week to four days (while still keeping to a 40 hour work week). The proposal will be forwarded to the Library Director’s Council for further discussion.

3. Update on MyiLibrary (Bill)
The Collections Committee is working on a license and contract to partner with Ingram on a pilot project to gain access to their online eBook platform MyiLibrary. This is a patron driven selection process that will be accessible through DiscoverLibrary and ACORN. A list of 7,000 titles in the humanities that have been deduped will be used in this test project. Patrons can click on a link to be directed to the MyiLibrary platform for the option to then access an eBook After a defined number of repeated accesses to the same book, the library pays for the book and would then own the book in perpetuity. . If patrons do not spend up to the $25,000 commitment by the end of a year, bibliographers would then choose books to reach our obligation.

4. Charge of Taskforce for Adding OCLC Numbers to ACORN Record (Bill)
A project team has been proposed by the Collections Committee to identify and update records lacking OCLC numbers and to determine which records to include or exclude from OCLC. This effort is in response to an interest by OCLC and Worldcat in loading circulation data from our collection. Bill will pursue the implementation of the project team and report back to the committee on its progress.

Suellen Stringer-Hye (Chair) and Henry Shipman discussed changes to the DiscoverLibrary signature as required by the Office of Trademark Licensing and Creative Services. The tree symbol must be removed from the DiscoverLibrary signature text but will be reconfigured and used as a background watermark in the DiscoverLibrary search box on the web, and it can also be used in other library advertising and marketing campaigns. The committee also reports that it has created 5 different posters from the Books that Matter campaign (as seen in the Fall 2007 issue of the Acorn Chronicle) and will print and distribute a total of 45 posters across campus this spring at a cost of $517.50. Five framed posters will be hung in the GLB Staff Lounge.

Flo Wilson asked directors to identify questions to ask of the University Librarian candidates during their interviews this month.

Lisa Shipman asked directors and administrators to review their cost centers and to inform her of anticipated 4th-quarter major purchases as well as potential deficits. She reminded everyone that carry forwards for materials encumbrances can only occur in a cost center with a positive balance and cannot exceed the amount of that balance.

Lisa reminded everyone to share their ratings with staff as they carry out their performance evaluations this month. The 1, 2, and 3 level ratings (Exemplary, Meets Expectations, and Below Expectations) will be tied directly to the levels of salary increase that staff receive. She asked that directors and administrators provide her with a separate list of staff nominations for merit awards and said it was not necessary to justify these nominations on the list itself. The justification, she said, should be evident from reading a nominee’s performance evaluation. Lisa asked that equity adjustment proposals for individual staff be forwarded to her, as well.

Since the Council will meet with the candidates for University Librarian over the next three weeks (April 16, 22, and 28), it decided to hold additional meetings only if there were submitted agenda items that needed immediate attention.

The Association of Research Libraries will conduct a field study beginning April 1 which will involve librarian interviews with faculty at their institutions. The goal is to learn if and how faculty use new model publications in their research activities. Library directors at the meeting agreed to ask their librarians to participate. The Council agreed that it would be helpful for librarians to have a generic outline to use during the interview process. Paul will inform ARL of our willingness to participate in its study.

Following a February directive from the Council, Roberta Winjum and Julie Loder consulted with Deborah Broadwater in order to understand Biomedical Library’s position on the purchase of an ERMS. They learned that Deborah is supportive of the idea and plans to discuss it with Nunzia Giuse in the future; however, she cannot commit Biomedical to a purchase at this point. The Council decided to move forward with the ERMS Evaluation Project Team’s recommendation of a conditional purchase of Ex Libris. Roberta Winjum will inform Serials Solutions that we will not be purchasing their product. She will also convey to Ex Libris our intention to enter into a good faith negotiation with them on the future purchase of their Verde product. Ex Libris must satisfy certain benchmarks of product reliability and maturity in the meantime. Roberta will provide the Council with a timeline of projected benchmark dates and a final purchase date.

March 18, 2008

Beginning April 7, The National Institutes of Health will require all authors receiving NIH funding to deposit their medical and scientific articles into PubMed within 12 months of publication. Otherwise, authors will be in violation of their rules and in jeopardy of losing their funding. In addition, any of their articles cited after April 8 must have PubMed Central identification numbers. For Vanderbilt researchers, rules violation could have serious consequences because they receive hundreds of millions of NIH dollars each year.

Last week, Paul, Tracy, and Roberta visited with Biomedical Library staff to see their newly-created database of publishers in the fields of medicine and science. The database provides information to researchers on publishers' willingness to deposit articles into PubMed on behalf of authors in order to help them comply with the new NIH rules. Going publisher rates for open access to articles are currently between $900 and $3,000.

Paul has suggested to university and VUMC administrators that a meeting be called of Library and VUMC representatives to consider whether or not the university should take responsibility for compliance with these new NIH rules. If so, Vanderbilt authors could turn over to the university rights to their future articles at the time they submit their grant proposals. The Library would then upload any published articles to both its institutional repository and to PubMed. In this way, Vanderbilt authors would avoid the publishers' open access fees. The Council hopes that this discussion will broaden to include decisions on how best to structure a Vanderbilt institutional repository and compliance with these new requirements. Paul will keep the Council informed of any meetings scheduled on this topic.

Paul and Lisa have been working to establish the leasing rates for space in both the Sharondale Annex and the new Archives Annex. They believe the warehouse space (approximately 12,000 sq. ft.) in the Archives Annex will be available for lease by January of 2009. Shortly before that time, university archival materials will be moved from the Sharondale Annex to the Archives Annex, freeing significant Annex space for lease, as well. Plans are to “white box” the new rental space at the Archives Annex and to offer credits to lessees who significantly upgrade their spaces. Paul and Lisa hope to share proposed square foot rates for both buildings at next Tuesday's S&P Council meeting.

For the last seven years, the Library has benefited from the Medical Center 's purchase of the maximum number of Novell operating system licenses for its use. VUMC gave enough of their unused licenses to the Library so that we did not have to pay for any. Now, VUMC plans to stop using the Novell system. Their proposed (but not realistic) deadline for conversion is June 30 of this year. The Library must now migrate to a Windows or Linux environment because staying with Novell is not cost effective. Jody suggested that if funding is available the Library should purchase enough licenses to allow us to get through one more year with Novell. In the meantime, he will put together a migration plan. Once migrated, Library staff should find the new system slightly different to use from the Novell system they currently use. The migration will primarily involve changes to the remote management services and the reestablishment of shared file folders and printers across the Library system.

• Electronic Resources Management System Evaluation Project Team Update (Roberta)

After months of gathering and evaluating information, the ERMS Project Team recommended a conditional purchase of Ex Libris' Verde system to the S&P Council. The Council agreed that key to making any of the evaluated systems work was the use of it by all Vanderbilt libraries. Otherwise, the value of any ERMS would diminish greatly. They agreed that before proceeding with a purchase Roberta Winjum would consult with Deborah Broadwater in Biomedical Library to understand that library's position on an ERMS and the future placing of Biomedical Library records into it.

The committee discussed the DiscoverLibrary rollout plan and is helping to shepherd the time guidelines in it. Marshall Breeding drafted a white paper on content management, and the committee is refining that paper and plans to bring the finished product to the S&P Council soon. As a first step toward the larger issue of digital preservation, the committee plans to discuss the problem of what to do with archival materials received from publishers for collections to which we subscribe.

Jody Combs and Cindy Franco met with the OAK Needs Assessment Group and received feedback from students, faculty, and Library staff about the OAK environment. Of immediate concern to them is the need to prioritize possible enhancements to OAK relative to other needs on campus (e.g., the need to upgrade the student registration system). He hopes the Needs Assessment Group will have a recommendation to the Provost's Office by March of this year which will outline the needs and costs for enhancements to the OAK environment.

The EPTF recently met with members from both Vanderbilt Environmental Health and Safety and the Nashville Fire Department. They arranged to have a first round of fire extinguisher training for about 60 Library employees on March 6, 2008. The Staff Development Committee will coordinate the training, and staff from Central Library, Science and Engineering Library, and Peabody Library will be among the first trained. A second round of training will be scheduled in May. Library-wide fire drills will be scheduled for late July or early August of this year, as well. VUMC offers free CPR training to Vanderbilt staff, and Juanita Murray will be speaking with Library Directors to get the word out to Library staff about the availability of this training. The EPTF hopes to complete their Library Emergency Plan by the end of the calendar year. They also hope to have in place emergency supplies kits for libraries between now and June.

5. The Medical Center plans to phase out its use of the Novell system. Libraries may need to migrate to the Windows environment because of this. Jody Combs will work with ITS and VUMC to draft a proposal to accomplish this migration.

6. Flo Wilson asked the Council whose name she should give Nunzia Giuse in Biomedical Library as a contact on issues concerning establishment of an institutional repository. The Council agreed that Roberta Winjum would be our contact.

February 5, 2008

• Discussion concerning obtaining the WorldCatLocal search engine through ASERL (Paul)

ASERL is investigating the interest of its member libraries in obtaining WCL as a search tool, particularly for resource sharing among ASERL libraries. Interested libraries are asked to fill out a questionnaire about their current integrated library systems and return it to ASERL by the end of the month. Jody Combs will provide the Library's response to the survey. WCL is one of several options the Library is considering to provide users access to more collections.

• Discussion of the Library's participation in the university-wide dialogue on the computer privileges and responsibilities policy (Jody)

Vanderbilt is appointing a committee to draft an update to its 1995 acceptable uses for computing policy. Jody Combs will represent the Library in this endeavor and has offered a wiki to host the discussion for the committee. Of interest to the Library are issues of patron privacy, copyright law, and licensing and contractual obligations with our vendors. Jody will involve other Council members in this discussion as he sees the need to bring them into it.

January 22, 2008

Suellen Stringer-Hye attended the meeting and showed the group how the DiscoverLibrary embedded search box currently looks within the Heard Library's webpages. The group discussed the need to quickly raise the visibility of DiscoverLibrary on the public web and decided that a firm date should be set for the move to the new product. Jody will create a schedule (for Council approval) with implementation deadlines for 1) providing an interim DiscoverLibrary link on the Library's main webpage and 2) featuring the DiscoverLibrary search box as the primary search box on the main webpage. The goal is to implement #1 very soon and #2 immediately following spring break. Public Services staff will need to be trained in the meantime to insure that they are comfortable interpreting DiscoverLibrary search results for patrons. Jody will consult with Celia Walker to see if the Staff Development Committee would be willing to organize these training sessions.

The Library and Ex Libris will soon put together the beta test plan for version 2 of Primo. The goal is to start beta testing March 6 or shortly thereafter and to have version 2 ready for general release by April 30. This version is a more flexible product and will include several new features.

Paul suggested that the current vacancy in the Head, Media Services & Government Information Librarian position in Central Library afforded the Library the opportunity to consider whether the position should be redefined as having components of broader, system-wide duties and possibly described as a digital media librarian. He explained that repurposing the position would give the Library a point person to work with the rest of the campus, and it would also give the Digital Media Archive Project Team someone to work with as that group determined its direction. There are two staffing needs in Central Library that need to be considered in any redefinition of the position, as well. First, Central Library will take the lead in the Vanderbilt Visions program this year and will need someone to oversee that effort. Second, Central needs a person to oversee technology support. It was decided that David Carpenter would work with Lisa to craft a definition of the position, and they would advertise it as soon as possible.

Paul, Bill, Roberta, and a member of the Vanderbilt Press visited Lightning Source, a subsidiary of Ingram Industries located outside of Nashville . The company prints books on demand. Lightning Source is looking for other ways to use their capabilities and services, and there may be opportunities for the Library to partner with them in the future.

December 18, 2007

The Digital Media Archive Project Team has met three times and wanted to report back to the Strategy & Planning Council regarding concerns about the infrastructure needed to support a digital media archive. Holling reviewed digital collections which the team had identified across campus, both in departmental hands and more accessible collections, and the size of the collections is quite large. The team was concerned that (a) we do not have the storage space to accept these collections; and (b) the cataloguers that would be needed to tag these materials are already very busy. They also felt that the role of a Digital Media Archive could be confused with the VU e-Archive, and that those two efforts should be clearly delineated.

Council members felt that once the university need and available content are identified, the project team can articulate (in a white paper) the scope of the project and related costs involved for storage space and personnel, possibly with a recommendation for a pilot project. Then we can schedule a meeting with university ITS staff to learn what they are planning for the larger university and explore if we could collaborate on large capacity storage. We can also begin to strategize how staff ti me might be made available to make the materials accessible and preserve them for the future.

Roberta outlined the need for an Electronic Resources Management System and encouraged the Council to continue in its efforts to acquire a system despite the recent failure to fill the ERMS librarian position. She noted that the project team members have volunteered to help with an ERMS implementation and that she would be willing to lead such a project. Council agreed that the team should continue with their investigative efforts and when a recommendation is approved the library can submit an exception request for funding.

Lisa thanked everyone who has helped in this fall's recruitment. She wanted to talk about ways to improve the recruitment procedure, specifically how we advertise positions. Our policy has been to post the minimum salary for job opening, but some staff feel that this policy deters some potential applicants. Council decided to post minimum salaries only when we are looking for an entry level person. Other positions, where we are looking for a mid-career or well established person, would be listed as “salary negotiable”.

December 4, 2007

1. Primo name update (Paul)
The new name for AlphaSearch will be Discover Library. The name will identify our catalog in other venues-MyVU, Facebook, etc. Creative Services will help us brand the name and we will run it through the trademark attorney to confirm it is available. Jody will work on a press release for the release of the Discover Library and will send Celia some information about those details for the Staffnews.

2. Copyright Task Force (Paul)
University administration is ready for us to move forward with a draft of a copyright policy for the library. A project team and charge was approved to gather other ARL policies and make a recommendation for our library to take to the provost. Examples of education programs in other libraries may also be included with the report, although educational development will take place after the policy is approved.

3. Duke book digitization project (Bill)
The library is working with Duke University Press and 16 other institutions on a pilot digitization project. Participants commit to purchasing all titles from the Duke Press in the coming year and we receive unlimited perpetual access to the digitized text and a print copy. We also receive access to Duke's backlist while subscribing. Compared with netLibrary, which allows one single user in the southeast at a time, this is advantageous. Vendor arrangements are still unconfirmed. They will provide MARC records for loading into ACORN. This could become a model for purchasing electronic materials.

November 13, 2007

1. The future development of the primo database. How do we grow the database by adding additional collections, databases etc. Should we migrate Athena/SiteSearch to Primo? (Paul and Jody)
The issue of how we add items to Primo was discussed. Among the suggestions for inclusion was Athena. While our records would increase (and hence costs), many records would be duplicates. The addition would allow us to lend when our own copy was circulating. However, since most of our loans are from academic institutions, we might consider approaching the Information Alliance (UTK and UK) first. A third node is scheduled for Primo Version 2 (beta testing is scheduled for March), which might allow us to perform quicker searches. Paul will put this on the ASERL agenda and have some initial discussions with UTK and UK.

Future questions about additions to Primo are primarily collection development issues, and so the Collections Committee will take on this responsibility in consultation with the Digital Library Steering Committee.

