Present: N. Brailo, A. Brandt, A. Concepcion, L Demsetz, C. Lee (co-chair), C. Tarr (recorder), B. Whitson
Guest: D. Sommer
Announcements:
1. The summary of the R. Minudri early-bird is finished, and is posted on our website, as is P. Bischof's report on the PSTF to the LAUC-B fall assembly.
2. C. Lee reported that our letter has been delivered to Jerry Lowell, and that she has contacted Brenda Krell about scheduling an appointment with him.
3. C. Lee reported that SIMS has decided to defer seeking ALA accreditation.
Agenda
1. Speakers for Spring events: After much discussion, we decided that we liked the idea of having two, possibly three, spring events requiring speakers. One will be a discussion among a panel of California academic reference librarians of how they have been coping with the lack of money/explosion of information and technology situation that they have experienced in the past few years, as have we. The second and possibly third event will involve one or two speakers talking about a "cool new thing." Names bandied about included Chris Ferguson from USC, Dave Carter from the Internet Public Library and Mike Eisenberg, formerly of AskERIC. For the first panel, we discussed scheduling the event from 10-11:30, followed by an informal no-host lunch at the Faculty club. This would allow participants to fly in and out from around the state, and give UCB librarians time to continue any conversations sparked by the panel discussion. P. Bischof and N. Brailo will organize.
D. Sommer suggested that all these events might serve as lead-ins to a possible future LAUC-B conference on public service.
2. D. Sommer discussed her experiences at the RUSA conference. Her section was entitled "Process Improvements for Customer Centered User Services," and dealt with tools and techniques for a systems analysis of specific functions, in this case customer service at an ILL desk. She felt it might eventually prove useful, should the PSTF facilitate a staff discussion and prioritizing of public service issues, as a way of looking at public service and fixing our processes. She felt it was most helpful because it engages staff.
D. Sommer will do a brief summary for the section she attended, which we will post to the PSTF web site along with the summaries by N. Brailo, P.Maughan and P. Janes.
3. Calendar: Our next two meetings will be Jan. 14 and 28, both Thursdays, from 1:00-3:00. A meeting schedule for 1999 was discussed.
4. Discussion of Statement from Katherine Mitchell: We discussed the upcoming meeting of C. Lee and P. Bischof with Jerry Lowell, in conjunction with a letter from K. Mitchell. We strategized about various outcomes. We agreed that the hoped-for outcomes from the planned brain-storming sessions were 1) an understanding of what we are currently doing right in PS, 2) an understanding of what we could be doing better, 3) ideas from staff about any new things we could be doing and 4) a sense of staff involvement, shared vision and purpose. We agreed that if some way of accomplishing these goals other than a staff brainstorming session is proposed, we would certainly go along with that, and would be willing to help in any way we could.
5. We compiled a list of all the one-time proposals submitted by PSTF members. These included: cleaning of computer keyboards in Doe-Moffitt; moving Information Center desk to a more visible location; tattle-taping whatever part of the Information Center collection is not already tattle-taped; reducing noise created by chairs in Main Stacks; rovers and phones in the Main Stacks to assist patrons; digitizing tables of contents of journals in storage.
6. L. Demsetz reported on her Faculty Library-Use Survey. She reported that it duplicates P. Maughan's research as discussed at our last meeting. It feels richer because it is more anecdotal, but is also less statistically valid. She questioned whether is was really useful for public service study, and thought that what it actually revealed was that different disciplines use the library differently. She thought it might be useful for resource allocation, but to be used for that would need to be done in a more statistically neutral way. We agreed that it had been very interesting, however, perhaps in the same way our user-panel was interesting, and that it had stimulated discussion. PSTF will ask L. Bell to mention the survey to the subcommittee of LPG which is looking at analytical data collection.
7. We looked at the Review of combined PSTF brainstorming, previous report priorities, user panel findings put together by C. Lee. We agreed that it might be a useful document for Jerry Lowell, in that it gives a map of what people are concerned about. C. Lee will attempt to prioritize items within each category in order to make it more readable. She will send it out, and the discussion will continue over e-mail.