RISG agenda, Wed., 11/19/08: 10-11:45; Rotch Conference Room
Present: Helman, Bartley, Cohn, Locknar, Green, McCann (minutes), Sweeney, Szarko, Horowitz
Guest: Michael Noga
Charm school - Michael Noga came to talk to us about Charm school. He gave a historical perspective, and told us how he and a group of other librarians got involved and made a library course. It started as a skit, but now it's a quiz. He sets up three laptops, and gives a group of students a few questions and asks them to use whatever resources they can to find the answer. He gives prizes, mostly candy and movie tickets for really great searching skills. He shared some experiences and explained how it fits into the larger charm school idea. He is going to be putting out a call to get people to help him work on it.
He'll come back around February to give us feedback on how it went (strengths/opportunities).
*Announcements: *
- Cite-help group met yesterday to figure out a schedule for IAP activities. Doing EndNote, RefWorks, and comparison between bibliographic software. (Peter)
- Who gets to decide which software (e.g. citation software) we support and link to. (Lisa)
It's not a formal process. As the name of the software comes up multiple times, the cite-help group looks into it more.
- A group of people interested in file/data management met yesterday to discuss a strategy for including "information management" in IAP sessions. Several classes were identified as opportunities for bringing best practices for file management into the session. They will be advertised together as an "information management" track. Ongoing - want to continue thinking about opportunities for identifying a need and whether there is available software to assist with management. Cautious about launching a new service, but want to keep up with what is coming in, what we are hearing as issues for students and researchers related to managing information.
A student from HST offered to teach a course about image and file management and someone will be co-teaching with him. Volunteers welcome.
- Several Library IAP classes have been submitted and are in planning stages across library systems.
- Peter submitted an idea to have "re-orientation" for those who missed the original. A scaled back version of orientation, tours, explanation of libraries' services, etc. The idea seemed to really catch on and we talked about it for a while. Mark is going to put out a call to RISG, CFG, and the Orientation committee to see who would be interested.
- Graduate student office (dean of graduate school) offers a grant for something that supports graduate student life. If we have an idea, when they post the grant, it would be a good idea. Usually limited amount of time to respond, so this is something good to think about on an ongoing basis so we're ready when they announce it.
- Reserve the DIRC for IAP soon! The schedule is filling up! It has been updated.
- Don't forget to use the perception of relevance survey at IAP sessions!
- A group in ASG is working on getting a circ-queue in RT. Harvard online forms should be ready in January. Patron will fill out Kerberos ID and it will be checked against a system, automatically generates a PDF sent to the user. If the Kerberos ID seems to be invalid, it will be shifted to a circ queue to address manually.
- PSLG update - Assessment benchmarks updated. Make assessment more integrated into our projects, rather than a cyclical thing. When people are proposing projects, an assessment plan will be part of this, and the plan will be required to address the six benchmarks, (how the proposal is striving towards these benchmarks).
E-services communication policy group wrote a policy for people writing to us through a web form includes turnaround time, customer service, and ways to improve interface that users see.
- Mark and Lisa are preparing for Immersion, interviewing stakeholders (Greg Harris -institutional surveys, someone from teaching and learning lab, education, innovation and assessment director, about their roles and assessment? Giving long term ideas for inserting ourselves in to classes
. (Please fill in details, I missed a little.)
- ISG update - Core competencies group is ramping up.
We updated the Goals and Future agenda items table, located here:
Reference Vision Project Report
We spent some time going over the current draft of the Reference Visions Project report. It was an engaging conversation, with plenty of suggestions and discussions, that both clarified text on the report, and in our minds.
I don't know if we need to include all this detail in the minutes.
Question about calling the reference vision a public services vision. It's larger than reference, but does not include all of public services.
Part of the flexibility, entrepreneurial, opportunist element in exploring new tools that we provide to users might be missing. Examples exist of unpredictability of environment. The new vision does not really mention the adaptability of the libraries, which is one of our strengths. We innovate and figure out ways to provide service in novel ways. There is an unpredictability about what users are going to need, but we are nimble enough to handle it.
Benchmarks and new vision - Are we going to propose specific action items? Do we want to give ourselves some goals for what we want to achieve? Possibly wait until we get the results from the survey to set goals? It might be a while before we see those data. We'll submit this report, and the group below will work on a separate vision and goals documents.
Does the photo diary have a role in this report? Also a user needs assessment (data in DSpace, libraries community) that was done for web services, and there may be valuable data to include in this. A subgroup will talk about statistics and developing goals from the stats (Lisa, Angie, Bill, Maggie), no sooner than January.