2. Continuation of the naming discussion for Primo (Paul)
Paul and Sue Erickson met with some students recently to ask for input on the Primo name. They felt that the name should brand Primo as a Vanderbilt product and should suggest that it is customizable. Names now under consideration are: MyVsearch, Vsearch, VUsearch. Celia will check with trademark attorneys to see if these are available. She will also check for AlphaSearch and see if a trademarked name can be used if a special graphic is added to it.

3. Update on the ASERL Mass Digitization Project (Paul)
ASERL hired a consultant to explore how the group might create a consortium to digitize our out-of-copyright collections. The consultant recommended going with the Open Content Alliance and determined that 250,000 volumes could be digitized for $9 million, excluding return shipping. No decision to pursue the project has been made at this time.

4. Update on the status of the ERMS Project Team (Roberta)
The ERMS project team is working on a set of questions to ask the major ERMS vendors. Roberta has contacted each vendor to obtain cost estimates for each product and the team expects to bring a recommendation to the S&P in January 2008.

5. Other
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive will collaborate with Technical Services catalogers in reviewing their metadata standards as part of their continual effort to refine operations.

October 30, 2007

1. Copyright (Paul)
Our reimbursement system for e-reserves is set up in such a way that it can inadvertently discourage faculty from using the service. We do not want to be the copyright police, but perhaps it is time to start to assert fair use when the classroom use criteria are met. If faculty see that we do not always funnel reserve requests through the copyright clearance center, perhaps they will be more inclined to use our services.

Sue Erickson reported on the steps that the library's copyright office takes in providing e-reserves and class pacs. Exceptions that do not require copyright clearance are documents in the public domain, US government documents, and publications by professors holding copyright to those documents. Class pac charges are based on the costs of producing the item. No class pacs are printed until permissions are granted. E-reserves that are already available in our paid databases do not require copyright permission. Prices for the others are usually based on the number of students in the class. Articles are posted at the time of request and may be removed if copyright is denied or is cost-prohibitive.

Amy Stewart-Mailhiot met with the university's legal counsel, Kevin Davis, and with members of the Compliance Office regarding copyright issues specific to videos. She was encouraged to draft some policy for counsel to review and send to the Provost for approval. Holling Smith-Borne noted that there is no copyright clearance center for music media. The Music Library follows the guidelines established by the Music Library Association. Sara Beutter has created a module on OAK for the Vanderbilt Visions initiative about applying fair use in the classroom.

Council members agreed that it seemed appropriate to expand on our first steps in copyright educational programs and resources. Faculty may be unaware that some resources are already available through out databases. We might also consider writing a white paper to show university administration where we stand compared to other ARL libraries and see if we can get help from across the campus to offer instruction. Bill Hook also suggested that we research how much has been spent on copyright royalties and analyze what we have paid for. A project team will be created to analyze our current copyright activities, explore educational initiatives, and possibly write a policy recommendation. Paul will take the report to Dennis Hall. In any case, we need to offer educational support for front line staff.

2. Primo Name (Celia)
The Communications Committee reviewed 43 name suggestions for Primo, most of which were generated from library staff. The parameters of the charge asked us to bring forward a name that would connect the search functionality with the library and still be catchy enough to intrigue students and other users. The four names brought forward by the Committee were "LibrarySearch", "Library", "MegaSearch", and "SmartSearch", recommending that they be combined with attractive graphics and the "Be Brilliant" marketing slogan to make them attractive. Council members were not overly enthusiastic about any of the names. Paul and Sue Erickson will meet with some students later this week to get their input on names and will report back to the Council at our next meeting.

3. Strategic Plan Progress Report (Flo)
Flo suggested that we post the Progress Report that she has created based on our discussions at the Library Administrative Retreat to the Staffweb and to the Library's home page. Council members were asked to send edits to Flo.

October 16, 2007

1. Committee membership procedure update (Flo, Celia)
A procedure has been drafted and posted to the library wiki regarding committee membership changes. The Council members reviewed the procedure and approved it, adding one change to the text.

2. AlphaSearch Update (Jody)
The Primo team is in the process of fixing bugs on AlphaSearch and expect to install Service Pack 5 on October 21. That should fix a number of the bugs being reported and will add additional functionality. The team is now working to allow the search box to be embedded in other environments, such as MyVu and OAK.

We will continue to follow the practice of introducing new versions through our test bed, moving them to full production after the bugs are resolved. Version 2 will be released at the end of December and we expect it to go into full production in February 2008. The team's next steps will be to work on building out the user interface. They will also work to create support tools like the e-shelf.

Current usage is about 1500 searches/day which approximates the number of Acorn searches. The response to AlphaSearch has been mostly positive and only minor problems need to be resolved. We are satisfied that this is going in the right direction and, if all changes are made, we expect it to be our primary search service. However, Acorn and other resources will not be going away for a long time.

The Communications Committee will work with Jody to inform staff and our users of these steps and to encourage more feedback for the team. We will solicit suggestions from staff for a permanent name for Primo and, once the Strategy & Planning Council approves the name in late October, instructors are encouraged to add information about this search capability in their presentations.

3. Staff Development Fund Guidelines (Celia)
The Staff Development Committee drafted guidelines for allocating the funds that will be generated from the endowment in the next fiscal year from the new Staff Development Fund. The Council approved the suggestions, which will soon be posted for all staff to review.

September 18, 2007

1. Task Force charge for the Digital Media Archive (Paul and Jody)
A charge for a Digital Media Archive Project Team was distributed. The team is charged with identifying digital items not produced by the library that should be archived and promoting the library to the university as a place to archive such resources. Much of what Vanderbilt is producing digitally may be lost and so now is the time to investigate what is being produced that needs to be saved. The team will also have conversations with potential content providers to determine what they would expect from a digital archive. In summary, the team's focus will be on marketing and collection development. Issues of access, copyright and preservation infrastructure will be taken up by another team and at another time. The Council approved the charge with some additions to the team members and asked that a progress report be prepared by the end of 2007.

2. Bib records in Acorn for freely-available full-text e-books (Roberta)
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain library has created bibliographic records for content digitized by their Google project. The records are freely available in the Open Content Alliance. Should we enter these records into Acorn or into Primo?

Council members noted other freely available content from the OCA to which we do not link. The issue is which of these resources supports what a research library collects and which support the specific mission of Vanderbilt? Our position might be that unvetted materials might be placed in Primo, but Acorn should represent materials that have been selected by our staff. We must continue to teach our users about the multiple levels of our collections, from the core academic records in Acorn, to Primo, World Cat and Google.

3. Metadata Committee chair (Roberta)
Discussion centered on the purpose of the Metadata Committee and its two-part goals: improving Acorn and participating in broad thinking about metadata.

September 11, 2007

1. ERMS Project Team (Janice Adlington)
Janice brought forward a recommendation from the ERMS project team to ask Roberta Winjum to chair the team until a new ERMS librarian is hired. Another member will be identified from the Management Library to take the place of departing team member, Rachel Vacek. The team's charge will expand to include examining how to enhance current acquisition records to track purchased titles. Discussion ensued regarding the value of selecting an ERMS that might not fully integrate with Workflows but might support our record-keeping.

The Council asked the team to continue with Roberta as the interim chair. The team's top priority will be to articulate criteria for required and preferred functionality. In December, Bill Hook will become a team member, replacing Mary Beth Blalock.

2. DLSC opportunities and needs recommendations (Jody Combs)
Jody discussed the Digital Library Steering Committee's priorities for the coming six months. They include: Coordination of the next phases of Primo; further research on content management approaches for re-architecting and managing the library's web presence; development of a distinct, online presence for digital library initiatives; development of a strategy for mounting and archiving local digital resources; and the investigation of current options for digital asset management software. Council approved the goals.

3. Naming the new storage facility (Paul Gherman)
A brief discussion was held to suggest names for the new Annex, should the building be acquired. If it does go through, the Council suggests Archives Annex.

August 28, 2007

Guests: Sue Davis, Holling Smith-Borne, Tracy Primich

1. Emergency Planning Team (Bill Hook)
The Library's emergency plan was last updated in 2000. It's time to review it and bring it in line with other such plans around campus, with campus library plans, and with the university's pandemic and business continuity plans. Sue Davis presented a model template called D Plan that is hosted by the Northeast Document Conservation Center. It's a free system designed to send automatic update reminders. Bill Hook will come back to the Council with a revised project team proposal and suggestions for 5 members. Juanita Murray will chair the team and Lisa Shipman will participate on the pandemic section of the plan.

2 Public Library of Science (PLoS) Subscription (Bill Hook)
Public access publication systems like PLoS offer reduced fee structures to faculty who publish from member institutions. A request from a faculty member brought the issue forward: if the Library advocates for open access, shouldn't we pay for memberships in organizations like PLos and purchase special public access subscriptions from publishers like the Oxford University Press? Such memberships would reduce the per page fees to faculty on the university and medical center campuses. Tracy Primich agreed to identify other open access publications and determine which most frequently publish Vanderbilt authors. Tracy, Bill Hook and the Collections Committee will report on what our peers are doing with open access and work with the Communications Committee to see how we can communicate to faculty about open access opportunities.

3.Digital Preservation Report (Roberta Winjum)
Paul began by thanking Sue Davis for her white paper on digital preservation. The paper is a good starting point for identifying best practices in preserving locally created materials. Are we large enough to follow the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) model to preserve our data forever or should we look for a partner(s) to help us do that? We already have a partner in place for some projects: the Library of Congress for the Television News and Case Western University for ETANA. We need to survey our digital resources, inventorying what we have, what is being preserved, what is not being preserved, who has the resource, etc. across the libraries to evaluate and recommend a consistent preservation policy. What will we need in the next ten years? Are our current preservation procedures meeting our needs? The DLSC will complete an inventory that Sue Davis developed in conjunction with her white paper and they will supplement her report and post it to the library's Staffweb.

August 21, 2007

1. Vanderbilt Library Media Archive (Paul)
As non-traditional media become more important in our collection development efforts, we need to draw our unique digital resources together into a common brand so that the university will identify the library as a location to store digital materials. Current collections include the Voices of Vanderbilt, the African Music Archive, the Television News Archive, the VU e-Archive, many items in Special Collections and other unique resources in Blair and Peabody. However, we should not underestimate the cost of building the infrastructure for these resources.

Paul agreed to contact Jim Parker and Mike Schoenfeld, whose department is working on iTunesU, an Apple program that offers server space to store streaming materials, to discuss this option.

2. Appointments to the DLSC (Jody Combs)
Jody brought the Council up to date on changes in the Digital Library Steering Committee. Sue Erickson, Director of System-Wide Public Services, will be asked to join the Committee, as will the new ERMS librarian and the Digital Collections Archivist when they are hired. Roberta Winjum, Flo Wilson and Paul Gherman will rotate off the Committee.

24 July 2007

De-acidification was a hot topic in the library world 15 years ago, but little is said about it today. In response to an inquiry from another ARL library, Paul asked why we do not de-acidify any of our materials. Sue Davis gave the Council a brief overview of how the preservation community regards de-acidification. Today there is one primary service provider, Preservation Technologies. Different materials are used for books versus documents, but the concept of adding magnesium oxide as an alkaline buffer compound to paper to avoid it becoming acidic is the same. Some libraries do de-acidify some of their materials, but policies and priorities vary.

De-acidification does not reverse existing damage to materials; it only keeps it from worsening. Some publishers have converted to using alkaline paper, but there is no consistent movement in this direction. The Heard Library conducted a physical condition assessment of the collection around 1990 and determined that approximately 80% of the collection will become brittle without de-acidification.

Discussion ensued as to the value of de-acidification versus digitization. It was determined that a number of tools should be available, including digitization for some materials that fall within the public domain and de-acidification for some more recent resources. Sue Davis agreed to research the subject further and work with Bill Hook and our bibliographers to develop a white paper for a collection policy statement that addresses digital preservation and de-acidification by the end of 2007.

Roberta distributed a sample report from ScholarlyStats, a program that evaluates usage statistics for our databases. We intend to use the program for the next year utilizing nine STM databases. Kitty Porter will be asked to provide a report to the S&P at the year's end to determine if we want to purchase the program.

We are currently gathering information from directors and committee chairs to give us an overview of our accomplishments in the last school year and see what progress we are making on our strategic goals. We will discuss the goals and our progress at the retreat and also discuss a recent RLG document, “Supporting the Changing Patterns of Research, Teaching and Learning”. Paul will create the agenda.

3 July 2007

1. Adding the Director of Development to the Strategy & Planning Council (Celia)
As we move toward a capital campaign, we are looking at ways to make our new Director of Development, Beth Boord, better informed about issues, resources and needs in the library. With this in mind, Celia Walker brought forward the idea of asking Beth to join the Strategy & Planning Council so that she would hear about issues strategic to the library. After discussion, it was decided to send Beth the Council agendas with a standing invitation to attend as a guest to listen to discussions on topics that might be useful for fundraising. Council members were encouraged to communicate with Beth when a topic arose that might be of interest to her, and to think of her when other activities occur in the library that might be of interest.

2. Annual Report: request for information from committee chairs (Celia)
Council members discussed plans for an annual report in the June 12 meeting. In follow up, the topic was discussed at last week's Library Directors Council and directors were asked to submit a bulleted list of the year's highlights to Celia by July 22. Committee chairs will be asked for similar reports.

3. Institutional Repository librarian (Juanita)
Juanita Murray and Roberta Winjum submitted a proposed job description for a Digital Collections Archivist for Special Collections to work with the Institutional Repository and other University archives, as well as support Web page design and maintenance for Special Collections, serve on their public service desk, and participate in committee and team work. This moves the reporting structure for the Institutional Repository (VU e-Archive) to Special Collections. Council members discussed the job and suggested some changes. Juanita will revise the description and Library Administration will post the 30 hour position to the HR site.

19 June 2007

1. GPO Proposal (Paul)
We discussed the request by ARL to send letters of support to the Superintendent of Documents in support of shared regional depositories. ASERL is also naming a steering committee to develop the idea within the Southeast. Larry Romans and Amy Stewart-Mailhoit joined the discussion. They reported that in Tennessee there has been a long-standing shared regional depository in existence that works well. It was decided that we send a letter of support for regionals.

2. Institutional repository leadership (Paul)
With Roberta Winjum taking over licensing from John Haar, there is a need to shift the responsibility to the Institutional Repository to someone else. Paul presented two alternatives to consider. One, that each bibliographer take on a liaison role with their department to foster the IR and encourage faculty to deposit material and to serve as a resource about how to manage their community on the IR.

The second was to place the future responsibility for the IR with Special Collections and Archives, since collecting faculty materials falls within the purview of the Archive. The vacant LA position could be restructured to include the responsibility to oversee the IR. After discussion it was decided to further investigate the second alternative, before the vacant LA position is filled using the previous job description. Lisa will be investigating the budgetary needs to create this type of position which would likely be at the librarian level.

3.Recommendations for restricted files (Lisa)
At the S & P meeting on May 1, 2007, we discussed the possibility of restricting meeting minutes and personal information (staff schedules, home telephone numbers, etc.) on the Library Intranet. Lisa Shipman and Celia Walker reviewed our online resources and made several recommendations to the S&P of what should be sequestered. S & P decided that potential library candidates' resumes should be restricted to University view only. S & P also decided that the Ingram Book Order Plan should be restricted to Library staff. One Council member suggested we remind staff on the newsfeed that all committee minutes and reports are public on the world wide web and should be written with that in mind. Reminders about this should run on the newsfeed every 2 - 3 months.

