LAUC-B Fall Assembly Minutes
Thursday, November 13, 2003
8:30 10:00 a.m.
Morrison Library
Guests: Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition of Networked Information and Adjunct Professor, School of Information Management and Systems, U.C. Berkeley; from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: Reginald Carr (Head), Ronald Milne (Deputy), Lesley Forbes (Head of Area Studies & Oriental Collection)
I. Welcome Allan called the meeting to order at 8:30 a.m.
II. Announcements and Introductions (Allan Urbanic, LAUC-B Chair)
A. The 2003/2004 LAUC-B Executive Committee has the following members: Christina Tarr (Vice Chair), Myrtis Cochran (Past Chair), Jane Rosario (Secretary), Linda McLane (Treasurer), David de Lorenzo and Ilan Eyman (Library Representatives), and Lincoln Cushing and Paul Atwood (Affiliated Libraries Representatives).
B. The LAUC Statewide Fall Assembly will be held at UC Berkeley on December 5th in the Lipmann Room in Barrows Hall. Please register for the assembly on the LAUC Assembly Web site. Local arrangements are being handled by a committee whose members include Beth Dupuis (who created the excellent Assembly Web site), Margaret Phillips, Ruth Girill, Beth Sibley and Sue Koskinen.
C. The LAUC Statewide Spring Assembly will be held at UC Riverside on May 13th.
D. The Distinguished Librarians Award (Norma Kobzina, co-chair, DLA Committee)
The Distinguished Librarians Award ceremony will be held in the Morrison Room on November 17, 2003 from 4:00 6:00 p.m. The program will begin promptly at 5:00 p.m. with remarks by Chancellor Berdahl. The committee members are Phyllis Bischof (co-chair), Lillian Castillo-Speed, David Sullivan, and Dan Wilson (faculty representative). The committee is working on a policy and procedures document for the use of future committees.
E. New LAUC members were announced: Tanya Hollis, Archivist for Environmental Collections, The Bancroft Library; Marci Hoffman, International and Foreign Law Librarian, Law Library; and Jason Strauss, Technical Services and Research, Reference & Collections.
F. The Affiliated Libraries Fall Assembly will be held on November 21, 2003. Further details will be forthcoming.
G. ExComm accepted the offer from Randall Brandt to be the LAUC-B Webmaster.
III. Approval of May 2003 Spring Assembly minutes
A correction to Sarah McDaniels name was read and accepted (McDaniel replacing McDaniels). The minutes were approved and will be distributed by email and posted on the LAUC-B Web site.
IV. Reports
A. Chairs Report (Allan Urbanic)
1. Local Committees (highlights only, since minutes are distributed to the membership)
a) The Executive Committee has voted to increase the Research & Professional Development allocation to all LAUC-B to $700.00 from funds available in the LAUC-B budget. This is roughly $275.00 over the sum allocated in the MOU. There are currently 115 LAUC-B members who will have access to these funds.
b) LAUC-B submitted its budget to Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Paul Gray on October 1, 2003. It included a request for a LAUC-sponsored conference entitled, The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing: Strategies For and From the Academy, to be held either in the Fall of 2004 or Spring 2003. To date the EVCP has not informed us of his decision.
c) Chris Tarr in her role as Vice-Chair is an ex officio member of the Academic Senate Library Committee and attends its meetings. Her reports are made part of the ExComm minutes.
d) LAUC is continuing its practice of hosting lunches for those interviewing for librarian positions. Due to a hiring freeze, this process has slowed considerably, however, there are a few positions on soft money in the Bancroft Library that are currently being recruited. David de Lorenzo is coordinating this program.
e) The LAUC-B Mentoring program is continuing and is currently managed by Ilan Eyman. His recent call for mentors led to numerous volunteers. If there are any new librarians who are interested in participating in this program and have not as yet requested a mentor, please contact Ilan.
f) A call for applications for the Townsend Center Library Fellows program has been posted on the web. The deadline for applying to this worthwhile program is March 31, 2004. The current Townsend Center Library Fellow is Paul Hamburg, who would be happy to speak with interested applicants about his experience.
g) The ExComm is currently reviewing the LAUC-B Bylaws to correct two small conflicts with the Statewide Bylaws. Suggested wording will be sent to Paul Weiss, the LAUC Parliamentarian and eventually to the Committee on Committees, Rules, and Jurisdictions for approval prior to their inclusion on the Spring ballot.
