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Library Managers • Minutes

Library Managers, September 20, 2005
9:15 a.m., Special Collections

Present:  Susan Saunders Bellingham, Eric Boyd, Jennifer Haas, Mark Haslett (Chair), Michele Laing, Sharon Lamont, Richard Pinnell, Shabiran Rahman, Susan Routliffe, Linda Teather, Debbie Tytko, Melanie Watkins, Annette Dandyk (Recorder)

Regrets: Betty Graf, Mary Stanley

  1. Chair’s Remarks

July Anniversary

  • July 7 –  Charles Woods, Systems, 25 years

August Anniversaries

  • August 1 –  Michele Laing, Musagetes, 15 years
  • August 1 –  Melanie Watkins, Circulation Services, 15 years
  • August 1 –  Dan Sich, ISR Davis, 5 years
  • August 6 –  Roslyn Keller, Cataloguing, 35 years
  • August 18 –  Esther Pinnock, LAU, 30 years

September Anniversaries

  • September 1 – Betty Graf, Cataloguing, 35 years
  • September 1 – Wish Leonard, Circulation Services, 15 years
  • September 1 – Alex McCulloch, Circulation Services, 15 years
  • September 8 – Judy McTaggart, 35 years
  • September 15 – John Sitler, Circulation Services, Resource Sharing, 25 years
  • September 24 – Bev Hubbard, Circulation Services, 15 years

Shabiran, Jennifer and Jim Parrott were commended for their work on the presentation for new faculty, done in cooperation with Office of Research orientation activities.

Bruce Mitchell was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada earlier this summer.

Mark reported on the September 19 Senate meeting:

Senate Graduate Research Council update – there was a motion to start microfilming Masters theses again. The issue of mandatory electronic submissions will be discussed at future meetings.

  1. Business Arising from August 16

#4 IBM/UW Alumni Equipment Credits – the computer hardware has not been received yet, and an expected delivery date is not known.

Business Arising from June 21

The Library’s lengthy top level voice menu that greets callers who dial 888-4883 or extension 4883 will be eliminated in favour of a more user friendly approach of having staff answer the phone. Calls will go directly to the Porter Circulation Desk which is staffed during Circulation Desk hours. If the line is busy or if people call after hours, callers will hear a greeting stating the hours when the phone is staffed, and building hours. It is hoped these changes can be implemented on a trial basis effective October 1. Statistics will be taken and reviewed.

  1. Departmental Update

Susan B gave a brief history and summary of activities in the Doris Lewis Rare Book room. The room was officially opened in September 1976 and experienced much growth and development during 1980s, aided by many SSHRC grants. Special Collections includes over 60,000 items, with more than 50,000 housed in Porter and the remaining located in Musagetes. The department’s mandate is to support teaching, learning and research of the UW community. All cataloguing is done in-house, and all items are available in TRELLIS. The collections are used by a wide variety of researchers, including groups of students brought in by some faculty. Last year over 1,000 researchers visited the Rare Book Room.

Susan highlighted some of the collections, described how materials were collected and organized, and the reasons why an item might be deemed special and chosen for the collection (rare, old, fragile, size, value, importance of the former owner).  Susan went on to describe trends and directions, and also talked about the development and business aspect of Special Collections. The Cultural Properties Act allows donors to receive generous tax receipts, and Special Collections has benefited from donations through that program. Many aspects of the work are becoming increasingly legalistic and complex, e.g. contact with donors and memorandum of agreements, accountability to the donors and stewardship, tax implications, and copyright. Digitization of collections is also becoming an important focus.

  1. Report of Survey of Information and Accessibility Needs of Students with Disabilities

The report was distributed for information. Managers will review it and discuss the recommendations at the October 18 Library Managers meeting.

  1. Sick Days

Recent changes to the Personal Health Information Protection Act, under Ontario Health Privacy legislation (November 2004) mean that Library Office will no longer file the pink section of the ‘Sick Leave Certificate” or photocopies of doctors’ notes in departmental personnel files. Human Resources is planning to modify the existing form. Staff will be encouraged to send their medical forms directly to Human Resources. Supervisors receiving forms from staff should forward them to HR, without first making a copy.

There was discussion about the Library’s practice of requiring staff to submit a doctor’s note for every absence due to illness when a staff member uses 20 or more sick days in a 12 month period. Mark will inquire about practices in the other areas that report to Bruce Mitchell. Sharon will contact Linda Brogden and Nellie Gomes and ask them to meet with the Managers to review guidelines regarding sick days.

Action: Sharon

  1. LibQUAL Survey

LibQUAL is ARL’s web based survey to measure library service quality. CARL directors have been asked to consider participating as a consortium in the 2007 survey. The survey would be run individually at each institution, and each institution would receive its own results as well as aggregate results for all participants. UW participated in a pilot project survey in 2001.

During discussion about participating in 2007 the following concerns and points were raised:

  • Concern about the number of questions: while the ones intended to measure service quality gaps have been reduced from 56 in 2001 to 30 in 2005, since each question requires the respondent to think about 3 different things (i.e. minimum, desired and perceived service levels) there are in effect 90 such questions
  • Concern about the difference between the amount of time that the survey suggests will be required (10 minutes in 2005) and actual experience at libraries that have run the survey recently
  • Focus on questions related to staff (close to 1/3 of the questions relate to staff). Since we frequently hear from users who are very happy with staff friendliness, courtesy, responsiveness, etc., this is not an area that we feel needs to be probed.
  • We received negative feedback in 2001 about the gap measurement approach, especially from faculty with expertise in developing and administering surveys
  • We received negative feedback from faculty about the way in which the survey data was presented (from 2001)
  • Finally, and perhaps most importantly, LibQUAL is one tool among many and we felt that a more focused and targeted approach would be more appropriate in our context

It was agreed that UW would not participate in the 2007 survey. Mark will inform Katherine McColgan at CARL.

Action: Mark

  1. 50th Anniversary Planning

Deferred.

  1. Staffing and Senate Long Range Planning

Managers were asked to review the Library’s strategic directions 2002-2005 http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/News/UWLibDocs
/strategictable.html document and consider immediate, and mid to long term staffing needs within their own units and in a library wide context. Staffing will be the focus of discussions at the next Managers meeting.

Next meeting: October 5, Porter 428

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September 19, 2007