MARS Executive Committee Meeting II Monday, January 22, 2007 Seattle, Convention Center, Rm 3A; 8:00 a.m. 12:30 p.m.

Transcription

1 MARS Executive Committee Meeting II Monday, January 22, 2007 Seattle, Convention Center, Rm 3A; 8:00 a.m. 12:30 p.m. APPROVED MINUTES Present: Executive Committee Members: Mary Popp, Past Chair; Kathleen Kern, Chair; Mary Mintz, Vice Chair; Laurie Probst; Debbie Bezanson; Kelley Lawton; Rosemary Meszaros; Hui Hua Chua; Buff Hirko. Committee and Task Force Chairs and Representatives: Charles Cobine, Bryna Coonin, Cynthia Crosser, Alex Hodges, Jim Langan, Carolyn Larson, Natalie McDonough, Kathryn Millis, Marina Salcedo, Susie Skarl, Carolyn Strickland, Doris Ann Sweet. Committee Appointments Mary Mintz will be making appointments between now and Annual. Committee chairs should notify Mary who is interested in continuing, and if chairs are interested in continuing, or recommend another as chair. It is also possible to appoint someone as consultant if there is a defined role, and if their term limits are up. Natalie McDonough reminded committee chairs that the new Committee Volunteer form will be up online after Midwinter. Executive Committee has also approved a new committee reporting form. Committee Reports Outreach Susie Skarl Susie thanked those who attended happy hour. Twenty six people signed in with others there who didn t sign in. It was difficult to find a location. There were a few guests at the Sunday committee meeting. They brainstormed about happy hours, five year review, invigorating membership, and using the Web page as an outreach mechanism. One guest wants to join committee. User Access to Services Cynthia Crosser and Bryna Coonin The committee has finished their paper on library and IT relationships, and it will be coming out Summer 2007 in RUSQ. They had a number of visitors at the meeting, with some interested in co chairing. There are some concerns about so many members going off committee, but the number of visitors and those interested in membership heartened the chairs about the committee s future. Old business: The group discussed how they went about conducting their review to prepare for program; archiving Web pages, tracking programs, and ensuring continuity as the committee moves forward. New business: The group generated a fair number of suggestions and will be distilling ideas at annual. They are not at the point where they have specific projects to propose.

2 Mary Mintz reminded committee chairs to capture names and contact information for visitors so that others can follow up about membership. Use the Committee Volunteer Form, and also pass names on to Mary. Newsletter Hui Hua Chua February 2 is the deadline for Messages to Mars submissions. April 20 is the deadline for preconference edition. MARS L currently has 517 members. Hui Hua will talk to Outreach about ways to recruit from those subscribers for membership. Mary Popp recommends waiting a bit to get membership list. The Publications Committee will begin looking for new Editor. Bryna Coonin thanked Hui Hua for the great work she s been doing. Products and Services Marina Salcedo The committee hosted the Hot Topics Discussion Forum on Saturday. There were 267 attendees, with 176 signing the attendance sheet. The committee is on a push to recruit new members. They discussed the section review and possible topics for next year s discussion forum. Members of the committee preferred the all committee meeting schedule to the previous model. Nominating Doris Ann Sweet Doris Ann praised her colleagues for their willingness to run for offices in MARS. Natalie McDonough and Rosemary Meszaros will be running for Vice Chair/Chair Elect. Ann Houston and Carolyn Strickland will be running for Member at Large. Mars Best Free Web Sites Charles Cobine The two new co chairs for the committee are Margaret Perkins and Jim Langan. They had several visitors at their meeting, with two interested in joining the committee. There are currently have nine members and the are considering if they want to have eleven twelve members. They will begin looking at new Web sites over the next two months. The Subject index to best sites has been completed: and they will send it to Publications and Executive Committee for final approval. Mary Mintz mentioned that Shannon has been getting a number of soliciting s asking to include urls in the list. She will be looking at ways to direct those contacts directly to current chair rather than to her, through the link to her at the bottom of the Web page. She is looking at ways to set this up better using the search functionality for MARS Best (Google Custom Search). Bill Drew s group set that up for historical index of MARS Best Free (1999 current). RUSA Update Editor Dan Mack had sent out a request for good free Web sites; Kathleen Kern has been in contact with him, and he is aware of the MARS Best site. There isn t any competition between the two. His effort will help publicity for the MARS site.