2. Statewide Committees
a) Myrtis Cochran and Allan Urbanic attended the LAUC Statewide transition meeting on August 22, 2003. LAUC committee roster vacancies and other clerical issues were discussed. Linda Kennedy proposed that a goal of her term as President will be to improve communication between LAUC and the University Librarians and also to help facilitate communication between local LAUC chapters and the individual campus UL.
b) The LAUC Statewide ExComm has held two conference calls, the first on October 14 and the most recent on November 3. Unfortunately, Allan missed them both due to the flu and jury duty. Chris Tarr graciously filled in for Allan on both occasions and her report on the conference calls is provided in the LAUC-B minutes. Barbara Schader, the Statewide Secretary, will be mounting them on their Web pages.
c) LAUC-Bs representatives on Statewide Committees are Maryly Snow (Committee on Committees, Rules, and Jurisdictions), Theresa Salazar (Committee on Diversity), Elizabeth Edinger (Committee on Library Plans & Policies), Ron Heckart (Committee on Professional Governance), and Jim Church (Committee on Research & Professional Development). Terry Huwe is also Chair of that Committee due to his position of President Elect of LAUC Statewide.
V. Old Business
A letter drafted by Bette Anton and Sue Koskinen concerning the awarding of Emeritus status for librarians was read and accepted by UL Tom Leonard. He wished to wait until the AFT-MOU, which contained an article about this issue, was ratified. Since it was announced that the MOU was ratified this morning, the LAUC-B Chair and Vice-Chair will finalize this issue with Tom Leonard at their December meeting.
VI. New Business
The ExComm approved a request by the Nominations and Elections Committee to mount a historical LAUC-B committee roster on the web showing all LAUC-B members and their current and past committee assignments. Concern had been expressed that there might be a privacy issue involved, however, ExComm decided that since this has all been public information, there seemed to be no apparent problem with privacy. If any LAUC-B member can think of a reason not to mount such a list on the web, please communicate these reservations to their LAUC-B representatives.
VII. Guest Speaker: Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition of Networked Information, and Adjunct Professor, School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley. (All Library staff was invited to attend this portion of the meeting.)
Lynch began by noting that it was pleasant to be back in familiar surroundings and to see old colleagues again. (Prior to joining the Coalition of Networked Information, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last ten as Director of Library Automation.)
The points he wished to convey in his talk were what the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) (http://www.cni.org/) is and what it does, and how digital projects currently underway shed light on issues faced by libraries regarding the stewardship of institutional intellectual assets.
CNI was founded n 1990 by the Association of Research Libraries, CAUSE, and Educom (CAUSE and Educom have since merged to form EDUCAUSE). CNI is guided by a Steering Committee chaired by Richard West of the California State University System. Its mission is to create information technology and digital content for teaching and learning. At its founding, it was an unprecedented cross-disciplinary collaboration between librarians and information technology groups. CNI consists of 200 institutional members and is supported by member dues. Members include government agencies, public libraries, publishers, information technology and network service providers, scholarly and professional societies, and a number of major universities and government entities from Canada and Europe.
Currently, the focus is on the changing practices of scholarly communications and the growing tension between traditional publishing in established journals and the emergence of open access scholarly publishing in the digital world. Most faculty are still working traditionally, publishing in journals produced by Elsevier, Wiley, IEEE, etc. Increasingly though, scholars are beginning to negotiate the digital world, although such efforts are fragmented and disorganized. Faculty finds Web maintenance irksome and security in the emerging digital world is problematic; running a public service on an amateur basis is becoming more and more difficult. Faculty would like scholarly dissemination in the digital world to be administered for them, as it is in the traditional paper world.