12 June 2007

1. library marketing campaign (Celia, Suellen Stringer-Hye and Henry Shipman)
Three members of the Communications Committee presented a plan for next year's library marketing campaign. The plan includes audience prioritization, system-wide services and resources to promote, a list of communications vehicles to use, a promotion schedule and cost estimate. Three different campaign message platforms were presented and discussed. The Council members gave the committee direction for the campaign, choosing to use two of the three message concepts. The Communications Committee will meet with Creative Services to move forward with the campaign and will present the campaign to the library staff in a summer brown bag.

2. annual report (Flo)
Council members discussed the need for an annual report (our last report was posted in 2004). The publication should address what the library has accomplished in the past 12 months. Celia will ask directors to send a bulleted list of what has been accomplished to her to consolidate as a first step. Our goal will be to post the report by September 1, 2007.

22 May 2007

The need for continuity in the oversight of system-wide public services was discussed. The Freshman Commons presses us to think of public services outside of silos and create a new structure for the service. Flo submitted a proposal for a position intended to manage system-wide public services.

Public services currently consist of the GIS Service and the Census Information center, system-wide instruction responsibilities, selected data subscriptions, and various potential committee projects and deliberations (Research Services, in particular, but also possible Circulation and Access). Additionally, there are assessment efforts, OAK initiatives for work with faculty training/development and instruction that could be made possible through the Blackboard community system. Work is already underway on information literacy and the Vanderbilt Visions program, which will start next fall. But there is also a need to formalize system-wide instructional technology support.

Flo will draft a job description for a coordinator of system-wide public services and another description for an instructional technology support coordinator and bring it to the S&P.

1 May 2007

1. Library Intranet (Paul)
A question about library Intranet usage came up on the ARL listserv, which led to a discussion on whether there is material that we post publicly that should be restricted to library staff or the university community. Currently we have some restricted files, but the amount is limited. The option of restricting crawling access was discussed, to limit the material drawn from an Internet search. But many robotic crawlers would not be limited by such measures. If there is value to these online materials, it resides in the ability for other ARLs to look at our Staffweb for models for library activities in such areas as cataloging or staff development training. Perhaps we should restrict meeting minutes and personal information (staff schedules, home telephone numbers, etc.) but leave all else open? Lisa Shipman and Celia Walker will review our online resources and make a recommendation to the S&P of what should be sequestered.

2. ERMS Project Team Scope (Roberta)
Discussion centered around a request to extend the timeline for the ERMS project team to make a recommendation on ERMSs-whether to purchase one and, if so, which system. Updates will be released for Verdi in January and it seems appropriate to extend the deadline for a recommendation until after that release. The Council agreed to extend the timeline to March 2008. The team will see a webinar by iii which should help them create a list of needs for an ERMS program.

This discussion led to a recent ScholarlyStats presentation and a discussion of whether we should purchase a trial set of platforms. ScholarlyStats would give us information on usage of library collections but we need multiple years to compare results. The software can also tell us if a particular user interface is preferred by users when more than one vendor provides a journal resource. Since a substantial number of vendors are not covered by ScholarlyStats it seems reasonable to start small and to perhaps begin with Science platforms. Roberta Winjum, Tracy Primich, and Bill Hook will look at the platforms needed.

3. Homepage Toolbar (Paul)
A Tell Us comment came in recently from a student who liked the Science & Engineering Toolbar and wondered if the library system would be offering a toolbar. Test Pilot currently has a Firefox toolbar option. We could easily build one for Internet Explorer, but the problem would be maintenance of the product. Moreover, the Primo project will search ACORN and any Dublin Core resource loaded into the program. With VISTA coming, more options will be available for toolbars and for 2.0 Web technology. The discussion was tabled.

4. Instruction Position (Flo)
Good progress has been made on the instruction goal this year. The plan for Vanderbilt Visions is complete and sessions for 1500 students will begin in September which include a library session. Other activities are being designed to support this program, including a short video about how research is conducted and the value of the library resources. Flo Wilson is seeking input from staff in all of the libraries to determine their needs in regards to an instructional position that will be created to support this program.

5. Aluka [http://www.aluka.org/ ](Paul)
Aluka is a platform for Africa that may later include materials from Latin America and Asia. JSTOR is currently providing free access to the database until July, when it will become a subscription database. The S&P discussed if it made sense to talk to Aluka about sharing our Ugandan music archive with them. Paul will talk with Holling Smith-Borne to get his input on the idea.

10 April 2007

1. Membership in RLG (Paul)
RLG, a not-for-profit organization of over 150 research libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural memory institutions, was purchased by OCLC (The Online Computer Library Center) and became part of its Office of Research. At a recent ASERL (The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries) meeting, RLG's role in OCLC was discussed and it is evident that it will drive OCLC's research agenda. The Council discussed if it was worthwhile for the library to join RLG. After some discussion it was clear that more information was needed to make the decision. Paul will attend a RLG meeting this summer to learn more about the benefits of RLG membership and report back to the Council.

2. Committee Structure Confusion (Roberta)
Some confusion arose over minutes from recent committee and Library Management Council (LMC) meetings. Some library staff thought that LMC was defunct. Discussion in one committee seemed to some to be part of another committee's charge. The Council determined that there was no need to retain LMC, a group that met regularly before the committee structure change of 2005. While the LMC has been a useful way to gather library administrators for system wide discussion, its large size made it difficult for decision making. With the creation of the Strategy & Planning Council, which focuses on strategic issues, and the Library Directors Council, which oversees public policy and procedures, there is no longer a need for the LMC to exist. Instead, the Strategy and Planning Council will meet jointly with the Library Directors Council to discuss library-wide issues of interest. These meetings will take place on an irregular basis when agenda items dictate. Minutes from such meetings will be linked from both committee wikis. Minutes from the LMC will be archived in the Reports and Documents section of the Staffweb. Paul will write an article for the Staffnews to clarify this issue.

Staff should also be reminded that multiple committees will frequently discuss issues relating to similar topics. If our committees are reaching out to shareholders on their tasks, then we should expect to see reports of topics on more than one committee minutes.

3. Open Content Alliance (Paul)
The Open Content Alliance (http://www.archive.org) contains 190,000 volumes of digitized content. Council members discussed whether the library should link to those pages through our Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) and whether we should consider participating in one of their regional digitization centers to digitize some of our resources. Jody Combs will investigate the possibility of utilizing a Primo pipe for importing the metadata related to the books already available in the OCA. Council members felt it was important to participate in digitization projects. Print on demand will eventually increase demand for digitized books and our involvement would support any journal weeding program that might evolve for titles with electronic back up. Bill Hook, John Haar and Marshall Breeding were asked to explore the possibility of linking the resources and determining the pros and cons of participating in the Open Content Alliance.

4. Clarification of ERMS Charge (Roberta)
Roberta reviewed the E-Resources Management System (ERMS) Project Team charge to clarify the role of the team. The Council confirmed that the team task is to identify the library's e-resource needs, advise S&P on the state of the market for management products, determine if the time is right to buy an ERMS, and, if appropriate, make a product recommendation. The team report is due on May 16, 2007.

5. JSTOR Print Removal Study (Paul)
Council members discussed whether the library should participate in JSTOR's (Journal Storage) study of 20 libraries who are withdrawing journals for which electronic back up exists. Paul spoke with JSTOR's Director of Library Relations Bruce Heterick, who confirmed that they would like Vanderbilt to participate even if we do not withdraw our journals. Bill Hook, who would lead the project for the library, encouraged participation in the project, as it allows us to see what other ARLs (Academic Research Libraries) are considering when determining whether to withdraw the journals. Their deliberations might inform our own procedures and give us insight into practices across the country. Paul will get more information on the process and report back to the Council.

Other Business
Jody Combs will contact Tim McNamara, Associate Provost for Faculty, to determine how best to store the university's SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) review materials. Some of the items in the report are confidential and others contain links that will not be maintained so a paper copy may be the best solution. Council members agreed that preserving the report is important to do.

20 March 2007

Paul began the meeting by welcoming Bill Hook, who will be taking over collection development when John leaves, and has been asked to join the Strategy & Planning Council.

1. The Storage Issue (Paul)
Members discussed a draft proposal regarding options that address our storage needs. Paul will meet with Vice Chancellor Nim Chinniah on Friday to discuss the topic. Options include: (1) building a new building on Chestnut Street; (2) leasing a space; (3) purchasing a building on 21st Avenue and retrofitting it to suit our needs; (4) contracting with Iron Mountain to store our resources; or (5) buying more time by eliminating bound serial set with electronic equivalents.

Members discussed all options and felt that they needed more information from Dennis Hall's committee to determine if they should purchase or lease a structure. John Haar has been working with Peg Earheart to estimate the amount of storage space that could be recovered if bound serials that are available as electronic back files could be withdrawn. A very rough estimate puts the savings at 10,000 linear feet. John will have a firmer estimate by Friday. The Council recommends that at this time we slow down or stop shipping bound serial sets that are already available as electronic back files to the Annex and notify university departments storing managed records in University Archives (which must be purged on a yearly cycle) that those materials will no longer be stored in the library.

In the future, we might identify Annex items that have never circulated to consider moving those materials into a further off campus storage facility. We also will determine the amount of staff time involved in identifying and withdrawing bound serial sets that are available in another format so that we can estimate the true cost of the project. We will also determine if Iron Mountain will accept books and if they provide insurance for deposited materials.

2. Proposed project team: Blog Polices and Procedures (Celia)
Celia brought forward a request from the Communications Committee to create a project team that would create and post guidelines and support resources for bloggers. The increase in the number of blogs in the library suggests that this might be a good time to encourage some consistency among the library-sponsored blogs.

The Council suggested that the team might also consider podcasts and other formats in their review and that the team should consult with staff involved in creating a style guide for Web postings. Celia will bring a draft of the charge back to the Council at a later meeting.

13 March 2007

1. Storage building issue (Paul)
The library has looked into a number of options to address the need for more space for Annex materials, including expanding the existing Annex (not feasible), building on Chestnut (space is claimed by the Medical Center, but we might be able to get it), renting at another location (most were either too small, decrepit or in an undesirable location), or contracting the storage to Iron Mountain, which manages storage facilities in a number of locations around the country, including several in Nashville (Paul, Flo and Juanita are meeting with them March 14). A location has also been identified on 21st Avenue and Charlotte with 38,000 square feet, security, parking, and loading facilities. Part of the building might be leased to other libraries and museums in Nashville. A decision will be made soon about which option we will take and what materials should be located in which storage units.

2. Uniform policy concerning unique titles (Flo)
In 2003, OCLC searched Vanderbilt's holdings to try to determine what titles Vanderbilt holds that no one else has. While some of the titles appeared to be unique due to a unique catalog record and others were dissertations and theses, there are a number of titles that are unique to our library. A loan request led to the question of circulation policies across the libraries for unique titles. The consensus among library directors was to move the unique titles to the Annex. These items would be available for in-house use only and would not be available for interlibrary loan without special permission from the director.

The question arose as to if this might make a good NEH access grant. Each title in the list would have to be checked to confirm it is unique and copyright determined to see if the item might be digitized. To do so would take a large amount of staff time but would serve to move forward the profession and serve as a model for other institutions. Roberta Winjum will discuss the possibility of the grant application with Sue Davis.

6 March 2007

1. Addressing VUnetID Stakeholder Needs (Jody)
Patrons without VUnetID's or those that use other identifiers to access ACORN need additional information on the log-in page to help them navigate through the new procedure. Some of these people are using a VUnetID and their ACORN pin. A higher percentage of people with these issues are found in Biomedical. They need clear information about how to use their social security number and pin. The Circulation and Access Committee has made a recommendation for addressing this issue. Flo will take their recommendation to the Library Directors Council.

2. Digital preservation white paper (Roberta)
Members of the Digital Library Steering Committee have discussed the need for a digital preservation goal. We are not ready at this time to create a project team because we don't know all of the issues involved. Roberta has asked Sue Davis to complete a white paper on the subject by July 1, 2007 for distribution to the Strategy & Planning Council. The paper should cover what we've already done, what could and what should be done regarding digital resources and purchased electronic resources. Roberta will send a copy of Sue's assignment to the Digital Library Steering Committee.

3. Committee Chairperson Evaluation (Lisa)
Lisa submitted a revised form for team and committee members to evaluate their leaders and chairs. The form was approved with some changes and will be posted to the Policies and Procedures link on the wikis and on the evaluation area of the Staffweb. Members will be asked to complete their evaluations by April 1, 2007.

27 February 2007

1. Oak Support (Paul)
Jody reported on current state of support for OAK. The OAK Advisory Board, comprised of faculty, administration and student representatives, is meeting March 19 to discuss what kind of support structure they would like to see for OAK, among other things.

Currently, there are a number of layers of OAK support and some layers that can be improved or are missing:

End-user support is thinner than it might be. Originally, all schools agreed to provide Tier I/Tier 1+ support and local technical support with the knowledge to advise and train faculty. There is an online "Quick Start Guide" for faculty, as well. The Nursing School probably provides the most complete support, which is logical because they rely extensively on OAK for distance education.
i. Support for faculty in determining best practices for instructional design and advanced training is not yet available. This might evolve into a collaborative effort with the Center for Teaching or other campus groups. Some discussion has centered on providing online resources.
ii. Training and support for students has not been sufficiently addressed. From the student's view, there is no single point of service for OAK.

The library could work on these two user support issues, possibly, for example, by placing a point person in each of the libraries to answer queries.

Another area of OAK implementation to consider is how we go about enhancing the environment. We are trying to put together a demonstration of other available systems (in addition to the BlackBoard Learning System) to begin thinking about whether and how we might take advantage of these.

Council members suggested that we might create an Ask Us button in OAK. We might also look at what the Nursing School is doing to make their program strong. Support could be bolstered by an awareness program; many users do not know about the existence of online guides. We have discussed the possibility of adding a tab for library resources in OAK.

For a system-wide resource that supports the university mission, current staffing levels are probably too thin. It will be interesting to see what the Advisory Board recommends. Once we know what is needed, the Strategy & Planning Council should reaffirm OAK's importance and consider asking for more resources for the project. Jody will report back to the Council after the March 19 Advisory Board meeting.

2. Continuation of discussion: communication between committees, councils and teams: how we make decisions (Paul)
Last week's discussion was continued and it was decided that committees should discuss and recommend priorities, but the Strategy & Planning Council looks at all recommendations from the strategic level and determines how library resources will be expended.

3. Committee chair/project team leader evaluations (Lisa)
When we discussed committee and team member evaluations some months ago, the point was made that teams and committees should also evaluate their leaders. In this way, they can provide input for improvement. Lisa distributed a draft evaluation form for committee chairs and project team leaders. Suggestions were made from the Council and Lisa and Celia will meet to revise parts of the evaluation form, which will be approved by the Council through email.

4. Staff Development Committee nominations (Celia)
Celia brought forth three names of staff suggested for the Staff Development Committee, which lost three members over the past year. Names were approved and Celia will contact their supervisors to seek their approval before contacting the staff members.

