AJCU Library Deans' Conference
Fairfield University
May 1 - 3, 2005


Present: Joan Overfield, James Estrada, Christine Conroy, Judy Trump, Mark Jacobs, Nick Burckel, Tyrone Cannon, Michael LaCroix, Eileen Bell-Garrison, Karla Petersen, Liz Salzer, John McGinty, Margaret Auer, Charles Kratz, John Popko, JoAnne Young, Jeanne Langdon, Barbara Boehnke, Richard Amelung, Jim Simonis, Ivan Gaetz, Mary Lee Sweat, Jim McCabe, Jim Hogan, Marcy Milota and Evelyn Minick. Nicholas Burckel presided over the meeting.

Approval of the Agenda: The agenda was approved with the addition of the NSSE Task Force and Digital Archives.

Approval of the Minutes of the 2004 Conference (final version 6/22/04) Minutes of the 2004 AJCU Library Deans meeting were approved by acclamation.

2006 Meeting Site and Dates: Jim Simonis will present Sunday evening, April 30th, and running through noon on Wednesday, May 3rd at Le Moyne to the IT group to confirm as 2006 meeting site and dates. The 2006 meeting is a joint Library/IT conference.

Confirmation of 2007 Meeting Site: As we will have two consecutive meetings on the east coast, we are looking for a west coast volunteer for the 2007 meeting. As all eyes focused on Michael LaCroix, he graciously volunteered Creighton University in beautiful Omaha, Nebraska. In his planning and date selection, we asked Michael to avoid Orthodox Easter and Mothers Day. He will send out some possible dates as soon as possible.
ACTION: Michael will send out possible dates by July 1, 2005.

Program Committee for the 2006 Conference: Nick asked for volunteers for the 2006 Program Committee. After a painful silence, Tyrone volunteered to serve, but he preferred not to serve as Chair. Jim Hogan volunteered to serve on the committee as well. Because of his experience in both Library and IT camps, we unanimously volunteered Joel Cohen at Canisius College to serve as Program Chair. We discussed the importance of a truly collaborative approach to program planning at our joint conferences. It was suggested that attendance at the EDUCAUSE Conference in October would be helpful for the Librarians on the Program Committee. The IT Program Committee often meets at the EDUCAUSE to begin planning the spring conference. It was also suggested that representatives from the Library and IT Department of the same institution might work on developing programs together. Karla offered to speak with Jack Corliss at Loyola Chicago about having more truly joint sessions at which we can discuss issues of mutual concern to the libraries and IT. Examples are institutional repositories/archiving information (including electronic information), security and authentication, overlapping systems, technology and space design, ACT information and technology competency test, copyright, what do librarians and IT do well, disaster planning, gaming, open source, e-portfolios. We also suggested that a provocative speaker to kick things off would be good.
ACTION: Joan will contact Joel right after the conference. Tyrone will consider chairing the committee should Joel decline. Karla will contact Jack Corliss.

Virtual Reference: Judy Trump discussed the proposal with pricing and hours of coverage with four additional institutions. She confirmed that Tutor.com will cover 24/7 for the two summer months, June 15 - August 15. The pricing and time commitments with 4 or 5 new members could lower the hours of coverage to 3, 6 & 8, and reduce the costs to $2,200, $3,600 and $5,100. New sites would have a training cost of $1,000 - $1,250. The criteria used to determine cost is the FTE students. Three hours of online training for new system will be included in the contract. The administrator of the site needs an additional two hours of training, but much of this is practice. Institutions will be billed through Tutor.com.

We expressed significant concern about the amount of volunteer work required to coordinate this project. Nick suggested that we leave the fees where they are and use the extra funding to pay for staffing. It was also suggested that a part time person be hired to take over the training, scheduling and surveying. Judy's counterpart felt it could be done by a quarter time person. We agreed to leave it as is until the end of the second year of participation and then decide about the need for staffing.

Librarians were content with the statistics provided and thought once a semester would be fine.
Liz asked if the groupings were set in stone, and Judy responded that they were taken from Peterson's Guide before we started. Many have changed since, so we can always go back and look at that again.

The group expressed some disappointment and concern that the Tutor.com representatives had little information about the new release and seemed vague regarding the January 2006 release date. Judy reported that she attended an actual demonstration of the Beta version and was impressed with the functionality. Tutor.com has missed a number of deadlines and we may need to start looking at alternatives. We were unanimous in our agreement that Tutor.com be"contractually penalized if updates are not available when promised." We fully support Judy and her committee in her management of the contract. .
ACTION:Judy will send out contract language with a penalty clause should they not provide their new release by January, 2006.

We agreed that the Virtual Reference Coordinators need to meet as a group. John McGinty volunteered Joann on his staff to put together a conference for each campus coordinator and to consider Georgetown as a location.