One digital project enjoying some success is the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (http://www.theses.org/), which currently disseminates online theses from member universities institutions, including Virginia Tech and Cal Tech. The site receives approximately 1,000 hits a month; it is unknown who is reading the theses and why, but clearly, accessibility has improved.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Advisory Committee has produced an important report on cyberinfrastructure (http://www.cise.nsf.gov/news/cybr/cybr2.cfm) examining NSF computing strategy and training scientists and engineers to use digital resources for collaboration tools and data management. The report shows how science education is changing in its use of digital tools. These developments will affect scholarly practices not only in the sciences but also in the humanities.
Another project is Internet2 (http://www.internet2.edu/). Internet2 is documenting performance in the digital age, including performances on the network, such as distributed musical performances. Digital capture is getting less expensive; however, there are no strategies for putting the performance in context after capture. Lynch noted how theatrical performances on television are edited into a linear experience, when they are in reality multiple layers of information: several cameras filming at once, scripts, notes, multiple voice tracks, etc. Similarly, faculty is going into new genres of scholarly communications. Linear arguments and presentations are still best for some scholarly disciplines, but many others may go beyond this.
One of the main concerns voiced about digital resources is preservation: how can we view it in 100 years? Lynch is more concerned about data being preserved in the short-term: can the data be retrieved in three years? What about the faculty members old computer, that is never backed up and is in imminent danger of crashing? Deep time questions assume that we have short-term sustainability, which we do not.
Scholarly communication is also the documentation of scholarship itself. For learning materials, there is open, free courseware at MIT that can be used worldwide, without charge. Harvard and UC Berkeley also have free courseware online. It is increasingly clear that the line between scholarly communication and learning materials is fairly arbitrary.
Records of institutional life itself may represent an enormous treasure trove of materials; much needs to be made public, as institutional decision-making has a public dimension. How are institutions addressing this?
The concept of an institutional repository is a vision of a mature service that no one has yet achieved: a service that is a secure, well-run stewardship that combines scholarly publishing, documenting the intellectual life of the institution, and that provides a public record of institutional decision-making. An example of initial progress in this area is the creation of the Dspace Federation, developed by MIT and Hewlett Packard (http://www.dspace.org/) and in the California Digital Librarys work (http://www.cdlib.org/).
Many institutions are struggling with the notion of institutional repositories and building a case for them. Again, NSFs report on cyberinfrastructure can provide some guidance. Such repositories can create disciplinary centers that serve the worldwide scholarly community; institutional repositories can be complimentary. In terms of the issues of capacity and resources, institutions must define their vision, the path to the vision, and then reconcile the vision with available resources.
Institutional repositories must be established as a service, not as a system, as systems will change. A service must be backed by policies; it cannot be random. Institutional repositories must have a commitment behind them. Currently such repositories are fashionable to make, but disastrous when abdicated. They must be protected, just like the care of our traditional collections.
Questions
A question was raised about the differences between stewardship and ownership of information. What is most important that the library community do now? Lynch stressed that engaging with the faculty is most important determine how our scholarly practice is changing. Recognize that we must sort through impossible resource allocation decisions between the old and the new, between traditional publishing and digital distribution. Right now the lions share of resources is still allocated to traditional scholarly publishing; the new scholarship, because it does not fit the traditional mold, is deeply at risk.
Another question was asked: where is leadership coming from? Lynch replied that it came from different places: faculty, and libraries themselves are suggesting strategies and facilitating conversations. The stakeholders are diverse in the development of institutional repositories the university registrar, public relations, the university archives. Outreach efforts to gain support must be wide.
Someone asked how copyright and commerce laws might fit. Lynch replied that the short answer was that much of the information concerned was not encumbered by too many rights, and that this presents an opportunity to structure new materials in a way so as to side step traditional pitfalls. We must examine individual as opposed to institutional rights.
VIII. Meeting was adjourned at 10:00 a.m. promptly.