20 February 2007

1. copyright education program/ARL site (Paul)
ARL has developed a brochure on copyright that focuses on issues for teachers. SPARC focuses on rights of authors. Do Vanderbilt faculty get input from the university on these subjects? This led to a discussion of whether the library should offer a copyright workshop, possibly jointly with the Law School. These issues will become increasingly important with audio and video streaming. Paul will ask Kevin Davis to talk with the S&P.

2. communication between committees, councils and teams: how we make decisions (Paul)
What is the function of any strategic committee vis a vis the Strategy & Planning Council? Are they advisors or stakeholders? How do we include people with special responsibilities in decision making and then how do we communicate those decisions? What implications do our decisions have for other groups?

Sometimes a decision cannot wait for stakeholder input. But that's not always the case. If we are interested in getting input, then we need to have a better procedure in place.

Council discussion proceeded to staffing demands and priorities for operational tasks versus strategic tasks. We need to establish the levels of support that can be expected by the libraries for operational activities and resources.

3. Draft charge for ERMS Evaluation Project Team (Roberta)
Council members discussed a draft charge for a project team for ERMS evaluations. Some changes were suggested for the charge, including specific types of reports needed from the team. The charge was approved with those changes. Roberta will make the changes and post a request for team members to the Staffnews.

6 February 2007

1. Central Director vacancy (Paul)
With John Haar retiring this summer, we need to determine how we will fill the positions that he is currently administering (collections, Central administration, licensing, interlibrary loan, system-wide administration, etc).

We will hire a director of the Central Library who will oversee interlibrary loan operations; system-wide collections responsibilities will be reassigned. Roberta Winjum will assume responsibility for e-resource licensing.

2. VU e-Archive Application Profile Project Team (Roberta)
Roberta submitted a project team charge to determine what metadata in the e-Archive can be standardized. The Council approved the creation of the team and Roberta will post the charge. A call will be sent out for individuals interested in participating on the team.

16 January 2007

1. Decentralized cataloging and the status of staff with new MLS degrees (Paul).

Paul led a discussion on two topics: (1) the need for consistent employment policy regarding staff with new MLS degrees and (2) the advantages of centralized cataloging (in Technical Services) versus decentralized cataloging, as occurs in some libraries. This led to a broader discussion on staffing needs in all of the libraries. Several new positions might be desirable to manage the institutional repository, to help to provide support for OAK, and to manage analytics. Council members agreed on the need to look at all vacant positions across the libraries in terms of system-wide needs.

Council members approved the new SFX project team charge and membership, drafted by Janice Adlington. Roberta Winjum will contact library directors to confirm their staff members' participation on the team, then she will send Celia text for a Staff News article and a link to the charge.

The library needs to increase the level of support provided to OAK to achieve its goals. Public Services librarians have been trained at Tier 1 levels, but additional Tier 1+ members are needed to assist with planning, faculty interaction, evaluation and training. Discussion was cut short on the topic due to a Primo meeting. Further discussion on this topic will take place at a Strategy & Planning meeting in the near future.

9 January 2007

1. White Paper on Electronic Resource Management Systems: Next Steps
(Janice Adlington)

Paul Gherman began the meeting by complimenting Janice on her report. Janice indicated the urgency in addressing electronic resource management in the library. Problems identified in the paper might be addressed by an Electronic Resources Management System (ERMS). But the ERMS technologies are closely associated with how the data is populated and not all systems communicate effectively with our system. So our vendors are limited. Janice suggested that her team, in consultation with the Library Directors Council. hold discussions with two vendors-Ex Libris (Verde) and ProQuest/Sirsi (Serials Solutions) -to learn more about their products and how they might benefit our systems.

The issues that need to be addressed are (1) can any of the available ERMS on the market address our needs and (2) if so, which product should we acquire? Clearly, software alone will not solve all of our problems. Business processes will need to be reviewed and realigned. We have taken procedures for print acquisitions and cobbled them together to work for electronic resources. John Haar and Janice will create a database that contains electronic resource information for staff to use while we are considering an ERMS.

The Strategy and Planning Council approved the creation of a project team chaired by Janice. She will update her white paper and add a glossary and then distribute it to the library staff. After ALA Midwinter, she will present her team charge to the Council and in April/May the team and the Directors Council will meet with vendors (who will also conduct a staff presentation), with the goal of having the evaluation done by June. By that date, we hope that much of the Primo work will be accomplished and LITS staff will be freer to work on any implementation that may be required. It may take a year or more to implement an ERMS, if selected. Many of the libraries currently using ERMS are not fully implemented and some of this may be due to implementation procedures that call for updates as serial invoices are received.

A few months ago, it was brought to John's attention that one of our journals, Nucleic Acid Research, is available free through Open Access. If we access it as a free resource, then the authors who submit articles for publication will be charged higher fees for pages and other services. We also have the option of getting a membership subscription at a slightly higher rate than we are currently paying. The advantage of this is that Vanderbilt authors would then be charged a significantly lower fee for submission. Between 2002 and 2006 there were three Vanderbilt authors who were the primary authors on articles in the journal and 33 Vanderbilt authors who co-authored an article. Should the library subvene these writers? What of other journals that have Open Access options?

Paul will take the issue to Dennis Hall, the Associate Provost for Research, as the issue is broader than the library's jurisdiction.

Interviews with librarians suggest that the library needs to improve its communication with new librarians, who could benefit from a mentoring program and career counseling. The Council agreed with this idea and referred it to the Staff Development Committee with the suggestion that the mentoring program be separate from the career counseling program and that mentors be drawn from departments outside of the new librarian's.

Flo Wilson brought forward a proposal to create a project team to conduct a survey of space usage in the libraries and possibly in other study locations on campus. Julie Blagojevich has been doing a literature review on the subject and she would chair a team to recommend a procedure and conduct the survey in the spring, followed by a review of the data. The Council approved the team and the project.

21 December 2006

1. Committees: reporting structure for organizational committees, teams and groups. How will job descriptions be created for operational groups? (Flo Wilson)

Flo distributed a year end report from the Library Directors Council (LDC) that included some suggestions for committee reporting and for charge changes. The LDC recommended that committees that primarily manage what goes on in the library-- the Circulation and Access Committee, the Research Services Committee, and the Committee on Collections-- report to the LDC. The S&P agreed with the idea, except when those committees work on strategic issues, when reporting should be made to the S&P. In all cases, but especially in strategic discussions, committees should invite stakeholders to attend meetings and contribute input.

The S&P approved the recommendation and suggested that the organizational chart be revised to reflect the new reporting structure.

Also discussed were tasks outlined in the LDC charge that relate to reporting on their progress. The charge calls for monthly and semiannual reports, but, in reality, these are not being accomplished. The charge will be rewritten for the LDC to reflect the actual reporting methodology. Other committees may need to examine their charges to determine if they are meeting the list of tasks or if their charge should be revised.

2. Name Issue: Recommendations from the Communications Committee to identify our library system (Celia Walker)

Celia submitted a proposal from the Communications Committee recommending changes to the way in which we present the library's name on the homepage and on other communications channels. The S&P members suggested that the proposal be sent to the LDC and Flo agreed to schedule a meeting with Paul and Celia and the LDC on January 10.

A draft of the PowerPoint presentation based on Paul's written outline was submitted for the members to review and send feedback to Celia.

14 November 2006

1. Vacant Positions--Council members discussed strategic initiatives and the staffing that would be desirable for the projects.

7 November 2006

1. SFX Advisory Group -- clarification of responsibilities (Janice Adlington)
Janice Adlington came to the Council to propose an advisory group for SFX using the same members from the project team. This group would manage the program, looking after collections specific to their interests and disciplines.

There is no structure for this type of group. Project teams have finite time periods. If we create management groups to maintain strategic programs, we need to be certain that their added duties are part of their job descriptions, so that staff feel that they can take the time necessary to complete the extra work. Perhaps this is a time to look at job descriptions in light of strategic changes. This group, the SFX Management Group, was approved. It was decided that all management groups should report to an AUL and this group will report to Roberta Winjum.

Similar requests should come through the Strategy & Planning Council. A Data Services Management Group is planned and others will become evident as we move toward our goals. There is also a communications requirement of these groups; they must work with other groups and stakeholders to avoid being at cross purposes. For example, if a new service is suggested for implementation, the group will need to bring other stakeholders in for consultation who are affected by the program.

Jody Combs submitted a proposal for a Freshman Commons portal based on expressed interest by the Dean of the Commons at a recent Strategy & Planning meeting. The proposal has met with very positive response. If approved for funding, we might consider eventually opening the portal to other classes and users. If we plan correctly, work for this portal will take place after Primo is near completion (work would begin in July and we would need to have it ready for the first Freshman Commons class in fall 2008). It fits with our strategic goals. The Council will also take steps to be actively involved with the Commons Advisory Board.

The Faculty News Project Team submitted a proposal for the creation of a Library News, a monthly update for library users on new services, resources, events. Library staff would be profiled each month to strengthen the connection between bibliographers and faculty. Council members encouraged the editors to create concise articles and to make the news graphically attractive. They also suggested that we feature an article about the General Library Building. In the future, we might push this information to OAK or another communication channel. Jody Combs will talk with the project team members about ideas for making the news visually interesting and easy to read. Some discussion about a future facet for Primo was discussed, as that might make the library's new book list easier to access. The proposal was approved and implementation is planned for December 2006.

The Staff Development Committee submitted an end of the year report on their strategic efforts (the Strategic Plan was finalized in October 2005) to use as a starting point for discussing the types of reports needed from all committees. Council members discussed ways that these reports could be synthesized to see how we are working toward our goals. Two purposes were identified: (1) to inform staff about progress on our goals and (2) to allow the Council to see if any changes need to be made to the Strategic Plan or any committee charges.

Committee chairs were asked to send Celia their achievements and the goals addressed by these projects. Reports will be posted to the wiki for staff to review and discuss at a future popcorn and cokes session. All reports are due to the Council by the first week in December.

24 October 2006

1. Storage Building Rental
Council members discussed the need to create an operational team to develop specs for Cliff Joyner, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Real Estate Operations, regarding our needs for a rental space. These needs will allow him to investigate what our options are for renting in the future. The group should look at how big a space we will need. Paul will chair the team and John Haar will be a member.

If we renovate the GLB or other libraries, we might need to store a large number of volumes, and this group should consider how that might affect our space needs. The projection of our planned collection growth will be an estimate. Other issues include: 1) how this move might affect our membership in the North American Storage Trust (NAST)[http://www.crl.edu/docs/NAStorageTrust.ppt]; 2) What is the relationship between electronic documents and paper and how do their sizes change year? 3) How do national efforts like the NAST affect our needs? 4) What kinds of collections should go in the new space and which should remain in the Annex? 5) How much staff will we need? 6) What kinds of shelving needs to go in the space? What amount, size, and what is the time line for how long we will need it? Area needs should be planned in square feet. Peg Earheart might be able to use the existing shelving at the Annex to convert to square feet.

Not all of these decisions can be made now, but we will need to provide sufficient information for Mr. Joyner to find appropriate space. We will also need a loading dock, environmental controls, a minimum ceiling height (we need to note alternatives of shelving heights and how much we can shelve with different heights), a heavy floor load will be required and perhaps we will ask for a one floor facility. LITS may need to review any proposed building to see that it meets the infrastructure needs for our technology. The operational team should note what they can address at this point and what questions they have. We will send a memo to Mr. Joyner in a few weeks.

Some information on environmental conditions is already available through existing documents like NAST. We do not need to find the land or meet with the architects at this point, we just need to confirm that acceptable rental space is available so that we can confirm that we will rent rather than build. If we estimate that the Annex will be full by 2009, then we will need to request funding in the 2007/2008 cycle to negotiate the lease and make the necessary modifications to be ready by 2008. This will give us a year to get in.

2. Metadata Application Profiles
Roberta Winjum reported that the Metadata Committee was planning to write application profiles for the VU e-archive.

17 October 2006

1. Review of PowerPoint slides for the Future of the Library (Paul)
Council members reviewed a draft PowerPoint presentation on the state of the library today and where we think it will be in the future. This presentation is being designed to help the Center for Academic Life Committee create a vision for the library in the future. It should lay the groundwork for discussion on a number of questions. For example, how many digital resources will we have versus print? Do we need an information commons? Will we need a library if digital resources dominate the collections? These are the types of questions that the committee will answer.

We need to show the committee that while the format of our content has expanded, the need for intermediary services in information retrieval is stronger than ever, due to the increasing complexity of our resources. Council members were asked to review and update slides within the presentation and send them to Paul and Celia.

2. Discussion of Annual Report for the Strategic Plan (Celia)
As the first year anniversary of the Strategic Plan approaches, it is important to look at what each committee has accomplished and synthesize the information into a report on the strategic plan. Each committee chair will be asked to create a one-page review of activities in the past year and Council members will discuss the reviews in order to determine where we are with the plan. A report will be presented to library staff.

3. E-resource Cost-sharing Models (John)
An alternative to the current model for sharing costs of e-resources among libraries was discussed, based on use statistics. Paul will investigate the issue and report back to the Council.

10 October 2006

1. Faculty Delivery Implementation Team (John Haar and Flo Wilson)
The library has decided to create a library system-wide service to deliver books and articles from the Library and Interlibrary Loan to faculty offices. Articles would be delivered electronically. A project team charged with developing a proposal for this service delivered its report in June 2006 endorsing the concept and recommending that the service be housed in Interlibrary Loan. A charge and proposed team membership was submitted to the S&P to draft an implementation plan. Team names were solicited from members of the Library Directors Council, who were also asked to make recommendations on the proposal. A position is being recruited to implement the program.

Council members approved the charge and team list. LITS staff will be consulted and involved as the project team members discuss the use of Illiad for the project. The team will be asked to submit their implementation plan by the end of December, with implementation occurring as soon as possible after approval.

3. Primo License
Council members reviewed the proposed contract from Ex Libris for the Library's participation on the Primo project.

4. OAK technical support (Jody)
Blackboard has experienced some service interruptions in recent years. MIS is the service provider for these types of problems. Jody Combs meets with MIS liaisons on a weekly basis to discuss these issues. However, since authentication comes from ITS, identifying the service issue can be problematic. When the Advisory Committee reconvenes, they will revisit the support structure and look at how the program is upgraded, as well as making it more robust.

The Medical Center and the Nursing School are planning for the possible occurrence of a pandemic. In that event, students might be sent home, possibly for a month, and the University would like for faculty to be able to continue teaching through Blackboard. We need to determine if Blackboard is reliable enough for us to rely on it for four weeks for all students and, if not, what it would take to make it reliable.

Julie Loder is now managing Tier 2 support for OAK. Tier 1 provides training; Tier 1+ can work with individual courses, add content areas and enable electronic reserve postings, among other tasks; Tier 2 has access to system-wide tools. Tier 3 is the system administrator, which is actually assigned to two people outside of the library; they have access to the back end of the system. Cindy Franco is the OAK manager, the program liaison and upgrade tester.

