Homer Babbidge Flooding
As you all read in Dave’s email yesterday, a water fountain in Bookworms broke and seeped water through levels B and A over the weekend. Work continues to remove the wet materials and the large cabinets from the areas to facilitate proper drying and cleaning. This is being done under the guidance of the Division of Environmental Health & Safety. Nothing will be moved back into the area until we have the approval from EH&S. I want to thank all of the folks who have made quick work to remedy this unfortunate accident, particularly Mike Slowik and Charlie Pei. Mike and his wife were in the building checking on something when they heard of the flood. They spent several hours removing books from the flowing water and covering up cabinets as the custodians were working to remove the water from the Plaza Level. And Charlie has worked over the weekend to begin the task of drying the materials affected.
Vice Provost Council – August 3
Many of you were unable to join us last week for the Vice Provost’s Council Open Forum so I wanted to take a moment to update you on that meeting. We were able to run through a round-table style format with each of the areas, including information on the ’16-’17 area goals. I was extremely pleased to see the way that each area aligned to our Purposeful Path Forward. It is clear to me that the areas were thoughtful in how we could maintain our essential services while being creative in bringing innovation to the forefront. I was struck by several goals that included a bit of clean-up in areas of the library, a late spring cleaning of sorts. For anyone who has felt the satisfaction of cleaning up an attic or messy kitchen, it does create a refreshed feeling and will help us to better use our spaces. All of the area goals are being compiled this week and will be available for everyone to review on Ibis next week. The minutes from the August 3rd meeting can be found here.
We did not review the Health Library goals but will be talking about them in upcoming meetings. As you know, we are currently working with them on managing a cut to their collections budget. I will also be meeting with each member of the Health Library one-on-one as I did when I first joined the Library. I will also be offering those one-on-one meetings to anyone who has joined the staff since those initial meetings.
Website Improvements
Thank you to everyone who came to the Web Governance Workgroup’s town hall meeting. I would like to thank the members of the WGW for their continued work on making improvements to our website. I realize that this is supplemental to each person’s regular job and their dedication to continued improvements is appreciated. They have proposed some changes to the main page and are currently doing usability testing. Please consider providing some feedback to the group, and if you know of anyone who might be interested in helping with usability testing, please reach out to them. The more feedback we get the better the improvements will be.
eReserve Changes
As mentioned in yesterday’s Daily Digest, this semester we will be working to continue the transition to an unmediated eReserves model. This is a significant change for faculty and I know that each of you who have the opportunity will do what you can to make the transition as smooth as possible.
Staff Notes
Please help me congratulate Michael Rodriguez for his recent published work in the ACRL publication The Small and Rural Academic Library: Leveraging Resources and Overcoming Limitations. Michael’s chapter is entitled “Technology Triage: Assessing and Managing Library Systems and Projects.”
Educause Key Issues for 2016
I know many of you are involved with Educause and I wanted to point out their latest ‘Key Issues in Teaching and Learning 2016’ release. This is a nice reference document that outlines the discussions and programming Educause will be focused on. You will quickly see that many of the identified issues are ones we are already participating in so you may find some of their resources helpful.