Vice Provost Council
The VPC meeting scheduled for May 25th has been cancelled. Please hold June 8th at 1:00 for my next Mashup.
Staffing Notes
Congratulations to Jennifer Eustis and Stan Huzarewicz for their recent promotions. Jennifer was promoted to University Librarian III and Stan to University Librarian II. You are invited to celebrate their achievements at a reception in the HBL staff lounge on Wednesday, May 25th from 9-9:30am. You have also heard that Galadriel Chilton will be leaving the UConn Libraries for a new position as the Ivy Plus Director of Collections Initiatives at Yale University. Please join us in wishing her well on Friday, May 27th from 10-11am in the Garden Level/Level B of HBL.
Library Statement on Piracy
The Scholarly Communications Team has responded to the continuing discussion of piracy and copyright law violations through a formal statement against these practices. Many of you are following this conversation closely, highlighted recently by the Sci-Hub website which has been named the world’s largest site for pirated academic papers. The statement, which you can read in its entirety here encourages the use of Open Educational Resources and other new publishing models as a way to transform the landscape. It also offers some suggestions of how to help avoid piracy and copyright violations through protecting usernames, passwords and other login information.
Open Educational Resources
Next week I will be co-presenting a session titled “The State of Open in CT” at the eVolution and eLearning Conference at Fairfield University. I will be presenting with Kevin Corcoran, the executive director of the CT Distance Learning Consortium and co-chair of the state-wide taskforce. And thanks to Kathy Labadorf’s continued work on our Davis Educational Foundation funded OER initiatives, we received 247 survey responses from faculty. The survey asked questions to understand their knowledge, use and attitudes on OERs. We are working to collect and present the findings so stay tuned. We have also launched a faculty incentive program, providing funding for faculty willing to read and review and open textbook or modify a course for affordability. You can find more information on the website as well as the presentation from the April 19th workshop if you were unable to attend.
Interlibrary Loan is a STAR
Congratulations to our Interlibrary Loan staff for their recent STAR award from the ALA Rethinking Resource Sharing Policies Committee. The award is an acknowledgement of their continued efforts to rethink library resource sharing and offer excellent ILL services to our users.
Donor Visit
I had the opportunity to meet members of the American Montessori Society’s Archive Committee this week. They were in the Archives for their meeting and to help identify some of the items in the collection held here in the Library. They are a devoted group who seemed to really enjoy their time here. Thanks to Laura Smith for working so closely with them and arranging such a packed day!