Purposeful Path Forward
At Wednesday’s VPC Open Forum, we reviewed the final two sections of the Purposeful Path Forward – Operational Excellence and Innovative Spaces. I was unable to attend but did hear that there was great feedback for incorporation into the final draft. The Council will be meeting today to review the Mission, Vision, and Priorities in the context of all of the feedback to produce a final document for distribution early next week. I have seen a draft and believe the open forums and input along the way have been a critical component in its strength. The path is laid out in such a way that will provide the structure to move us forward in a meaningful way while allowing some fluidity as things shift. I want to thank you all for the time and energy that has gone into this and hope that when you read it in total, the work behind it is as evident to you as it is to me.

Master Plan Update
From what I understand there were questions about the progress of the Babbidge Master Plan yesterday so I thought I would provide another update. We are still in the very early stages of the plan, working on gathering current usage data, student growth projections and looking at other academic libraries of interest. Beverly Wood, Director of Planning and I presented a basic outline of this information as well as a time frame for moving forward to Provost Choi at the end of June. We have asked to consider waiting for several pieces to fall into place before we dig into an actual plan – our Purposeful Path Forward, the principles for which we would like our space used for, and the University’s effort to standardize space allocations for staffing, classrooms, etc. We have already seen some draft space standardization language and have indicated that there are library staff that require exceptions to enable proper work efficiencies and we will continue to monitor this. At this point we do not have a Babbidge Master Plan in place to share. It is my intention that when we have a better sense from the Provost of what the next steps are, I will have a Mashup to discuss it in greater detail.

I also wanted to take a moment to mention the work that is still continuing on the off-site preservation facility. As you may remember, we have been working with the University planners on this project and are hopeful that it will allow us to utilize our space in more creative and innovative ways without sacrificing access or preservation needs of the collection. There has been substantive work on this over the past few months and we continue to work with the University and other state-wide partners in making this a reality.

Homer Commons Help Services
I am pleased to announce that we will be partnering with UITS to provide help services in Homer Commons this coming year. The help desk, which is currently run by the Library, will now be run by UITS and their HuskyTech staff. They will provide the full complement of services to students defined by HuskyTech as well as computer and technical support for library equipment on the first floor. For all other issues that are not basic technical issues, a system will be worked out in which they will refer the patron to the proper library staff.  This switch will take place for the fall semester.

Martha on the Move
I am so pleased to announce that I am a grandmother again! A healthy and very sweet Bode Bedard was born on July 2 and I will be spending the next two weeks visiting him and his parents. I will return to work on July 27th. If you have any pressing issues over those two weeks, please feel free to contact any of the Directors for assistance.