Purposeful Plan of Action
Thank you for your thoughtful participation in our open forums on the purposeful plan of action. I hope that you found the discussions useful and are excited at what our future will bring. The next step in the process is that the facilitators for each area of focus will be incorporating the feedback they received into their statements and drafting action steps. If you have any other feedback you would like to share with these groups, please do so as soon as possible. These will be submitted to VPC before May 19th so they can be reviewed. I will also report our progress to the Provost at my May meeting. Because this work is important to focus on, and the generally busy nature of the end of the semester, we will not be holding a VPC Open Forum next week, May 13th.

Finals Week
We are nearing the end of finals week and I would once again like to thank all of you who helped create an environment for which students felt comfortable to work and even play a little while here. Our door counts are consistent again this year, with back to back 11,000 + days. We were also visited by other folks who took time to help students relax such as the police department handing out candy and folks from Insomnia Cookies wandering the building with freshly baked and still warm cookies.

Staff Lounge Beautification
If you have been in the staff lounge this week you will see that it looks a little different. The addition of the door from the 24-Hour Quiet Study allowed us the opportunity to have the whole space repainted. We also hosted a brunch for donors in there on Sunday and the artwork was added to showcase some of the images found in the archives. The event was a part of our ongoing stewardship of donors, treating our guests to brunch and tickets to the CRT’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a nice opportunity to re-connect with some of our generous donors and we were honored to get to visit with Alex and Catherine Babbidge. Alex is the son of Homer Babbidge and Catherine is Alex’s daughter. It had been some time since they were in the facility and they were pleased to see how busy it was on a Sunday afternoon.

ARL Meeting in San Francisco
Last week I attended the ARL Meeting and had the opportunity to engage in a lot of great conversation about many of the things we are working on now. For example new developments in research data and preservation, Open Educational Resources, fair use, how libraries work in a global environment and the critical role the library has in providing services for the disabled learner. I look forward to sharing what I learned with all of you over the coming weeks.