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Library Managers

University of Waterloo
Library Managers, April 20, 2011
9:30 a.m., LIB 428

Present: Annie Bélanger, Betty Graf, Jennifer Haas, Mark Haslett (Chair), Michele Laing, Sharon Lamont, Alex McCulloch, Richard Pinnell, Susan Routliffe, Debbie Tytko, Annette Dandyk (Recorder)

Regrets: Eric Boyd, Susan Mavor, Carl Nagel, Mary Stanley

1. Chair’s Remarks
• Recognition and Commendation
Anniversary:
April 3, Maria Reinhard, Cataloguing, 5 years

Heartfelt thanks to Laurie Strome for coordinating the volunteers for the library display at the March 15 Open House for prospective students. This year’s volunteers:
Helena Calogeridis
Nancy Collins
Sarah Jones
Vicki Houley Siegel
Sandra Keys
Martha Lauzon
Leeanne Romane
Al Smith
Gail Sperling
Larisa Smyk
Yi-Mei Wang
Amy Zhao

It was noted at the April 18 Senate meeting that the Lieutenant Governor really enjoyed his visit to campus on 11th. Annie Bélanger, Mary Stanley, and Janet Wason did a lot of work in preparation for his visit to the Library.

• Updates
Pascal Calarco visited the Library on April 14 and 15, and met with the Access and Discovery committee and a number of individuals. He now has a uWaterloo email address and has been added to a number of email aliases. Mark will send an announcement to OCUL, CARL and TUG in the next few weeks. We are eagerly awaiting his arrival.

Pascal was invited by the President of Ex Libris to join a metadata advisory committee.

Work on the Voyager upgrade went well except for a few ongoing wrinkles.

2. Business Arising from March 16
#3 Bad Weather/ Emergency Leave:
It was agreed that a manager can allow the use of an emergency day when a staff member is unable to get to work due to inclement weather. Managers should make the determination based on the particular circumstances for the staff member at the time, guided by the example in the Weather/ Emergency Closing Guidelines: “Weather conditions can sometimes be intimidating even though UW does not officially ‘close’. Staff and faculty who live at some distance from the campus can be particularly affected.”

Managers were asked to inform Sharon when they do grant an emergency leave day due to weather, and should feel free to consult with Sharon if they are having difficulty making a decision. We’ll review the situation next year.

#5 Senate Presentation:
Mark’s Senate presentation was well received. He acknowledged the significant contributions and help of Nancy Collins and Mary Stanley. http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/haslett/presentations.html

3. Casual Staffing
Since the meeting in February, LibExec has engaged in a number of discussions with the goal of developing a plan for casual staffing that was within the terms of university policy, and still continues to offer the same level of service.

Mark outlined the new guidelines for casual staffing:
Three new permanent part-time positions have been approved within Circulation Services, and will be posted over the summer. Following the internal posting process, others, including current casual staff, would be eligible to apply for any of the positions not filled internally.

Effectively immediately, the pool of candidates for ongoing casual work (e.g. shelving) will be limited to students registered full-time at Waterloo.
• Hiring will continue to be on a term-by-term basis, with no guarantee of continued employment
• Because we will be hiring full time students, there is no need for a 15-term cap
• It is understood that registered students can be hired for one or, at most, two consecutive terms when they are not currently enrolled as an active student, e.g. over the summer vacation period
• Following graduation, a student who has already worked at the Library may continue to do so for up to two terms

The pool of candidates for casual and contract positions, as defined in Policy 54, will continue to include community workers:
• Casual positions: e.g. monitors during extended hours periods or a special project anticipated to take less than 3 months
• Contract positions: a project anticipated to take longer than 3 months

There will be a transition period as we introduce this new approach. In particular:
• Students who are currently working in the Library may continue working without limit as long as they are registered full-time students at Waterloo, and, as noted above, for up to two terms following graduation
• Current community workers can continue working up to the 15-term limit as documented on their most recent confirmation of casual employment letter.

The situation at Musagetes is a special case because of the difficulty hiring students there. This needs to be discussed further.

Mark will send a message to all library staff soon.
Action: Mark

4. Access Copyright Interrogatories
Mark provided a brief update on the status of Access Copyright license and tariff. The license ended on December 31, 2010. An interim tariff was introduced by the Copyright Board; University of Waterloo is now operating under that tariff. A final tariff will need to be certified by the Copyright Board, but this process could take at least until the end of 2013 and is subject to proceedings before the Copyright Board with Access Copyright and AUCC, the latter of which is representing University of Waterloo and other Canadian universities outside of Quebec. AUCC has recently received a long list of interrogatories from Access Copyright that needs to be responded to by early June by AUCC and each university. President Feridun Hamdullahpur has asked Mark to co-ordinate Waterloo’s response to the interrogatories. This will involve a large amount of work on the part of many units including faculty areas across campus.

5. Update re User Needs Assessment
Annie gave an update on work to date. The user data collection is now complete with over 7,100 responses, or 28% of the campus population. Marian Davies, Agnes Zientarska-Kayko, Paul Agotici (Davis UW Work Placement), and Mary Neghers (a volunteer from Mohawk College) provided invaluable assistance with the data collection.

Next steps:
Staff consultation: will occur in May. The meeting will revolve around the views that staff have of ‘what Library users want from our site”. More about what staff want to achieve on the site will be sought after the completion of user requirements.
Prize draw: the Survey Research Centre will handle the prize draw, expected to occur end of April/first week of May.
Data analysis: the Survey Research Centre will be handling the analysis for the survey. Other data analysis will be done internally.
Methodology, Protocols, and Documentation: methodology as well as reviewing the protocols used for test delivery will be documented. This will compose a “toolkit” for use by WebOps in future usability and user need testing.
Planning: WebOps, along with Marian and Agnes will be planning the next steps of doing the groundwork for preparing for a web redesign.

6. Around the Table Updates
Debbie
Acquisitions staff are still working towards year end; the cut-off for invoices is next Monday.

Alex
Alex has begun a conversation with IST, staff at the U of Guelph Library and Guelph’s Teaching Support Services about how to present Ares in Desire to Learn. Atlas is prepared to develop a building block to D2L, and we will send them a jointly-developed list of features we would like to see.

Scholars Portal had been doing some testing and inadvertently sent ILL overdue notices across Ontario. Wish Leonard is seeing if they can track down the recipients and advise them about the error.

Betty
Cataloguing staff are testing the new Voyager software. Some bugs in the production system haven’t been fixed yet.

Jennifer
Assuming that all goes well, a link will appear on the Library’s homepage today marking the beginning of the Primo Central trial. Primo Central is a search engine that provides results from the Library’s online and print collections in a single search. The formal launch is scheduled for May 2.

Annie
Annie’s last day at work will be May 27. Jane Forgay and Christine Jewell have agreed to take over some of her administrative duties while she’s on leave. Annie will return to work in December.

Next meeting: May 4


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

 

 


 


 


 


 


 




 




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September 17, 2011