3 Planning Natalie McDonough At the All Committee Meeting, they talked about section review. Linda Friend is chairing the Task Force. Betty Whitacre sent out draft questions from RUSA. MARS will have additional questions. Committee chairs should start working on this review process in advance of annual meeting. The current version of Handbook is out as a word document and as a pdf. The Committee Volunteer Form has been updated and will be posted on the Web page. Paper copies were distributed at Saturday Executive Committee meeting. Committee chairs should start using this form along with the new committee reporting form. This form goes to Kathleen Kern, Laurie Prost, Natalie McDonough, and Mary Mintz. Their goal for next year is to conduct a SWOT analysis, and there will be a breakout session in Philadelphia to talk about MARS as a whole. They are looking at using one or more facilitators. They are discussing a program idea for Anaheim, Meet Mickey in MARS, as a more formal way to get information out about MARS and recruiting new members. They also looked at the problems in having lots of MARS documents housed on member, institution servers, and are discussing having those MARS documents moved over to ALA server. Discussion: Kathleen Kern commented that the Web page is used internally for committee business, but that we need to remember that it s also a great tool for informing others about MARS and recruiting new members. Kathleen encouraged committee chairs to review Web site; update old content, and make certain to post new content. Bryna Coonin recommended that committee think about archiving with future in mind (setting things up to support future ideas) and suggested that we include a review of Web page in section review questions. Kathleen commented that Shannon will be able to talk later at this meeting about archiving issues. Mary Mintz followed up on SWOT analysis report. Planning is interested in suggestions about facilitators of a potentially large group. If it is a large group discussion it might be possible to bring in an external person, but someone who is preferably interested in reference and MARS would probably still have to be an ALA member. If the discussion in broken into small groups, they hope to use Executive Committee and/or committee chairs to facilitate those small groups. Public Libraries Carolyn Strickland The committee talked about upcoming program for annual. Committee members were helpful in picking and contacting speakers: Margaret Mohundro, Marty O Neill, and Jean Evans. They will be getting publicity out to listservs and CogNotes. They talked to Shannon about updating content on Web page. They will co sponsor the program with ETS and RSS Cooperative Reference Committee. There were good comments about all committee meeting format. Publications Carolyn Larson The major focus of the meeting was ways to focus committee Web page content, and using them for outreach. Two committee members have drafted document on guidelines for a timetable to review Web page content. They will be adding additional

4 information on how to make corrections/changes if needed (who to contact, etc). For the section review they will face the problem of finding minutes and other documentation from previous years. New business: The Newsletter Editor and Web Coordinator terms will expire in They need to move now to put next individuals in place as interns for a year to ensure a smooth transition, and will put search committee process in place (per procedure in Handbook). Mary Popp asked if the guideline include information about what format(s) should be used to submit content to Shannon. Carolyn will follow up on this useful suggestion. Kathryn Millis asked if it was possible to simplify some of this content, for example centrally adding information about upcoming meeting schedule, rather than having each committee chair having to request this information be added. The group discussed some issues about if this information is centrally available, or if it really needs to be the responsibility of individual chairs because of variations in scheduling. Management of Electronic Reference Kathryn Millis There were three guests at their meeting. The committee continued work on the virtual poster sessions. The deadline for submissions is January 31. As of today they have received four submissions (proposals actual poster content will be due after the selection process). They talked about how to publicize those chosen once decisions have been made. Overall, the feeling of committee is that the virtual poster sessions will be worth doing as a ongoing project, at least for a few rounds. They considered how to report out on how to do this easier to help other groups that may want to do virtual sessions. Doris Ann Sweet suggested putting information in the MARS Handbook. Kathleen Kern suggested putting a brief report in the members section of RUSQ (How to do a virtual poster session). The committee is hoping to send content to Shannon in April to allow time to work out technical and other issues, such as copyright. They will be posted close to annual and announced at the Chairs Program. The posters will reside on the MARS site. Virtual Reference Jana Ronan Their discussions at this meeting was mostly to identify issues related to the virtual reference training program from Washington State, which reached the end of its threeyear grant funding. In an effort to continue the tutorial, the Washington State Library and RUSA signed a contract to provide open unrestricted access to tutorial. They are considering the issues of ongoing maintenance and updating to ensure that the quality continues at a high level as well as keeping the content up to date. There is a subcommittee of the Virtual Reference Committee that will be responsible for maintenance. The committee will be sponsoring a program at Annual: See it Hear it Touch it How Learning Styles Affect Virtual Reference Service (Monday 10:30 noon). The program will feature three speakers. Marie Radford (Rutgers), Eileen Abels (Drexel), and Lynn Westbrook (UT Austin), and will address all library types.