We talked about a variety of library situations, Libraries who have money and no staff, libraries who want to pay but not involve staff this year. Artemis offered to help provide funds for Libraries if money was the only reason for non-participation. She felt it was important for every institution to participate. Libraries must let Judy know by May 15th. As of our meeting, Gonzaga, Regis, Rockhurst and Boston College were joining; Saint Joseph's would pay their fee for this year, but not have librarians assist in the Chat hours. In lieu of this participation, St. Joseph's would investigate IM and provide a report to the AJCU Deans.
ACTION: Deadline to Judy Trump by May 15th for final decision.

History E-Books: Nick listed the libraries that already subscribe to History E-Books, and then identified the institutions who have expressed interest in a consortial purchase. Those interested included: Canisius, Holy Cross, Creighton, Fairfield, Gonzaga, Loyola Maryland., Loyola Chicago, Loyola New Orleans, Rockhurst, St. Louis, St. Joseph's, Seattle, Detroit Mercy and Scranton. Nick will contact the vendor and get consortial pricing.
ACTION: Nick will have information for us by the end of May, 2005

WorldCAT Collection Analysis Software: In anticipation of our meeting, Charles asked OCLC for a quote for the WorldCAT Collection Analysis Software. The price was $42,000 for all twenty-eight institutions. If we purchase the software as a consortium, we have access to the data of all Jesuit Libraries. In addition, each Library may choose three additional Universities for comparison.
ACTION: Charles will send out the information by the end of May, 2005.

University Courseware and e-Reserves: Several people missed the tally sheet with courseware and e-reserve products. Regis has Web-CT, John Carroll has Blackboard & eRes, Scranton has Blackboard and eRes, Canisius has Blackboard and uses Triple I for reserves, but hopes to put all reserves into Blackboard. Loyola Chicago does e-reserves through Blackboard.

Introducing New Members. Tyrone suggested a procedure for introducing new members to our group. At ARL meetings, each new ARL director is introduced by a colleague who serves as a mentor. The mentor prepares the new director for the conference with information on the history, ongoing projects, and operating procedures of the group. As we will have at least three new directors at our 2006 meetings, we agreed to try this.
ACTION: Joan will appoint/select mentors for our new directors before our next conference.

LibQUAL –Jim Simonis is coordinating our LibQUAL survey. Jim, Jim Hogan, and Carla agreed to work on specific additional questions, and to coordinate our payment schedules. They will put a list of questions together and ask the participating libraries to vote on their favorites, and then the top five will be used.
ACTION: Jim will send a list of draft questions out to the Library by June 15, 2005. Jim will let us know if we can add our own questions. In the meantime, each campus should identify the person on our campus who will handle the LibQUAL survey.
ACTION: Send Jim Simonis the name of your coordinator by May 15. The dates are on the ARL web site at http://www.libqual.org/documents/admin/libqualupdate2.4_1.0.pdf - June 27 and 28.

Conference Web Site – Charles made notes at our discussion of the conference web site.
ACTION: He will make the agreed upon changes and send those out to everyone for input by the end of May. Charles will also send out the Affinity Survey categories. If they receive a positive response, Joann Young has volunteered to collect the data and put it up on the web site. Once our page is set up, Charles will ask us for annual reports, newsletters, institutional reports, etc.
ACTION: Our 'go live' date was set for August 1st. After discussion, we determined that part of the site should be password protected. Items such as directory information, Jesuit library passport, and promotional items can be open to all. We will add the web site review and content as an agenda item for the 2006 meeting.

Digitization of Campus Newspapers: Michael, Mark, Charles and representatives from Detroit Mercy and St. Joseph's developed a survey on campus newspapers. Each Library should calculate the number of pages we want digitized, then Michael will get some prices from Olive. If you already have film, you need to know the number of frames. Move ahead, gather info, and get prices, hosting possibilities. Committee agreed to provide a list of the things we need to know to make a decision. For example we need to know what the usage has been, and who uses it, what is already on line, if our student newspaper comes out electronically, etc. At this point it is only a buying club, but it could evolve into a project to be funded as a national resource.
ACTION: Michael will develop the list of questions we need answered and send to each library by June 30.

Last Copy of Religious Studies Journals: After the limited response from Librarians responsible for Theology collections, we wanted to move this along by proposing some action. However, Mark ran the idea past his AUL for Collections at Georgetown and we discovered that it was much more complicated than we imagined. To define the task, Mark volunteered Georgetown's AUL for Collections, and Christine Conroy from Boston College and Richard Amelung from St. Louis also volunteered. The group will develop some definitions and propose a project that would preserve our religious collections, but also be helpful and reasonable.
ACTION: Richard volunteered to provide a coordinator of Religious Studies Journals Task Force from St. Louis University. They will begin a discussion and provide us with a recommendation by March 30, 2006.

ContentDM: This discussion grew out of last year's demonstration of the ContentDM software product. Joel followed up and surveyed our Libraries for interest, but his response was disappointing. Joel will resend information so please respond if you are interested. Tell Joel what your Library is using for photographs and for digitizing archives. We left this discussion uncertain if the purpose was to resolve metadata issues, or to organize a group purchase of the software.