5. ScholarlyStats (Roberta)
This product is designed to collect electronic resource usage. It can work with 39 different publisher platforms. ScholarlyStats pulls the statistics on our behalf and generates reports for us. This is done in a proprietary way, not currently using SUSHI (NISO Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) . Eventually, these protocols will be used by ERMS (Electronic Resource Management Systems), such as Verdi, but for now, Scholarly Stats is a good short term solution. The Council will look at building this into the budget for next year. Considering how much we spend on electronic resources, it is important to have good data on their usage.

6. Statistics, analytics and assessment (update) (all)
Jody reminded everyone to think about their departmental assessment needs in preparation for a follow up discussion on the need for a web analytics program and general assessment support.

26 September 2006

1. CLIR Fellow in Scholarly Information Resources (Paul Gherman)
Council members discussed the opportunity to bring a recently graduated humanities PhD to the library for one or two years for work in a special area of research, as part of this CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) fellowship program. CLIR provides the scholars but the library would be responsible for their salaries, and creating and monitoring the project. While there are projects that could use such support, no strong interest was expressed in funding such a program at the present time.

2. Statistics, analytics, and assessment (tools and personnel) (Jody Combs)
The purchase of a web analytics package has been approved, but gathering the statistics is only the first step in assessment. The need for a staff member to assess the statistics we generate was discussed. A more generalized assessment need has been identified more broadly across the library committees and project teams. Council members were asked to identify specific assessment needs and other potential staffing requirements. Lisa Shipman was asked to identify funding opportunities. The Council will reconsider the issue when it reconvenes in mid-October. A white paper may be written to identify why such a position would be critical to the library.

3. Library development within the schools (Celia Walker, Paul)
Beth Boord, Associate Dean for Development at Divinity and Director of Development for the Library, was invited to join today's meeting to meet Council members and speak briefly about her new role as major gifts officer for the library.

19 September 2006

Council members discussed the vision for OAK.The OAK environment refers to a set of tools that enhance the students' academic experience, including course management systems and other technology-related tools that mediate learning. Blackboard is the first component of OAK

Plans are underway to reconvene the OAK advisory board to ensure that the development direction is meeting their needs in terms of training support, infrastructure, and faculty support. This year, approximately 1500 courses, including the new Vanderbilt Vision courses, are available in OAK. Some faculty use OAK for e-reserves only, while others take advantage of more or all of the OAK tools. We do not have firm numbers for this, but our ability to track who is using the system will improve with the new version of OAK. A large percentage of students have at least one course on OAK.

Marketing and support for OAK was discussed. The library needs to identify OAK as a priority and encourage staff to promote the tool to faculty. However, each faculty member is creating their OAK course in different ways, making it problematic for students to use OAK for different courses. We need to identify ways to create more consistency across the OAK courses. Additional training opportunities need to be developed, including an online tutorial for faculty or an OAK course on "best practices." The Center for Teaching should play a role in the program and the library is working to provide training for OAK in the Center's orientation for new faculty and teaching assistants. The idea of providing a link to library resources in the form of a tab at the top of each class section was also discussed.

Paul will look into the possibility of soliciting input from the deans about our stewardship of OAK. Cindy and Jody will convene the Advisory Board. A users' group will be considered as another way to provide input into OAK.

12 September 2006

1. Google Library Print Project: follow up (Marshall Breeding)
Following up on our last discussion, Marshall noted that Google partner institutions were taking a conservative stance with books digitized by Google. For example, at the University of Michigan, onsite visitors can perform a word search within all digitized texts, but outside of the campus only those materials that are within copyright may be word searched. Still, the value for collaborating with Google remains high. John Haar and Marshall will draft a letter of inquiry to Google. If there is interest, we will further investigate how such a project would fit into the library's priorities.

3. On-going Maintenance of the Home Page (Celia Walker, Flo Wilson)
As the Web refresher project team is drawing to a close, the S&P discussed a method for vetting content and design submitted for inclusion on the Web site. The Digital Library Steering Committee plans to perform a complete review of the homepage but until then it is necessary to have a team in place to review requests. It was decided to ask the refresher team to respond to such requests until the larger redesign project is underway.

4. Acorn priorities (Flo)
The issue of a complex search problem identified in Acorn as early as 1998 was brought to the Council. LITS has researched the problem-which is a hyperlink search action in series searching--and contacted SIRSI to address the problem with no resolution. While the S&P Council realizes that there is a problem, now is not the time to address it. LITS has already put in over 40 hours on the issue and it would take significantly more time to continue to try to fix it or to simply turn off the option, which might affect other areas of the catalog. As we are now looking at the possibility that Primo might become the primary catalog, because the number of such searches is very small, and since our technology staff has other high priority projects to complete, we cannot invest more time in this problem at this time.

28 August 2006

1. Google Library Print digitization project (Marshall)
With the recent announcement that the University of California libraries will partner with Google to digitize their collections, Marshall asked Council members to consider if the library should approach Google to digitize Vanderbilt's collections. There are a number of unique collections that might be of interest to Google, although the possibility that Google will take on additional partners is probably remote. The Council members debated the pros and cons of the proposal.

The decision to contact Google was postponed until some preliminary work could be done. Marshall will look into Google's identified needs as well as those of the Open Content Alliance, a group of organizations collaborating to build a digital archive (http://www.opencontentalliance.org/); S&P members will send suggestions of library unique collections to John; and Paul will ask ASERL to add the topic to their fall agenda.

2. Library Storage Facility (Paul)
Paul recently drafted a white paper on the library's storage facility for distribution to university administration and the library's Space Committee. The goal of the paper was to identify issues to address in preparation for identifying and utilizing a new storage facility. The issue is time-sensitive, as plans for the location of a new facility need to take shape within the next six months. Council members discussed where the facility might be located. More will be known on this topic in the coming weeks, when Paul will meet with university staff to discuss our options.

A number of other issues need to be addressed in this complex problem: What materials would be best suited to be housed in such a facility? Who would staff the facility? Paul wants to begin the discussions with the Space Committee and the Strategy & Planning Council. In the meantime, staff in the Office of the University Librarian will closely examine costs and other factors, to determine means for comparing different locations and staffing options. The Space Committee will make a recommendation on the kinds of materials that might be best suited for the new facility. They will also look at how the library will manage the current space crunch. An open library staff discussion will be scheduled in the coming weeks to inform staff about the complexities of the storage issue.

3. Reexamination of the strategic goals (all)
The Strategy & Planning Council reviewed the five strategic goals and the next steps of the Strategic Plan to determine if we are on course or if changes need to be made in the Plan. Reports from goal champions on instruction, communications, the Center for Academic Life, space and the Digital Library were discussed along with Next Steps. The Council's consensus was that we are following the plan and no corrections are needed. Some projects are taking longer than expected and we still have a long way to go on the goals, but committees and project teams seem to be making exceptional efforts to accomplish these ambitious goals. Committees will create an annual report for the Plan, to be published on the Web in November.

15 August 2006

The Council had no fixed agenda for this meeting, taking the time to look at the big picture of the library, including significant challenges and opportunities we face. Some discussion centered on the Library of Congress' recent decision to stop tracing series. Prior to the American Libraries Association's annual meeting, an interim policy was formed by a Heard Library group chaired by Marshall Breeding. The decision was to moderate the way that the library traces series until more could be learned at the ALA meeting. It was decided to trace strong numbered series and not trace others. But little direction came from the ALA meeting. Since LC is not going to change the way that they work, the Council talked about what our next steps should be. Series work supports searching through series searches and keyword searches and it also supports the acquisition process. Search engines work better with authorities. Even if full text is digitized for many books, users would still need authorities to improve their searches.
What rules and procedures best accommodate new ways of searching (for example, faceted searching)? Paul said that he had asked that the topic be placed on the fall ASERL directors agenda.

The pace of change within the library field was also discussed. When thinking of what a new conceptual model of library service might be, it's difficult to grab onto a model because things are constantly changing. We have done little so far in the strategic plan that would require the library to change. Our pace is slow, but that gives staff more time to accommodate change. However, it is important for staff to understand the importance of committee and team work and volunteer for projects. We have put in place an organizational structure that supports projects, but operational work is also important (most new projects eventually become part of operational work, if they are successful).

Over the next ten years, we have the opportunity to help redesign the way that the university communicates. We need to engage the larger enterprise if at all possible. Faculty and students will use these tools (OAK, Primo, e-Archive, etc.) and the library can provide academic support.

8 August 2006

1. Community Survey (Paul)
Paul discussed some of the results of the spring Community Survey. Copies of each roll up group will be distributed to designated supervisors in the next two weeks so that they may disseminate the information to their groups. This year the university is not expecting that we formally develop plans of action, etc. But the survey is very important for supervisors to gauge staff feelings and opinions about how they, the Library, and the University are doing in creating a supportive and conducive place to work.

2. Meeting Management and Project Management Training: Recommendations from the project teams (Celia)
The Staff Development Committee was charged to recommend meeting management training and project management training for library staff. The goal is to give all staff the tools that they need to participate in strategic work in the library.

The Meeting Management Project Team recommended that all staff attend a film that introduces basic meeting management concepts (components of a good meeting, etc.), followed by a short discussion period and a take home packet of information. Staff who lead teams and committees would also take a meeting management course for leaders, that would follow the same format but provide information on leading meetings. Each class would take 1 to 2 hours.

The Project Management Training Team recommended that staff who participate on project teams or committees take basic project management training in interactive sessions with a Human Resources facilitator to review the basic components of a good project. The course would take 1 to 2 hours and include information packets for participants to keep. A day-long course for project management was recommended for staff who lead project teams and/or committees. The same format and provider would be used, but the training would include topics such as creating timelines and flowcharts.

Courses would run throughout the year, between this fall and the end of the school year, following which classes would be offered each semester, to provide training for new employees and new team members and leaders. The proposal was approved by the Council, with the members' thanks to these two project teams.

July 25, 2006

1. Committee organization and reporting (Flo).
The group discussed whether the Circulation and Access Committee and the Research Services Committees should report to the Library Directors Council rather than S&P since both groups routinely deal with issues that directly impact the libraries. It was decided that reporting to S&P was preferable because these issues can also impact Technical Services, LITS, and other units not represented on the Directors Council.

2. Library organization chart update (Paul).
Roberta is revising the library organization chart to reflect the changes that have been made this last year and the new appointments in director positions. We are ready to distribute an organization chart along with the one for all library-wide committees and project teams and their reporting relationships to library administration.

3. Faculty delivery project (Flo).
A project team has recommended and S&P has approved the establishment of a unit within Interlibrary Loan to manage delivery of materials from the libraries and the Annex directly to faculty offices. The team proposed that we create a Library Assistant III position to head the service and that this position report to Jim Toplon. S&P decided to wait until the end of the fiscal year to assess our ability to fund this position. Coincidentally, Rachael Bankes, who works 20 hours per week in ILL, has submitted her resignation. At Jim's suggestion we will fund the delivery service position as a half-time position at the outset and combine it with the vacated half-time ILL position. The person hired will work both in ILL and delivery until such time as the delivery service grows into a full-time responsibility. At that time we will fund a full-time delivery position. We can use the part-time ILL salary line plus an anticipated OUL surplus to fund the position for this year and build it into the base budget for 2007-08. We expect to fill the position in the near future. We will ask Jim to head a team to implement the delivery service once the new LAIII is hired. Flo and John will work on a project team plan.

4. ERMS project (Roberta).
S&P discussed whether there is need to appoint a project team to evaluate Electronic Resources Management Systems on the market and recommend a system for purchase. Given the demands of Primo development for the remainder of 2006, the group felt we could not take on a vendor selection project in the immediate future. We will instead ask Janice Adlington, our new Electronic Resources Librarian, to investigate the ERMS marketplace and prepare a white paper for the library. The white paper will study the library's current configuration for e-resource management, investigate our need for an ERMS, and describe how it would be used. With additional input, S&P will then decide next steps. We may also ask ExLibris for an extension of its December deadline for a discount on the purchase price of its ERMS, Verde.

5. Web statistics (Paul).
Paul asked Jody for a status report on the Digital Library Steering Committee's review of web analytics packages. The Steering Committee feels that we lack a useful tool to report usage statistics on library web pages. Marshall has looked at Google Analytics, which is free but does not provide historical data. An informal group of Steering Committee members is evaluating proprietary tools that would enable us to perform historical trend analysis. S&P discussion turned to whether the library has anyone with the time and desire to perform intensive analysis of data that an analytics tool could generate. Over the long term, we might consider a position that could extract, analyze, and report this data and coordinate other types of assessment functions, such as focus groups or usability studies.

11 July 2006

1.Popcorn and cokes discussion (Lisa, Paul)
Plans were made for the discussion, which will focus on performance evaluations. Paul will discuss proposed text for evaluations and get staff input on wording. Celia will send a reminder in the staff news feed with this topic.

The discussion also focused on the need for strategic thinking when a job becomes available. Some positions will require an experienced seasoned staff member, but others may be filled well by junior, younger applicants. Wording in job ads should reflect which is needed.

2. Organization chart (Flo, Celia)
A draft organization chart for committees and project teams was reviewed and edited. Celia will make the revisions and post it to the S&P wiki. Changes should be given to Celia at future S&P meetings, so that completed projects may be removed and new ones added.

3. Web page "look & feel" policy (Celia)
This issue arose in the Communications Committee: should the Communications Committee write policy and provide resources for the "look & feel" of the system-wide web pages? The Committee would like to provide staff with tools to choose from a wide range of styles and colors that would lend some consistency to the pages. The Committee is willing to take on the task, but they wanted to be sure that they are the right group to do so. The S&P Council felt that this would be helpful. As we move toward using style sheets, it would be very useful for staff who are actively editing existing pages (or creating new ones) to use broadly consistent technical implementation to help plan for future adaptations. This will not apply to inactive web pages. The Council recommended that a training component also be added to the project, so that staff who are less familiar with style sheets can be given support. Existing web editors should be contacted to collaborate and consult on the project. Celia will ask Suellen to work on the team and the final product will be submitted to the S&P Council when ready.

4. Committee on Collections gift policy (John)
(http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/CDAG/GiftPolicyandProcedure.htm)
The policy and procedure for in-kind library donations was reviewed. Some minor wording changes were recommended. John will make those changes and post the policy to the Collection Development section of the Heard home page.

20 June 2006

1. Faculty Delivery Service (Flo)
This proposal has met with enthusiasm by staff and by faculty, who have listed it as among the most important services the library can provide. Several libraries are already offering the service; this proposal would create a system-wide service to draw in the remaining libraries. Estimated expenses for such a program, which would include book and document delivery, include staffing, hardware and furniture, and the software license fee. The Council voted to support the proposal. Flo and Lisa will look at how the project would be funded this year, with the goal of asking for an exception for next year. Estimated implementation would be in the spring.

2. Contini-Volterra Archive Project (Paul)
Special Collections applied to the Kress Foundation last year for funds to support the digitization and metadata for the Contini-Volterra Collection, a group of approximately 60,000 images of art works from the early Renaissance to the 18th century. The collection was sold to Vanderbilt approximately 30 years ago by the two men who assembled it. Some of the works portrayed were destroyed in WWII and may be unique representations of lost objects. Kress has responded to the request with a smaller grant. Juanita Murray and other Special Collections staff will work with the Grants Panel to determine a cost per unit, including rights management needs and indirect costs. A meeting will take place in NY in September to discuss options for reducing the scope of the project to fit the available budget.

