VPC Open Forum

At last week’s VPC meeting I took some time to clarify the role of Vice Provost Council as well as the meeting structure we have found to work best. The Council is responsible for libraries-wide budgeting and resource allocation, policy development, priority setting, staffing decisions, and advising the Vice Provost on the overall administration of the University of Connecticut Libraries. The Council meets on a regular basis in two forums (1) VPC Planning Meetings are weekly closed meetings to discuss a wide range of current issues and establish agendas for the VPC Open Forum. (2) VPC Open Forums are held biweekly and library staff are encouraged to attend. It is an opportunity to communicate by sharing reports, updates, and discuss decisions and issues with the wider library.  The minutes from the full meeting on March 4th can be found here.

The agenda for next week’s VPC Open Forum on Wednesday, March 18 can be found here. Please RSVP to Kristen if you plan on attending.

Open Source Textbook Committee

The university-wide Open Source Textbook Committee has been busy over the last few weeks. There are two bills currently in the House and Senate that we have been monitoring. House Bill 6117 is titled “An Act Concerning the Use of Digital Open-Source Textbooks in Higher Education.” The bill is to establish an open source textbook consortium to help lower the cost of acquiring a college degree in Connecticut. Members of UConnPIRG testified at the hearing in support of the bill. Senate Bill 931 is titled “An Act Concerning Requirements for College Textbooks.” This proposed bill would prohibit requiring students to use a new edition of a textbook any sooner than three years following the date of the initial publication. In this case I worked with Government Relations to provide written testimony that indicated our support for textbook reform but concerns over the seemingly arbitrary three year requirement.

Here at UConn, members of UConnPIRG have been meeting with faculty members asking them for a commitment to consider open source textbooks. We anticipate reaching out to those faculty members with the offer to provide support and learn more from their experiences. The Undergraduate Student Government passed a resolution this week urging faculty to submit their textbook requests on time as required by the federal Higher Education Opportunity Act. This was also supported by PLAC at our meeting yesterday.

Our internal task force, led by Kathy Labadorf has been busy collecting data, reports and teaching materials from across the country, and internationally. Dawn Cadogan is developing a libguide and today Kathy is attending a conference at UMass Boston focused on Open Educational Resources.

If you are interested in seeing any of the testimony or legislative documents, please let me know and I would be glad to share them.

RFID Tags

For those of you who do not subscribe to the staffchat zlist, Fred Rick sent out a piece of library history last week that I thought I would share. Although we will continue to use our RFID system, the barcode will now be  imprinted directly on the tags so we will no longer need to print labels. As Rick said in his message, it’s an “end of an era.”

The good news on this front is that at long last we are finalizing our agreement with the new vendor and in fact I signed the paperwork yesterday so stay tuned.

Have a great weekend!