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Thursday, November 21, 2002
10:00 - 11:45am
Porter Meeting Room 224A

Present: Jane Britton, Anne Fullerton, Shabiran Rahman, Jamie Russell, Alexandra Stathopoulos (recorder)
Regrets: Wish Leonard, Heather Schaaf
Guest Speaker: Doug Morton

1. Special Report from Doug Morton

Doug gave the CNAC a report on the pre-conference workshop on “Preparing for, Administering and Using Statistics and Measures for Digital Reference Evaluation: Practical Approaches” at the Virtual Reference Desk Conference 2002 (Chicago IL).

Topics covered at the pre-conference included:

• “Google Answers”
  For a fee, members of the public may ask a question. Reference providers then bid to answer the question. This raises the issue of response assessment, which can be very labour intensive.
• Outcomes Assessment
  Outcomes assessment asks the question: “what is our contribution to the goals and objectives of both the university and the library?”
• Evaluation Measures
  CNAC members were provided with a list of over 35 different measures of evaluation. Ideally, a few of them would be chosen and implemented by asking the users (focus groups, surveys, VR pop-ups etc.) for feedback.
  A series of Powerpoint slides designed by Charles McClure on the topic of “Organizing Your Library for Digital Reference Assessment” were also distributed to CNAC members.
  Doug’s suggestion for UW library VR assessment was that greater efforts be put to advertising VR, using strategically placed buttons on UW library web pages prone to user questions – such as the top page, Journal Indexes, Proxy page and the Discipline pages. The first step in this endeavour will be to have a proper button designed and approved by the Library.

2. Approval of Minutes of November 7, 2002

The minutes were approved with changes.

3. Business Arising

a) The Annotated Agenda
In the New Year, the group will begin to welcome feedback/input on an annotated agenda to be prepared and sent to Library staff several days prior to each bi-weekly meeting. As an alternative to this initiative, the group may choose to send a single list of the topics they plan to address each term to Library staff to invite feedback/suggestions.

b) CNAC Webpages
Alexandra will be making several changes to the CNAC webspace over her term as volunteer recorder. As a start, the group will provide her with functional headings for the CNAC’s Select List of Suggested Readings on Assessment page. In addition, a selection of webpages to do with assessment will have links from the CNAC webspace shortly.

c) Asklib Questions
CNAC will not be addressing the Asklib questions anytime in the near future. Once an appropriate course of action is determined, the committee may become involved. Related to question/response assessment, Chris Gray has shown that it is possible to parse Asklib responses into Excel. Ethical issues were raised regarding the use of any gathered data.

d) Recommended Needs Assessment Skills
Doug Morton’s lecture was a learning tool for CNAC members.

e) Web Template
By the next meeting, Anne will have sent verbiage to Alexandra to add to the project template form. Alexandra will submit the form to Marina Wan for CGI scripting following the approval of the form at the 28 Nov 2002 meeting.

4. Agenda for Next Meeting

· Finalize template
· Okay the message to be sent to staff

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