5 Index Subcommittee Jana Ronan The subcommittee has set up a wiki, and they hope for a product that they can start marketing at Annual. While it will provide contact information for libraries, they also see potential use by library users. Kathleen Kern suggested that it would be good to announce this project during the MARS Chairs program. The subcommittee discussed offering a program for 2008 Annual, with a working title, Talk to strangers online, focusing to issues of trust between user and librarian, but also the issue of trust between other librarians in consortial environment. The subcommittee received approval to proceed with the proposal. RUSA Prof Development Committee Linda Keiter An ALA committee (Library Support Staff Certification Task Force) reported to this group they are looking into certification for library support staff across all libraries. RUSA wanted input into this project, so they have a representative on the committee (Jean Alexander). IMLS grant proposal has been written but not yet submitted. The target audience is public and academic library staff a personal thing rather than an institutional thing individual validation of skills. A question was asked if this certification would include continuing education, but it was pointed out that librarians don t even have continuing education requirements. The committee is talking about criteria and competencies in various areas of librarianship. There was also an update on CE courses for spring. They also heard a report on WISE+ (consortium of library schools) offering reduced tuition to some courses for RUSA members. A lot is unclear at this point. They will be looking at topics that are of interested to RUSA members. Colleen Seale announced link to Element K project. Apparently ALA has a contact for members to take these courses as reduced rate. Linda will distribute the url for more information. Continuing Education and Publications Task Force Linda Keiter The task force has three subgroups; one working on survey draft survey will go out to Executive Committee for approval soon after MidWinter. They will also solicit feedback from a select group of MARS members. Another subgroup is looking at how MARS committees can contribute to continuing education efforts through programs and considering what incentives can we offer them to help make this possible. A reference technology group is looking at getting information about new reference technologies out to users quickly, in a format that people like. They are considering how we can compete with the many free continuing education tools out there. Hot Topics Mark Dehmlow On Saturday they co sponsored with Local Products and Services a panel discussion session on next generation interfaces. There were 267 attendees. There was a nice write up on the discussion in CogNotes. The committee does not yet have a topic for Annual. They are talking about follow up topics, such as the work at the University of Pennsylvania with Ajax, alternatives to the library catalog, using social networking as a way to allow interactions with the catalog, University of Arizona replacing their catalog

6 with Google, or the problem of relevance ranking, maybe bring in experts to talk about why it s so difficult. Program 2007 Jana Ronan Planning continues for the 2007 program, Harnessing the Hive (10:30 Noon Sunday). The have selected two other speakers, Matt Bejune and Meredith Farkas. They hope to do postings on RUSA blog closer to annuals, and may be enticing the speakers to participate. They were able to get additional funding to bring in Tim Spaulding. There was some discussion of the lack of awareness of funding to support bringing in external speakers. RUSA Conference Planning Coordinating Committee Jana Ronan Among the programs approved: Preconference: BRASS Business 101, Services for Older Adults, Genealogy. Programs: ASCLA/RUSA 101, a newby guide to these two groups (discussion group, but posting with programs to attract more attendance), 14 th annual reference research Forum, STARS ILL Data collection definition and analysis (Saturday). Virtual Reference Discussion Group Alex Hodges They had smaller attendance than in past years, but there were lots of new attendees and a lively discussion. Scheduling Coordinator Buff Hirko Buff thanked Mary Popp for her advice and counsel on these new duties. She is working on understanding the scheduling process and will be in contact with committee chairs about the schedule for Annual. RUSA Publications Carolyn Larson Daniel Mack, who is responsible for RUSA Updates is getting lots of good feedback on links to MARS Free Web sites. Diane Zabel reported that RUSQ has gotten funding to increase size from pages. She has added new columns and has a two year backlog of articles for publication. Responsibility for Web publications lies at the section and committee level rather than with RUSA Publications. They will be coming up with more specific guidelines for individual committees. They are interested in overseeing the RUSA blog more closely. Executive Committee members expressed concerns that MARS Local Systems is responsible for the blog (at the request of the RUSA Board) rather than RUSA Publications. Kathleen Kern clarified that the RUSA Board asked that a MARS committee take responsibility for establishing the blog. It s probably appropriate that RUSA Publications become involved, but MARS responsibility for the blog didn t happen