JesuitNET: In our discussion with Dick Vigilante, we developed a clear and effective solution-- cross registration for all Jesuit-Net courses. The Jesuit Net Working Group will get together at ALA. The group includes, Charles, Joann, Ivan and Eileen. We asked them to develop a statement clearly identifying cross registration as our preferred solution, as well as a template of services that each member Library will be responsible for. We will have our document ready when the Chief Academic Officers meet in mid October. Eileen agreed to provide and to keep up-to-date the list of librarian contacts for the online courses and the URL for the AJCU library catalogs.
ACTION: Eileen will send out a draft to AJCU Libraries in July, 2006 and prepare a final document by August 1st.

NSSE: The National Survey of Student Engagement is administered to freshmen and seniors at most Jesuit institutions. There are several questions in the instrument that can be used to assess the effectiveness of information literacy programs. It would also be a great opportunity to include additional library questions. Evelyn volunteered to work with a small group to explore questions in the NSSE survey that could be used for assessment and to find out if additional questions can be added. The group includes Charles from Scranton, John from Loyola Maryland, and Karen Bordenaro from Canisius who wrote an article on the topic.
ACTION: Evelyn will determine the cycle for inclusion of questions by June. She will also convene the group and provide a report at the next conference.

Jesuit Archives Project: Liz drafted and distributed a statement to address three concerns:

The statement was unanimously approved. The statement was sent to members in a separate mailing.
Nick volunteered Marquette to host the meeting. Kathy Young at Loyola Chicago, Mark Savolis from Holy Cross and Lynn Conway at Georgetown were volunteered to work with Matt Blessing. Most of us have 'lone arrangers', a single person working in Archives. This may be their only opportunity to get together, and to bring everyone up to a minimum level of understanding. Marquette will cover the costs and travel of a consultant. Each Library will cover the expenses of their Archivist. The meeting is expected to take place this summer.
ACTION: Matt Blessing should proceed with planning for a Jesuit Archive Meeting.

New Business

Jesuit Library Passport: Mary Lee expressed a need for additional promotional materials for Jesuit Library Passport. Evelyn has extras and will arrange to send some to New Orleans. If you need additional materials, let the group know and we can share. We decided that we needed annual statistics to reflect the academic year, September to August.
ACTION: John and Mark developed a form to gather annual statistics. They will send it out to the Libraries this summer and report.

Steering Committee: Our new Steering Committee will be chaired by Joan Overfield from Fairfield, and includes Jim Simonis from Le Moyne and Michael LaCroix from Creighton. Nick expressed our sincere appreciation to the 2005 Program Committee, Jim McCabe (chair), Kratz, Langdon, and Overfield (ex officio). Thanks also to James Estrada and Joan Overfield for excellent local arrangements.

Attendance at Future Library Deans' Conference: John McGinty raised the issue of succession and the importance of finding ways to model behavior and offer growth opportunities for our younger department chairs. AJCU Archivists and Theology Librarians have already set up listservs. We discussed the value of inviting Associate Directors, Virtual Reference Coordinators, Resource Managers, Archivist, etc. to our annual conferences. John noted that the IT Directors often bring 3 or 4 staff members to their conference. If a particular group met with us, they could meet alone for half or three quarters of the time. The physical, institutional and logistical impact for the host institution is a real concern. After much discussion, we agreed that there is considerable value in meeting alone. However, we also recognize the benefit of having other staff members attend based on a targeted issue that we want to move forward. In the interests of getting things accomplished, it may be more effective to have a coordinating committee meet with the directors, rather than an individual from each library, similar to the Virtual Reference model. We would need to identify the topic by October to make this happen. We should also express our support for staff specialists to organize their own conferences.

Virtual Reference – if Tutor.Com doesn't Deliver: We discussed what our options would be should Tutor.com not follow through with their promised enhancements. We again reiterated that we want a contractual penalty if deadlines are not met.

Should this happen, we would need to have an interest group established by October 1st to investigate alternatives. The individuals who were involved in the original investigation volunteered to step forward again if needed. They include Charles Kratz (Scranton) Pat Berge (Marquette) Mark Jacobs and Judy Trump (Georgetown) Locke Morrisey (San Francisco) and Helene Lafrance (Santa Clara).

Saint Joseph's came prepared to withdraw from the program. Short staffing, marginal use and frustrations with the software have all been issues. Other institutions volunteered to cover Saint Joseph's hours. In the interests of the cooperative, SJU is willing to continue to pay for their coverage and to continue in the program. SJU would like to try offering virtual reference with Instant Messenger. Seattle University is also interested in exploring this format.
ACTION: SJU and Seattle Librarians will work together on an IM pilot and report our findings to the Conference next May.

The group expressed heartfelt thanks to Joan and James and to Fairfield University for their gracious hosting.

Promises not listed elsewhere:

Value Booklet - Jim Hogan will send us all his "Value Booklet" that identifies what the library provides for each department.

Submitted by Evelyn Minick, May 9, 2005

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