3. Public services person for DLSC (replacing Janice) (Flo and Jody)
Janice Adlington will remain on the Digital Library Steering Committee as the Electronic Resources Librarian, but the need to add someone from Public Services was discussed and a name suggested.

4. E-reserves/OAK project (Flo and Jody)
A charge was presented to create an E-reserves/Oak Project Team to look at how we administer reserves across the library system. With the addition of OAK to the library's responsibilities, more consistency will be required. This group will create policies and provide more resources for faculty with links to recommended websites. The charge was approved.

5. Recommendations of the ETD Project Team (Roberta)
A number of interim recommendations of the ETD Project Team were presented to the Council to help to streamline the ETD process. These include: asking the catalog team to burn the CD Rom (a preservation function) and setting guidelines for students to submit their theses and dissertations, including a review of existing records for errors. The recommendations were approved by the Council.

6 June 2006

Approval of the VU eArchive guidelines for submission
This was approved. Discussion included ETD's, Vanderbilt electronic publications, archiving and the Digital Collections webpages. Special Collections and Tech Services will be working together on metadata for Vanderbilt archived e-publications. More of the archives collected by Special Collections in electronic form will be moved to the VU e-archive.

Potential topics for an August retreat include performance evaluation, review and rankings; and LibQUAL.

The Project Team which developed a proposal for the Faculty document delivery service presented its work to the Library Directors Council. LDC was enthusiastic about moving toward implementation of the proposal. Funding will be sought. S&PC will discuss this further at a coming meeting once everyone has a copy of the proposal.

A chart has been created which identifies all staff who are currently participating on committees and/or project teams. It give a good idea of who's involved in what. A few suggested additions will be completed, and we will figure out a way to keep it up-to-date.

The report/recommendations of the ETD project team will be distributed to S&PC members.

23 May 2006

1. LibQUAL+2006
The LibQUAL+2006 survey is now closed. Preliminary data has been distributed to the Strategy & Planning Council. This year's survey included the Eskind Library and we can sort the results to include or exclude them. It also had a place to indicate which library was used by the respondent. We have over 500 comments. There were many more comments than last time, but fewer respondents. The project team will meet soon begin to review the results and study them over the next few months. In August or September the norms will be published, which will show where we are in relation to other ARL libraries. After the project team has met with the Library Directors Council in June, the library-wide preliminary report may be posted. Comments will likely be made available in early June.

2. Pod casts
The University is becoming more active in pod casting. We need to look at how we archive them as university publications. Roberta Winjum will meet with Jodie Gambill to discuss the issues involved in archiving these resources, either in University Archives (where all university electronic publications are currently being archived) or in the Institutional Repository.

3. Project Teams
Charges for an Information Competencies Instruction Project Team and a Faculty News Project Team were reviewed. Changes were made to the Faculty News Team charge and both were approved.

May 9, 2006

Juanita Murray told the Council that the RLG Archive Grid had contacted Special Collections recently to ask that we participate in the Archive Grid program. RLG harvests information from finding aids and puts it in a worldwide database. Most of the major universities are participating in the project. Access to the database is currently free, although it may eventually become a subscription service. Discussion centered around technical questions, primarily how we might submit the material (html or EAD). The decision was made to allow RLG to access our finding aids.

The rest of the meeting concerned plans for an upcoming visit from Ex Libris, scheduled for May 15 and 16. The two-day planning session will examine the details of how our partnership with Ex Libris on the Primo project will work.

May 2, 2006

1. LC Series Changes
The Library of Congress has decided to cease tracing series in bibliographic records and no longer perform authority work on series. This has the potential for impacting everyone's work.

What is the magnitude of the effect of losing series tracing? Is it worth the work that it would require for us to take on the extra work of providing the series information and authority work? What would we have to give up doing in order to take on the extra work? Is there a compromise? While series searching is a very small part of the searches our users perform, series searches are often done as keyword searches, which is by far the preferred search type. Some series work is more important than others, as it comprises one of the only ways to access some series that are not shelved together.

The Council asked Marshall Breeding to lead a small group of staff from the Metadata and Research Services Committee (including both reference and circulation staff) to make a recommendation based on how users search. They should present the recommendation to both committees and submit it for approval to the Strategy & Planning Council. Marshall will write a brief charge for the team.

After this decision is reached, we should view our work within the broader terms of all that we do. We need to look at other items that need to be accessible, both print and electronic documents.

2. Structure Discussion
Council members had a broad discussion about how much planning is conducted before a team is in place and if the new structure of the library was becoming too cumbersome. While both planning and action are required to create a successful project, it seems that now more work is being performed by staff with less administrative experience, which was one of our goals in becoming a learning organization. While this can require more front-end preparation to be certain that project teams are aware of their responsibilities and what will be expected of them in their work, it allows us to let them work independently and is therefore worthwhile.

3. Staff Development Committee Project Teams: Project Management and Java Workflows Training.
Council members approved both project team charges.

18 April 2006

Council again discussed the question of whether to partner with Ex Libiris on Primo.

*Adequacy of staffing for completing this project as well as other major projects we're committed to.

* It was noted that there are a host of related Acorn services that occur outside of Unicorn (Illiad and Annex delivery services, for example) and we will need to do some analysis of how to address those services.

* Budget issues were discussed. The project would require a mid-size server with standard configuration (it would hold indexes, not data sets). It needs high reliability, as it would be the face of the library. The server may also require a back up.

* Unlike Metalib, this is a contract to help to develop a product. We should not expect a fully functioning product with all of the desired features early in our development and implementation.

As a group, the Council was in support of the partnership. Paul will check with other administrative library staff to get everyone's thoughts and will have a discussion with the Digital Library Steering Committee before reaching a decision.

11 April 2006

* If we do decide to become partners in the project, it would be necessary to look at Ex Libris' other products, particularly Verde, their electronic resources manager, to see if they might be of use to our library.

* As user research and discovery happens more frequently on the Web environment, the library needs tools like Primo to be able to draw in users and encourage them to stay here.

The Council drafted a list of questions to ask Ex Libris about the terms of the contract. After these are addressed, we plan to reach a decision at our next meeting.

4 April 2006

1. Staff Training
There are five types of training in the library: (1) system-wide strategic training, like the upcoming meeting management training, which is organized by the Staff Development Committee; (2) system-wide new initiatives, such as the upcoming Java Client training, which is currently being organized by LITS through the committees; (3) new employee training, which was the responsibility of the former Technology Training Coordinators, individual departments, and LITS; (4) individual, job-related skills such as Excel training, which is conducted individually through New Horizons, our online technology training course (keys were distributed by the former Technology Training Coordinators); and (5) individual conference attendance, which is the responsibility of each department. We also offer informal individual training in brown bag and Web cast sessions.

We must be sure where the responsibility for each area of training falls. Changes in the committee structure have made training for system-wide initiatives (2) complex. The Staff Development Committee volunteered to take responsibility for organizing these activities, creating a central resource. They would create a project team for each program which would identify trainers, organize the sessions and communicate the information to staff. They would also assess the success of the training. Chris Waldrop has volunteered to help with the Java Client project, and several of the committees (circulation and access, collections) have already begun to plan for their own Workflows training. It's important to see that no smaller groups or individuals are forgotten in the training.

With the dissolution of the Technology Training Coordinators, some training needs may fall through the cracks. This group was helpful in that members were from across the library, with expertise in the nuances of work in different departments. They also met on a monthly basis, which allowed for communication about new technology needs. It was decided to combine the Technology Support Coordinators and the former Technology Training Coordinators into one team, which would be responsible for new employee technology training (3) and for distributing New Horizons access keys to interested staff members (4). The team would report to LITS. They might also attend new initiative training to help as an informal backup for individual questions (but not lead or organize the training).

Individual conference funding will remain within departments and libraries, even for strategic initiatives.

The special training needs of new library directors were discussed, as was broader new staff orientation, and the Staff Development Committee was asked to create a checklist of training activities for new staff.

The Staff Development Committee submitted a report on a survey conducted with library directors and committee chairs on perceived training needs for the coming months. Top needs for training were identified as (1) Setting Priorities / Goal Setting, (2) Customer Service Skills, and (3) Service Assessment (in that order). The Committee will focus on these topics next and report back to the participants on the responses. In the fall they will conduct a similar survey of the full staff.

The Staff Development Committee will organized training for system-wide initiatives and will prepare a checklist for new employee training. They will submit the report of their survey findings to the participants and begin work on the next three initiatives. A staff survey of training needs will be conducted in the fall. LITS will work with the Technology Support Coordinators to create a team to address individual training needs mentioned above.

Portico is a dark archive of electronic periodicals that grew out of Jstor. It uses the Jstor infrastructure and is funded by the Mellon Foundation and other agencies. It is working with Elsevier, among others. If an event triggers a loss of access to an electronic journal, subscribers to Portico can access the materials in their archive. (It's a lot like an insurance policy.) There are other groups working in this area: LOCKSS ((Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), a consortium effort of publishers, learned societies, and librarians, which is preserving resources that are different from Portico (so we need to work with both parties). CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is another collaborative working in this area. CLOCKSS is a closed group.

We will subscribe to Portico beginning July 1, 2006, and John Haar will be the contact.

April 21 is Blackboard Day at Vanderbilt. The event will be held in the Student Life Center and will provide an introduction of Blackboard, demonstrating the community system and the portal system. The event is free and more information will be posted to the news feed.

21 March 2006

Council members discussed the plans for the upcoming Strategic Planning Forum. Pat Johnson will gather the questions submitted in advance of the meeting and send them anonymously to the Council members on Monday, and send any later questions as they arrive. Paul will send a reminder to staff to encourage meeting attendance. At the meeting, he will outline the major topics and significant efforts toward those goals. Committee chairs should think about what they are working on toward the goals (for example, Jody could report on OAK, Roberta on Acorn, John on storage issues, all within the context of the Strategic Plan). Celia will create a PowerPoint template and plug in the goals and next steps for everyone to use.

Members also continued the discussion of committee/team work evaluation. We want to create a method for team or committee members to evaluate their chairs, too. The upcoming meeting management training will help us create an outline for this evaluation process. The Council decided to wait to complete the forms until the meeting management program had been conducted.

March 14, 2006

1. Library Test Bed Project (Jody)
Council members approved the team charge and the team members. Since not everyone has been contacted at this time, names will not be reported.

2. Committee/Team Work Evaluation Review (Lisa)
Lisa submitted a draft of a brief review form for committee and team work evaluation. She was asked to do so since staff who are committing time to strategic work need some form of review to use in conjunction with their standard job review. If someone is doing an exceptional job, we would like to have the opportunity to recognize their efforts. Likewise, if someone is not putting sufficient effort into committee work (tardiness, missing meetings for no reason, not sharing in the workload), then they need to know that more is expected of them.

The Council decided that it would be best to implement this process in next year's evaluation, since some committee and team members may not fully understand that the work that they do there is as important as their daily work. This year, the review will be handled informally. Committee and team chairs will advise their groups of the new procedure and show them the review form so they will be aware of the process. Next year at review time (or when a team project is completed), chairs and team leaders will complete a form for each member of the committee or team, share it with the member, and send it to their supervisor.

3. Strategic Planning Forum
Council members reviewed the forum reports and wiki pass codes were distributed so that each chair could complete their report. This wiki system was designed to document strategic progress toward goals and to recognize committee/team work. The wiki will be posted to the committee drop down menu on the Staffweb on Monday, March 20 and an email will be distributed by Paul to encourage staff to read the documents, think about questions and comments and attend the meeting. The meeting, which takes place March 29, will begin with Paul asking everyone on a committee or team to rise (a list of committee members will be distributed as well), then he will briefly address key talking points about the report, followed by time for questions and comments from the attendees.

4. ETD Charge (Roberta)
The charge was approved with some suggestions for assessment changes.

February 21, 2006

S&P members discussed their responses to the Web cast presentation made by ExLibris held Monday. Topics included:

Design
Primo has highlighted services that might already be available in Worldcat so that more people are likely to use them. This software is designed to integrate with a library's existing homepage. It is designed for the average user (unlike NC State, which is designed for librarians). Is there an existing way to make our resources more visible to users?

How is it functionally different?
Its ability to integrate a search with other environments, such as Blackboard or a future university portal, would be useful for us. Primo is built around a publishing platform (a search engine/indexing scheme with harvested data that is all pre-indexed so you can get an immediate response). Those searches can be performed quickly and thoroughly. Primo provides a tab for things drawn from a metasearch, allowing the software more time to pull those responses together.

What is the amount of digital content that we have here to make this useful?
We have enough material: Acorn data, CRL, TV News, Institutional Repository, ETDs-anything harvestable that we have an interest in could go there. Operations like Google Scholar show us the power of deep indexing.

What will the costs be?
Marshall will discuss the details with them about costs and what particular project we might work on, if we decide to participate as a tester. We might focus on incorporating course management systems; with searching and streaming video in the TV News Archive (this would benefit our subscribers); develop a pipeline between Primo and SIRSI (they may not have any other UNICORN partners); or work with authority records and thesauri.

Are we willing to participate in a project for 10 months that may end up being something we don't use? What will we not do because of this? If we don't do this, what do we do to make our Web environment what today's users expect? This would have an impact on the users, which is a good yardstick for what to do first. Or is this a service that we already provide and we should instead broaden our services? Do we improve what we are already doing or offer more services that would lead to a Center for Academic Life? Can we stage these activities so that we can do them all?

Marshall will speak with Primo representatives about the projects that might interest the library and will schedule a staff-wide presentation of the program. Marshall will share the proposal and his own papers on Primo with the staff. Then the committees can become engaged in the review process.

Acorn has always been the place where we put things that we own. But the line between what we do and do not own has blurred with e-books and other electronic resources. We pay $40,000/year for the CRL materials. In this way, the materials are similar to NetLibrary resources, which we do post in Acorn. CRL may be thought of as another library annex, based in Chicago.

There are, however, maintenance issues associated with adding a large quantity of records to SIRSI, particularly the CRL, over which we have no control. We do not want to pay for the cost of authority processing. If we must set up another library for this, that will be an additional fee. Would we add the records of UT or UTK? They are materials we can borrow, but they are not in Acorn.

Roberta will draft a policy for what goes in to Acorn. This will help us decide what we expend our efforts on. John will determine how many records are in the CRL collection and how the records will affect SIRSI costs. We will refer the issue of whether we should load the CRL records into Acorn to the Metadata Committee for their recommendation. Since we index twice yearly, the Committee should also look at what timing is best for loading the 18th c collection and, if we decide to do so, adding the CRL records.

3. Recommendations for 2 Project teams from the Staff Development Committee: Meeting Management and Journal Club

The Staff Development Committee brought forward two charges: one for a team to run meeting management training for all staff and another to create a team to run a journal club. Both charges were approved with the addition of estimated end dates for the projects. Discussion centered on if meeting training should be mandatory for all staff and the Council agreed that if we are hoping to empower staff at all levels to participate in decision-making in the library, then we need to be certain that we all have the necessary skills to accomplish those tasks.

