University Libraries Directors Council meeting notes
DATE: April 3, 2007
Present: Judy Adams Volpe, Austin Booth, Gary Byrd, Gemma
DeVinney, John Edens, Mark Ludwig, Nancy Nuzzo, Stacy Person, Stephen Roberts,
Karen Senglaup, Margaret Wells
Excused: John Edens, James Milles, Sharon Schiffhauer
Recorder: Nancy Nuzzo
Announcements and Discussion Topics:
- Steve reported on changes to office space assignments for Director’s Office and Systems staff. These are being made to accommodate Nancy Kielar and her staff.
- Gary reported on conversations and meetings he has had with Nancy Cunningham, director of the library at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and others regarding a closer affiliation between the RPCI library and the UB libraries. The university administration supports further exploration of this idea. Nancy Cunningham will draft a document outlining a detailed plan with steps and milestones. This will be shared widely. Among the issues to explore: effect on license agreements, new demands on staff time, use of annex, outright cost and return.
- Austin reported on the need to implement education and advocacy efforts
surrounding the issue of scholarly communication. She and Karen attended a
worthwhile conference in North Carolina where they were given practical tools.
The ASL Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Team has offered to work on this
project. The consensus of the Directors Council was to give them the go-ahead
to develop a focused pilot project. General direction and vision will be provided
by the Directors Council.
The discussion turned to BioMed Central. SUNY-wide membership covered authors’ fees for the past two years; the program ended on April 1. At the same time, the pricing structure was changed and now author fees are significantly higher. Several UB faculty authors have papers “in the pipeline” and were expecting that their fees would be paid. The questions are whether it is appropriate for the Libraries to pay author fees, whether this is the best way to show support for open access, and if by paying fees for the next year to accommodate authors with papers in the pipeline, do we harm future efforts to share the cost with the VP for Research. The consensus of the DC was to renew membership for the coming year, and initiate a conversation with the VP for Research. - Steve brought up the ARL Leadership Training being held in Albany in June. DC members are invited to suggest potential attendees.
- Nancy reported on the ARL 75th anniversary commemorative volume Celebrating Research: Rare Collections From the Membership of the Association of Research Libraries. The Poetry Collection will be featured. Publication is scheduled for October 2007.
- Karen reported on discussions surrounding space requirements for the Learning Academies. Of the three options discussed the most suitable is the empty space on the Cybraries side of Lockwood.
- Mark reported that the recent ALEPH service pack upgrade went smoothly. He is working on setting up a report server to run batch jobs. It will run SAS programs on monthly extractions of bib data to generate reports. Presently, order data takes longer to extract. When that issue is addressed, reports can be run on order data as well.
- The NYU 21st Century Library report was briefly discussed.
- Other items briefly mentioned: Steve will be meeting with the SUNY Provost. A new SUNY funding model is needed. Austin reported that librarians from the state library are interested in working with SUNY librarians. The Provost has formed the Institutional Repository group; Steve will distribute a list of members. Margie noted that the Information Literacy/Fluency Task Force and the e-Reference Packages Task Force have both made recommendations.
- The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, April 10 at 9:00 a.m., and will feature a discussion of space planning issues with Beau Willis and Sean Sullivan.
Content provider: N. Nuzzo
Last update:
5 April, 2007
Comments: lib-staffweb@buffalo.edu