Present: Helena Calogeridis, Judy McTaggart, Sue Moskal, Jim Parrott, Richard Pinnell, Susan Routliffe (Chair), Mary Stanley, Linda Teather, Melanie Watkins, Rose Koebel (Recorder)
Guest: Michele Laing
Regrets: Doug Morton
The minutes of the meeting of April 23, 2002 were approved with changes.
Marina Wan, Paul St-Pierre, and Shabiran Rahman have all confirmed their interest in joining the task group. ISMC considered the expressions of interest received from library assistants, and agreed that Carole Steele will be sixth member. Susan will contact Carol to convey the Committee’s decision. The members of the Virtual Reference Implementation Task Group are: Doug Morton (Chair), Helena Calogeridis, Michele Laing, Paul St- Pierre, Carol Steele, and Marina Wan. Shabiran Rahman will join the group when it begins to consider assessment and feedback mechanisms.
Susan has drafted the message for all staff about the Virtual Reference Feasibility Study Report. Now that the membership of the new task group has been confirmed, Susan will send the message shortly after today’s meeting. In addition to Library staff, the message will go to Carolyn Dirks (St. Jerome’s University Library), Lois Clifford (Renison College Library), and Sam Steiner (Conrad Grebel College Library). Susan will also send a separate notification to contacts at WLU and the University of Guelph, and ask that it be forwarded to the appropriate staff at those institutions.
Susan has signed and sent the contract to LSSI. The contract refers to a systems administrator, which will most likely be Doug. A technical backup from UW Library Systems is also needed. Linda noted that it would be useful to get a description of what the technical backup is required to do, so that Systems can consider who that person should be. If Doug has a description, he should send it to Linda.
Mike Ridley (OCUL Chair) is coordinating the first meeting of an OCUL Collaborative Virtual Reference Task Group. UW has been invited to join the meeting, which will take place in May. Although the collaborative initiative will begin in September 2002, and may be too early for UW Library to take part in, Susan has advised Mike that she and Doug will attend the initial meeting.
Sue introduced this topic, which the Committee discussed to see if there were concerns associated with Ask Us/Tell Us. Members of ISMC (and others) found value in seeing what kinds of questions were being asked, and how they were being answered, particularly the ones relating to their discipline areas. It was noted that the questions and answers are kept and could be viewed in Pine. It is unclear whether questions are being referred to subject specialists when necessary. It was concluded that a meeting with those staff providing this service would be useful in discussing issues such as:
Students are letting us know that they’d like more desktop applications on our public workstations than we currently provide. The Committee identified what applications students are requesting for the public workstations, and considered what would be needed to make such applications available. Most requests involve Excel, Word, and e-mail access. Linda noted the last full review of public workstations was done in 1997, and that Systems is proposing that another review take place this summer. The proposal is not formed yet; there are authentication, security, and software upgrade issues to consider. ISMC suggested that a task group be formed to bring together input from ISR, Systems and User Services. Linda will draft preliminary terms of reference with Carl; ISMC will review them at the next meeting. Helena will report at ISR’s meeting this Friday that ISMC plans to form the workstation review task group.