The Journal Club was first developed by Sharon Weiner and there have been requests for the club to be reformed as a system-wide program. The Staff Development Committee would like to begin this year's club with the topic of organizational learning, one of the prioritized "next steps" of the Strategic Plan. Discussion centered on if we need to provide a structure for such a voluntary club, or if this is something that can be generated under its own steam as a social activity. The charge was approved.

The Council members then talked in more detail about structure in the library, in order to see if we are becoming too committee/team heavy. We do not want to limit strategic progress by asking staff to run decisions through so many committees that nothing is accomplished. We must strike a balance that provides sufficient support and oversight to accomplish tasks without hampering progress.

February 14, 2006

The issue of what belongs in Acorn has been discussed in the past, but it came up again with the introduction of two collections: the new 18th century collection, which contains 127,000 records, and the announcement at ALA that CRL records are available to download into our catalog. Our practice has been that if we own an item or we have selected it (eg, free from the Internet), we put it in Acorn if practical. But some materials, like ETDs, are cataloged and also available in our databases.

Items are put in OCLC in part because we want to make them available to lend to other institutions. We might not put some electronic items there as we could not lend them. Does everything we have access to go in Acorn? It seems confusing to users to link to things in Acorn that we do not own. The CRL material is not owned by us and so maybe it should not go in our database. But we would like to see the use of these materials enhanced; thus, the suggestion that the records might be loaded into Acorn. Why not instead create a test bed where we have a button in Acorn ("Try your search in Worldcat") that links to other materials such as those of the Center for Research Libraries items? The Research Services Committee recommended that these materials be made more visible, particularly for graduate students and faculty.

The 18th century collections were flagged simply because there are so many of them. We currently have approximately 2.3 to 2.5 million titles in our catalog. When we reach 3 million, we will trigger an increase in our SIRSI charges (last upgrade was $46,000) and an increase in maintenance fees. Jody will get the specific details about these numbers. The 127,000 18th century records and approximately 100,000 CRL records will not put us at that point, but it will draw us closer to the trigger.

The Council members decided to enter the 18th century collection records in Acorn and to wait to discuss the CRL records until John returns. We will also think about experimenting with a test bed button. Roberta and the Metadata Committee will draft a policy for what goes in Acorn in consultation with the Collections Committee, and bring it back to the S&P.

Marshall has held further conversations with ExLibris and has scheduled a webcast demonstration for Monday, February 20 at 2:00. The S&P Council, Library Directors Council, Metadata Committee, Digital Library Steering Committee and Research Services Committee members will be invited to the demonstration; Celia will book the room and Paul will send an announcement.

The Council members discussed what we want to communicate in the forum. After some debate about having multiple sessions on one or more committee topics versus having one long session, we decided to ask committee chairs to create a written report on their progress in the last 6 months (October-March) and post it to the annual report wiki by March 17. Celia will post a news feed article on the subject on the following Monday. Staff will be asked to read the report and come to the forum ready to ask questions. Staff will also be invited to submit questions in advance of the meeting. The forum will then be a 1hour or 1 ½ hour Q&A session. Celia will look for a good location and date during the last week in March, particularly March 27-29.

February 7, 2006

1. Heard Website Update Project (Jody)
This team was created to deal with the immediate needs of the homepage until a major project could occur. This group's charge is based on a number of conversations of what needs to be done before fall (including refreshing the look and feel and basic navigation changes). Consistent terminology issues will be referred to the Research Services Committee.

2. Library Test Bed Project (Jody)
The charge was submitted in draft form and will be discussed further by associated stakeholders and possibly modified. The team charge is to create a site to allow testing and trials of proposed digital library services and resources. It will include ways to solicit suggestions for potential resources/services and recruit users for focus groups. It is essentially a market test bed. The site must be easily accessible from its related service area (so a test of the Acorn spell checker would be linked from Acorn) and it must be clearly identified as a test page as opposed to a permanent resource or service. It must not be harvestable by Google or it will draw outside users to the site who think it is a permanent resource.

We need to create a procedure for implementing desirable services/resources. Is the level of service/usage a determining factor in approving or reviewing a new resource? It is important to have someone on staff who can support analytics.

3. Committee and project team evaluation (Flo)
a. How do we evaluate the work of committee and project teams?
b. How do we provide input to supervisors relative to staff participation on committees and project teams?
We need some way for committee chairs to provide feedback on committee work to inform staff evaluations. We need to build in a brief report at the end of a project for committee and team leaders to report on participation. This could take the form of a checklist (with ratings 1-5) on such topics at attendance, punctuality, contribution to discussion, etc. Also, we would add space for a line or two about exceptional service. Lisa and Celia will draft a form for this evaluation. When project teams are created, chairs should relate to them that they will be required to do this. Staff also need to be made aware that project team and committee work is as important as daily work.

4. Do we need a committee on assessment? (Paul)
It is important, now that we have gotten our strategic planning implementation underway, that we focus on customer service. The S&P council is responsible for seeing that we bear this overarching goal in mind. LibQual+2006 will begin in mid-March and the results will be here within 6 months. Flo will be the point person for assessment.

The Library Directors Council is supporting the creation of a project team to create a document describing our service philosophy and identifying service standards.

Marshall reported back to the Council that he had contacted ExLibris to express interest in exploring the idea of Vanderbilt being a test site for Primo. We will also have a reviewt of WebFeat, a metasearcher service.

31 January 2006

Council members continued their discussion about team building with reference to Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths, a program used by the University of Nebraska Library.

Marshall reported on Primo, Ex Libris' next generation online browser, which is currently in prototype and was exhibited at Mid-Winter ALA. While Endeca (in use at North Carolina State and soon to be released at Chicago Public Library and the Phoenix Public Library) and Aquabrowser both came out of business applications, Primo is designed to work specifically for libraries. It takes local digital content, indexes it, and puts it in a search platform. It differs from metasearching where one query is cast to hundreds of different databases. Primo has access to the information itself and it can combine terms and categories in a search. It looks sophisticated and appealing and is oriented toward the way that a library works. It is based on web services and its architecture allows us to integrate its resources.

The first iteration, due around the end of 2006, will deal with local content (online catalogs, institutional repository documents and digitized special collections). The second iteration will launch into metasearching and should be running in 2007.

This led to a discussion of what our users want. It was suggested that Ex Libris might accept Vanderbilt as a test site for Primo. We talked about whether we could partner with Ex Libris and still have time to work on other projects. John stated that we should have a library catalog that catalogs to the article level. Primo will be able to do that. Marshall will express our interest in the project to Ex Libris and find out more about what would be involved and expected of us in the testing. We may want to reexamine Metalib, since so many other libraries are using it and like it. Perhaps we could purchase Metalib and get it running while we test Primo, and then we will be ready when Primo expands its services in 2007.

January 17, 2006

Council members met to discuss policies and procedures for the creation of project teams and for the Staff News Feed. The Project Team procedure will be posted to a policies and procedures wiki, available through the Staffweb. Celia will gather examples of charges so that we may create a template for project team charges.

The Staff News Feed policy and procedure will be available in the Reports and Documents section of the Staffweb, in the category called Policy and Procedure, Communications Manual. A submission form will be linked to the News Feed on the digest and on the Web page and a comments button will also be added to the Staff News Feed page. Celia will post an article to the News Feed announcing the Communications policy and telling how staff can access the resource.

The Council also discussed team building. At our next meeting we will continue this discussion.

January 3, 2006

The Council discussed the values associated with a learning organization, an organizational model that uses continual learning (both informal and formal) along with reflection and information sharing to improve skills and knowledge within an organization. The learning organization model is based on the idea that individual learning leads to organizational learning. Transforming the library into a learning organization is one of the prioritized goals of the Strategic Plan, and is assigned to the Staff Development Committee.

For change to occur within an organization, it is important for staff to understand why change needs to occur (for us, change is needed to strengthen ties between the library and the university's mission so that we are identified as a vital part of the mission and the university's goals). For a learning organization to succeed, it is also important for staff to understand and accept a common set of values. Do all library staff operate under the same set of values? What are the signs that we do or don't?

We have been involved in process for almost two years. It is important now to identify successes that have occurred in the committees and project teams. The Communications Committee will be in contact with committees to establish dates for the first semi-iannual reports to staff (forums) on progress. Committees should identify what they have stopped doing and what they have started doing. The Council can analyze these reports to see if there are trends in our progress. We should be able to identify what has been accomplished toward our strategic goals and toward our mission. (for example, "In terms of support for instruction, we have done…..") These reports will be posted to the Strategic Plan wiki, which will be made available on the Staffweb and will form the basis for a Strategic Plan annual report.

December 13, 2005

1. Committee Reports (All)
Highlights of recent committee meetings were discussed in brief. The Metadata Committee reported on their discussion of the new system for making Acorn decisions. Space Planning is considering adding vending machines for office supplies in some of the libraries. The Digital Library Steering Committee is examining how they propose to tie our digital resources together and are looking at an information hub or portal as an eventual replacement to the Heard website. Staff Development is continuing its examination of learning organizations and has identified a number of core values that are characteristic of a learning organization. The Communications Committee is addressing a number of small projects (news ticker, assessing the news feed, etc.) and is prioritizing their long range goals.

The recommendation was made to write a news feed article about the new forms of communication in the library. Celia will write this, as well as an article about the new project teams which have been created to date. We talked about when it is appropriate to send email messages to staff and it was determined that while we are trying to encourage staff to use the news feed for current information, some timely and important notices (such as holiday time sheet deadlines) could also be submitted to a forum of supervisors to reinforce that they message is received. The idea here is that more formats and channels of information will improve communication, since everyone has their own preferred method of receiving information.

The Communications Committee is in the process of assessing the success of the news feed. In November, articles were up by 400% over Novembers in the last five years. Only 23% of those articles were meeting summaries or agendas, so we are clearly getting more information out to staff. Whether the rss feed is the best format for staff to receive the news is still be reviewed. Anyone with thoughts on the news feed is encouraged to send those suggestions, complaints and kudos to Celia, who will write a news feed article to that effect.

Over 150 people have completed their Skills & Interests survey. A list of names of those staff who have not completed their survey was distributed at the meeting and Celia and Paul will contact those administrators with staff on the list, asking them to encourage their staff to complete the form.

Members are planning to have a meeting with LMC to determine how our values have changed in light of the Strategic Plan. Strategy and Planning Council members agreed to review the websites of ARL libraries to see if they identify their core values. Lisa will look through the literature that she has to see how values are created. Celia will bring the Staff Development's list of values associated with a learning organization to the next S&P meeting, which is January 3. At that meeting, we will discuss the process for accomplishing the task of identifying our new values.

In lieu of next week's meeting, the Strategy & Planning Council members will hold a donuts and coffee informational meeting in the GLB staff lounge to answer any questions and listed to staff input on the strategic plan, project teams and committee structure, and on communication in the library, as well as other issues as they arise.

29 November 2005

1. LibQUAL+2006 Project Team (Flo Wilson)
Janice Adlington has agreed to serve as project coordinator and primary contact for the LibQUAL+ program. Library directors have been asked to supply suggested names for her project team. The team will need to address a number of issues including permissions, communication, sampling and participation incentives. Work begins December 15, when the instrument is available on the ARL website.

2. GIS Task Force Recommendations (Flo Wilson)
The GIS Task Force submitted a list of recommendations to address GIS services at Vanderbilt. The Strategy & Planning Council asked Flo to go back to the task force to discuss the need to reduce planned personnel from 3 or 4 to 1, using existing staff as back ups or drawing in a student assistant from Peabody, should they decide to support such an effort. The tentative start date for the GIS program, a system-wide service that will be physically housed at Peabody, is July 2006.

Members gave approval for the Staff Development Committee to distribute a survey to committee chairs and LMC members to determine their training needs.

4. Report on Beta Testing Unicorn GL 3.1 (Jody Combs and Roberta Winjum)
Discussion with LITS and Technical Service members has led to the decision to participate in the testing of the next Unicorn enhancement. The decision was reached because a number of the enhancements, including the acquisition wizard, make it worthwhile to participate at this time. However, the library will only participate in basic testing.

The issue of decision-making among staff and committees was also discussed in regards to Acorn functionality, a subject raised at a recent Metadata Committee meeting. The topic was not strategic and so should not be addressed by the committee, but was too short-term to require a project team. The decision was made to assign these smaller decisions to one or two individual staff who understand the ramifications of such a decision and who will contact all involved stakeholders for input. This also brought up the subject of whether staff are clear about their role in the new organizational environment. We need to provide staff development and/or informational news items to make certain that staff's questions on these fundamental issues are answered. A brainstorming session on library values with LMC would be useful in order to identify topics to address. This all ties into the concept of the library as a learning environment.

5. Staff Skills and Interests Inventory Tool--who should have access to the search interface for this? (Jody Combs)
Members decided that this tool will be made available to committee chairs and to LMC members for the present time.

8 November 2005

1.Discussion of whether the library should participate in beta testing SIRSI's Unicorn GL 3.1 (Jody Combs)

Council members discussed the benefits and responsibilities of participating in the beta testing of SIRSI's Unicorn GL 3.1. The project will allow us to plan for training for the new version and give us the opportunity to suggest feature changes. However, the project will also require staff time and the question arose as to if it was appropriate to devote time to this project when we have discussed a greater willingness to accept Sirsi out of the box. In the future, we will have an Electronic Resource Management system that might perform many of the records management functions now performed by Acorn. We must look at the opportunities to determine if they will result in increased productivity in the long run. Jody and Roberta will speak with members of Technical Services and determine if we should participate in the testing. They will then report back to the S&P Council

Celia submitted a list of skills and interests submitted to date for the staff survey designed to identify potential project team members. Council members will submit final suggestions to Celia by November 10, after which the Communications Committee will review and possibly group these items, write explanatory text, and meet with Jason Battles to devise the survey.

After a question arose about open meetings, Flo brought this question to the Council to confirm that our procedure is to direct staff interested in attending committee meetings to the committee chair, who will make the decision on whether to allow visitors. If topics draw interest from staff, chairs are asked to contact the Staff Development Committee to consider the topic for a brown bag program. Chairs should also encourage inquiring staff to submit those interests in the upcoming staff interest survey.

The Library Directors Council would like to create a project team for the faculty delivery service. A list of potential members was reviewed and approved. Flo will create a project description and submit it to the S&P Council.

Discussion centered around what collection might be appropriate for such a pilot test and the members determined that while this was an interesting project, they were not convinced of the value for us in the short term.

Committee chairs were asked to describe their priority goals, if identified:
Digital Library Steering Committee: dealing with open/legacy issues and developing a strategy for prioritizing them
Library Directors Committee: still prioritizing, but working on faculty delivery program
Staff Development: Project Management, Managing Committees and a Learning Environment retreat
Communications: short term communications plan for strategic plan
Metadata: identifying current projects and what schema are being used
Digital Library Advisory Board: no priorities, since the group is designed to provide feedback to the S&P
Center for Academic Life: wrestling with if we create this group now or wait for a larger group with Dennis Hall; learning commons is moving forward
Space Planning: the Annex; also a survey of how directors are using their space
Collections: developing guidelines for the acceptance and encouragement of submissions to the e-Archive; fostering collaborative projects with UT and UK
Circulation: brainstorming now, with prioritization to follow
Research Services: creating an instruction forum and a reference forum with possible e-mail distribution lists for each; examining service expectations for frontline service and creating guidelines and standards; looking at Blackboard to determine how we can use of the tool to help users (for example, using OAK for postings for journals)

1 November 2005

Committee chairs reviewed meetings that had occurred since our last Strategy & Planning Council meeting. The Digital Library Steering Committee, the Metadata Committee, the Communications Committee, the Staff Development Committee and the Library Directors' Council met this week. Many of the committees looked at what is currently being done in their area of work and discussed what needs to be done to accomplish the goals of the Strategic Plan. Some of the committees are using OAK as an internal communications device. It will be important to offer training for staff who need help with OAK, wikis and RSS feeds.

