Vice Provost Council/Martha’s Mashup
A reminder that my Mashup is next Wednesday, June 8th at 1:00 in the Class of ’47. It will be an opportunity for me to share with you all of the work we did last year. This means that the VPC meeting next week will be cancelled. The next VPC meeting will be at UConn Health on June 23rd. If you are able to make the trip that would be great, but we will also be providing a stream of the meeting.
Staffing News
Chenwei Zhao will be moving from her current unit of Licensing & Acquisitions to Metadata & Discovery Services. This change is being made as a reflection of the nature of Chenwei’s work in the context of the recently re-organized Collections & Discovery area. This will likely include a change in the physical location of her work station in the coming weeks.
Search Committees
We have several search committees forming to begin filling the positions that were recently approved by the Provost. They include:
Head of Licensing & Acquisitions
Richard Bleiler, Patrick Carr, Hilda Drabek, Merlita Murphy (chair), Elisabeth Umpleby, Hongjie Wang
Head of Metadata & Discovery
Patrick Carr, Janice Christopher, Darcy Kirk, Janice Swiatek (chair), Joelle Thomas
Digital Scholarship & Repository Analyst
Greg Colati (chair), Jennifer Eustis, Michael Howser, Doug Neary, Joel Salisbury (DMD Faculty), Sara Sikes
Entrepreneurship and Innovation Librarian/Specialist
Joel Atkinson, Valori Banfi, Steve Batt, Jill Livingston (chair), Jennifer Snow
And thank you to the search committee for the Financial Services Assistant – Hilda Drabek, Khara Leon (chair), and Bob Swanson. They worked quickly and diligently to recommend a candidate and I expect an announcement on the results shortly.
ELUNA Roundtable
Several library staff members from Storrs, Health and Law campuses attended the ELUNA (Ex Libris Users of North America) conference last month in Oklahoma City and learned a lot about how to optimize Alma/Primo for our users so we will be hosting a roundtable discussion to share with anyone interested. It will be Wednesday, June 15th from 2-3pm in the HBL Administrative Conference Room. We will be sending out a Skype link separately.
BLC Board Retreat
At the BLC Board Retreat next week I will officially become the next President, representing the 17 academic libraries and research libraries in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire. I am excited to continue the important projects that BLC is involved in, particularly those that benefit our library such as the EAST project. I also am looking forward to focusing on my own theme for BLC, which is workforce development. I believe the need to build and develop staff with the right skills in a time of significant transformation within libraries is an issue facing all of us. The first step BLC will be making in this area will happen in parallel with the retreat, with a concurrent workshop for AULs within BLC libraries on this very topic. DeEtta Jones, nationally known author and strategist, will be leading that retreat and Holly will be representing UConn. BLC will receive a report and recommendations from this workshop to start our action plan.
2016 Book Fair
Many of you may have seen the announcement from the Book Fair Committee last week regarding the upcoming 2016 Fair. Due to the transition from the UConn Co-op to Barnes and Noble, we have opted to postpone the Fair this fall and instead look towards hosting the 25th Anniversary event in the spring. We will keep you posted as that progresses but you can see the full announcement here.
ALADN 2016
This Thursday through Saturday Jean and I will be attending the 2016 ALADN (Academic Library Advancement and Development Network) Conference. Hosted by our colleagues at UMass Amherst and sponsored by BLC, the conference will gather professionals in academic library fundraising from across North America to share innovations, best practices, and organizational successes related to fundraising for libraries, including communication and marketing strategies. Jean has represented UConn on the planning committee, chairing the pre-conference program on Thursday titled “Mastering Library Fundraising and Communications – A Fail-proof Plan.”