7 out of the blue. Kelley Lawton reported that Local Systems is talking about guidelines for the blog. The committee has a lot of concerns and isn t sure how to proceed. Kathleen suggested that Local Systems should be in touch with MARS Publications about moving this forward. Access to Information Kathleen Kern reported that our representative to this committee, Lesley Bell, wasn t able to attend the meeting. She was not aware of the appointment until after it had been made, and she graciously accepted the assignment. RUSA Membership Mary Popp Mary Popp is looking for a new person to serve as the MARS representative. Notify her if you have recommendations. RUSA Planning and Finance Mary Mintz Both Mary Popp and Mary Mintz attended the meeting. The committee agreed to allocate $2000 to the Cultural Communities Fund as matching funds for a million dollar NEH grant. There was a discussion of continuing education around interest from ALA in having more workshop type experiences at midwinter. This interest is coming from the vendors who want more attendance on the exhibit floor, that is, higher attendance at conference. Some expressed opposing view that we should look at further reducing Midwinter or even eliminate in recognition of decreasing support for travel money for attending two conferences per year. The budgets for the current year, and the prospective budget for next year look good. There were two action items related to the RUSA endowment: 1) The committee approved transfer of $50,000 into the endowment. 2) Sections that make money through preconferences don t see any of those funds coming back into the section. Some of net earnings from endowment fund will come back to RUSA for its use. The committee voted to use 50% of used to support conference programs and the rest to support other initiatives. This means that we will need guidelines and procedures for managing requests for these funds. Finance and Planning has proposed having support staff dues, priced at 50% of full individual dues. They discussed whether it should be tied to student rates. This is the same rate used for inactive, retired membership rates. Preconference 2007 Carole Pilkington The preconference, Reinvented Reference: Emerging Technologies for Reference Services will have a reference focus for outreach and benefits for users, rather than a focus we might see in a LITA program. Michael Stevens will be the keynote speaker. They are using a wiki to track working documents and conference calls to manage work. The group discussed the need for giving preconference planning chairs some best practice/guidelines for planning preconferences to account for steep learning curve in planning these events. They are also recommending that a clear topic/plan for a

8 preconference is determined in advance of requesting a preconference. The issues are really the timetable of proposing program 18 months in advance, and having continuity in experience in the procedures for preconference planning. It was suggested that a member of the previous planning committee be appointed to serve as consultant to the next planning committee. 11:30 RSS Executive Committee joined the MARS Executive Committee, for an informal meeting between the two groups Susan Beck, Chair Barb Mann, Member at Large John Hepner, Member at Large Lisa Horowitz, Vice Chair Susan Ware, Secretary Discussion focused on planning for the proposed 2008 preconference. It is tentatively on the docket, but it isn t yet officially on the books. We need to confirm its status with RUSA Conference Planning Coordinating Committee. Preconferences go to PCCC and then to the RUSA Board for approval at Midwinter (for Annual the following year). Preconferences also go to RUSA Budget as placeholder based on information gathered by RUSA staff. The group also considered the need for enthusiastic people for the planning committee. There were no identified RSS members interested in participating, although some of the RSS members from the current planning committee may be willing to continue as consultants. The group agreed that they would wait until the PCCC meeting on Monday afternoon, to find out if the preconference for 2008 is on the books, and report out that the two sections will evaluate whether to offer it or not, depending on available people, and participant interest in the topic. We will rely on Mary Mintz and Lisa Horowitz to recruit people to serve on a small planning committee of four people. The meeting adjourned at 12:40 Minutes submitted by Laura Probst, MARS Secretary