The Library Directors' Council determined to move forward with system-wide faculty delivery service and will create a project team to implement the program.

Members discussed how we create project teams and how we might create a roster to identify interested and/or skilled staff who might serve on teams (and identify those staff members who might already be very busy). The Library Staff Directory might be adapted to include headers for committee work, skills and interests. Celia will ask all Strategy & Planning Council members to submit suggestions for skills and interests so that we can create a drop down menu of options. Each staff member can then populate his or her own information in a consistent manner. Jody will look into creating the restricted database with locations for committee work and year of service, skills and interests. When Celia has gathered all of the skills/interests, the Communications Committee will review the list, make suggestions and submit them to the S&P Council. We will give this project a high priority, as some committees need to create project teams in the very near future. We will add a definition of skills and interests to the home page of the directory to explain the difference to staff.

We also discussed how we approve staff for project team work. We need to create a litmus test to prioritize those projects that affect a broad range of the library. We should clear recommended staff through their supervisor after the S&P Council has reviewed the names. We must also look at what things we can stop doing, so that project team members have time to complete these projects. We must also show the pay off for the project, which might eventually reduce work.

18 October 2005

John reported that the Space Planning Committee met. At that meeting, Peg reported that the Annex will be out of space in 4 to 5 years even if we fully shelve the building. The Committee discussed weeding duplicates from the Annex, possibly withdrawing serials where we have the electronic equivalent or depending on the Serials Archive of the Information Alliance. They will also be reviewing the Divinity rennovation plans. Priorities for the committee are the Annex addition, review of other building plans, the space survey, and monitoring the inflow to the Annex so that it does not exceed predictions.

Roberta reported on the Metadata Committee. The Committee plans to review the various on-going projects that are underway to get a better feel of what is going on, e.g., the Special Collections photo archive. Marshall will be showing them Jane Landers' Cuban ecclesiastical records. The Committee wants to review the various ACORN enhancement requests/training needs. We agreed that the latter is a topic for the Staff Development Committee. They discussed the SIRSI beta testers group, and the question arose if we should continue being a SIRSI beta test site. This led to a discussion of whether we should do as much ACORN customization in the future. (This was a big issue identified early in the strategic planning process.) Jody plans to raise the issue at the first meeting of the Digital Library Strategic Planning Committee. There followed a discussion of the extent of consultation and input from committees and groups where an issue is not directly within their scope or charge. The S&P Council is the appropriate group to assign items to committees and to move forward on specific issues.

The new committees need to be represented on the Staffweb drop down menus. We suggested that the Communications Committee should address this. LITS could make the change.

11 October 2005

Council members discussed spell checking software for Acorn. Research services staff seem to be pleased with the product, although there is an occasional delay in populating the search box. Since we average about 1,000 searches/day, the 25,000 search limit placed on the software provider should be sufficient for our purposes. Members agreed to try the spell check and if we discover that we have problems we can cancel the program.

Members next examined priorities for committees, looking at such issues as how we determine where issues are resolved. The group determined that they would address priorities within their committees and report back to the Council about those results. The Strategy & Planning Council looks at the big picture and so will be proactive in directing committees about priorities.

The agenda for the October 13th committee discussion was reviewed and it was decided that we would group committee discussions by chairs, so as to allow for more time for Q&A. Celia will rework the agenda and send it to the council members and will prepare a list of committee members for distribution at the October 13th meeting.

4 October 2005

The Council members discussed reporting procedures for committees. Since the OAK course is not ideal for communicating with those outside of committees, it was decided to redesign the newsletter as an RSS feed format, to push information to the staff. We would use a red "new" flag to mark new material. The newsletter would be distributed on a daily basis in the manner of The Register, but would contain more of an abstract with the headline and document link. On the 1st and 15th of the month, the newsletter would be sent as a full "newspaper" and then archived the following day.

Committee members would be responsible for sending Celia a copy of their meeting agenda in brief for the newsletter (one week prior to the meeting, whenever possible) and for sending an abstract of their meeting minutes with a link to the full document. Each submission must contain a contact name for questions. Staff will need to be trained to be succinct but thorough in their reports and agendas and samples of abstracts, minutes and agendas should be provided to each committee to use as models. New policies should include information about when they were first created, links to the older document, and when they were last updated. Support documents would be made available on the Staffweb (when appropriate) after they have been reviewed by the committee and edited. Until then, they would be available in OAK to committee members. Committees will also post minutes to the Staffweb, although unit work groups will be exempt from this responsibility.

It will be important to assess the success of the new format after a period of time to see if we are giving staff the right amount of information in a format that works for them. It is also important to consider how we will create a digital archive of the newsletters. We must build a model for storage of these materials that will demonstrate possibilities to the Vanderbilt community.

1. distribute agendas and support materials
2. send agendas and contact information to Celia one week prior to meeting (for newsletter)
3. send an abstract of the minutes, a headline, a link to the full documents, and contact information to Celia one week after the meeting (for newsletter)
4. send minutes and reviewed support documents to their Web pages one week after meeting to be linked to the drop down menus on Staffweb
5. report quarterly or semiannually to staff at an open house

The Council members also discussed how the October 13 staff Committee discussion meeting will proceed. It is important to note how the committees will work in a different manner, using a system-wide approach. Their directives for tasks will be determined by the Strategy & Planning Council. We should stress the importance of project team opportunities. And we should describe the communications and assessment responsibilities that will be common to all committees. Celia will distribute an agenda for the meeting.

Letters will be sent to committee members this week. All charges should be sent with corrections to Celia by Wednesday afternoon. We should also send letters to those who were not selected for committee work.

September 27, 2005

Council members reviewed the proposed list of members for the committees and established a timetable for completing the committee work. Paul will contact directors of Eskind and Law and Flo will contact directors of Management, Peabody and Divinity to confirm that they concur with the appointments from their libraries. Paul and Flo will send an email to S&P members to confirm that they have completed these tasks. Then all committee chairs will contact their prospective members. Once confirmed, Paul will send each a letter that includes: the confirmation of their appointments, reinforces the importance of their work, tells them that they will be contacted by the chair to go over details and schedule a meeting, and tells them that the committees will be reviewed annually by the S&P group. The committee charge will be attached to each letter and committee chairs are asked to review their charges and send any changes to Celia. Letters will go out in the next week. Chairs should also create a group email list for their committees and send the list to LITS in an Inform so that it may be added to the staff mail listings.

The short term plan for communicating the strategic plan was discussed. It will include: (1) the new and improved staff newsletter, which will serve as one important vehicle for sending out information to staff (2) a Web page for the strategic plan that allows for updates to be added to the goals and tasks (3) and a library-wide discussion that will take place after the Provost's talk on October 11. Committee chairs will outline the work of their committee, note members, stress the importance of the work, and remind staff that were not picked of upcoming project team opportunities. A list of all volunteers for committee work who were not selected will be placed on OAK for future consultation when selecting project teams. An overview of the paradigm changes in the strategic plan will also be reinforced at the meeting (system-wide thinking, closer association with the university's goals, empowerment of all levels of staff, and greater communication inside and outside of the library).

Committees will be encouraged to consider in their work (1) their top goals (2) look at how they can help to implement Next Steps and (3) look at orphaned goals--those goals not selected that were recommended by the strategic plan working groups. Celia will add those goals to the OAK documents. The Council may assign these tasks to committees.

The question of how interim decisions will be handled when we are in-between committees was brought up. The example of the request for spell check on Acorn was used as an example. Such decisions which come from outside of committees will be submitted to the Strategy & Planning Council who will send the suggestion to the appropriate committee(s) or bump it up to a higher council if appropriate. Chairs will report on committee activities to the Strategy & Planning Council. This discussion reinforced the need for improved communication within the library to make the committee structure run smoothly and minimize overlap of tasks.

September 13, 2005

The group discussed ways to improve communication among Council members. Jody will create an OAK class for us to share documents and give us instruction on using OAK. Each member will submit documents for review by the Monday before our meetings. Celia will send each member a reminder along with a list of all needed documents.

The Council then turned to the discussion of our strategic goal implementation plans. The tasks listed on these plans do not encompass all activity of the group, but are intended to get the work started. In many cases, the group members will identify some of the tasks to be accomplished within each goal.

The need for project management training was discussed. It was decided that this would become a strategic goal and would be assigned to the Staff Development Committee; they would take it as a priority. These goal tasks are the top priorities of the library. The work will be reviewed during the employee's annual evaluation.

The responsibility involved in committee work was stressed. Once part of a committee, staff members should consider that work to be part of their jobs, not something that they do when they have extra time. Committee assignments will be discussed with directors and supervisors, and all libraries should encourage their staff to participate. The staff library directory might be extended to include committee memberships for each staff member.

Council members will make changes to their plans and send them to Celia, who will ask that they be posted to the Staffweb. Celia will make the Staff Survey results accessible to all Council members.

August 26, 2005

The Council met to discuss the remaining committee charges. Paul distributed a brochure from the U of British Colimbia that he asked each member to review to see how we rate against their startegic efforts. We are to mark "yes" if we've accomplished the task discussed; "no" if we've not, or "na" if the task is not relevant to the Heard Library.

* We need a communication structure for decisions made outside of the group format, so that all changes in policy or procedure can be reviewed by stakeholders.

* Committees do not reflect Acorn information or Web work. How will that be incorporated into the structure?

* Celia will make each charge consistent in style and form. Suellen will load the text to the "New in the Library" section of the Staffweb for announcement next Thursday, September 1, in the Staff Newsletter. See: Committeestructureoverview.html

August 23, 2005

The Council reviewed half of the committee charges. Each rubric should include reporting order (where they report and who is responsible chair). Committees that are not typically strategic (advice and policy groups) in nature should report to the Director's Group for any needed ratification. The Directors' Group and the Strategy & Planning Council need to have written voting procedures in place in case there is disagreement among the members. However, it will be the responsibility of the committee chair to inform appropriate/affected groups including the group to which they report before a decision is reached. Each committee charge should state this requirement, as well as other reporting requirements. The charges should also note that assessment is an important part of their charge. Committees may chose to create distribution lists of interested stakeholders for each project managed by the committee. The Strategy & Planning Council will review group charges annually, along with committee membership.

16 August 2005

The Council discussed the next step of the Strategic Plan: writing charges for the proposed committees. Assignments were divided as follows:

Paul: overall report, Center for Academic Life, and Strategy and Planning Council

John: Collections Committee, Space Committee (Collections will combine print and digital library collections activities)

(1) Membership (not specific names, but what skills are needed from the members, if the committee should be representative of all library units, etc.)

(3) Charge (should include the need for the group to communicate with appropriate other groups when making decisions and should stress service quality/primacy of needs of users)

Specific tasks that relate to the five Strategic Plan Goals may be added to the text as appropriate.

The Council reviewed committee structure, looking at a number of charts. Chart #7 seemed to best represent the concepts of the committee structure, with overlapping circles that symbolize the system-wide responsibilities of most library committees. The Council emphasized the importance of empowering the committees and forums to make decisions, with the accompanying responsibility of communicating their decisions. Each committee will be expected to report monthly on their activities through the Staff Newsletter. Minutes of all meetings should also be posted and a quarterly report should be presented.

This increased authority requires committees to do more research to determine the impact of their decisions. Decisions would only go beyond the AUL level in exceptional cases, where the proposed initiative goes against the broader vision of the Library. Staff will need to write procedures to enable these groups to make decisions on their own.

Discussion ensued as to whether the Digital Library should form a separate circle in the committee structure chart. The need for steering committees was also discussed, and the Council members felt that the Strategy and Planning Council could create all of the committees and forums, which in turn would report to the S&P.

2 August 2005

The Council reviewed Roberta's Committee Structure diagram and discussed the posibility of adding LMC and/or the Directors' Group to the chart. It was decided to put the University Librarian at the top of the chart, with LMC and the Strategy and Planning Council directly underneath him. These two units would , in turn, have the administrative organization under LMC and the 3 Steering Committees (Community, Access and Obtaining and Organizing Information) under the S&P Council. The Steering Committees would be composed of chairs of the committees organized under each area and a few other individuals. Faculty and students might be considered for membership in some sort of advisory committees.

We looked at Flo's implementation plan for Goal 4 and talked about the differences between a forum (created to foster communication) and a committee (created for long-term work). Project teams would be created under the forums or committees, to complete specific tasks. It would be important to give these teams authority to complete their assignments, which would be reported back to their steering committee and to the S&P Council. The S&P Council would be responsible for evaluation of the projects, although each committee, group, or forum would be required to evaluate their own work.

For next week, Roberta will update the Committee Structure diagram. Paul wants to discuss if the Center for Academic Life is in the correct column on the diagram. We will also make plans for the August 15 Retreat.

19 July 2005

The Council continued the discussion of library committees. Topics which might fall under the three broad steering committees described last week include: Instruction, Center for Academic Life, Collection Development or Management, Digital Library Steering Committee, Metadata, Circulation and Access (ie., physical access), Staff Development, Space (this may be the library directors' task), Reference, Web Development, Communications, Institutional Repository.

Can we build our organization with this conceptual model? The current committees were developed ad hoc and do not communicate effectively with other groups.

A charge needs to be written for each subgroup so that they fit into the larger library goals. Steering committee chairs need to (1) keep their eye on the big picture (2) coordinate groups below you and monitor their activities (3) communicate (4) monitor activities toward the 5 goals (5) look at quality of service and accept responsibility to help us become a learning organization. Steering committees would contain around six people who would form a team to work with the chair. Members might be chairs of the subgroups.

Roberta will work on a draft of an organization chart for this concept for our next meeting.

12 July 2005

The Council divided the library's goals into three broad categories: (1) identifying and assembling information; (2) access; and (3) community. They then began to identify subgroups that might fall under each category, but several subgroups could be identified with more than one category. These three groups could serve as steering committees for the main tasks of the library. They could hold quarterly open meetings to increase information sharing. Staff and users could be invited to these meetings. This might be an opportunity to get feedback from our users. However, we would still need other forms of communication to spread the news to everyone who is interested.

It will be important to bring new staff into these groups, as they could provide a vehicle for visibility and challenge for staff that have not had the opportunity to serve on system-wide committees. We might try to place new librarians on a committee within two years of their hiring.

For next week, members are asked to think about what falls into the three groups. Who should be the leadership for these groups? What subgroups might fall under these headers? How do out five strategic goals overlay these groups? How do we pursue these ideas and still retain our user focus?

Strategy and Planning Council

Minutes

Meeting Notes (most recent at the beginning)