VPC Meeting

The next VPC meeting will be Wednesday, December 14th. A formal agenda will be coming shortly but please mark your calendars since this is a date outside of the normal rotation.

Great news for the Master Plan

At yesterday’s Board of Trustee’s meeting, approval was given for the University to spend $3.9M for renovations to Level 1 and another $1.1M to complete the board room on Level 4. With this funding we can officially start working through the Master Plan! In addition we have already earmarked funds for changes including new furniture to the North Entrance Lobby and Plaza lobby areas, which will begin shortly. This has been two years in the making so congrats to everyone who has attended meetings and provided feedback to get us here. I would like to particularly thank Holly and Dave for shepherding us through the countless meetings, brainstorming and blueprints. There is much more work to come and we will have more information shortly including timelines and more detailed plans.

Interim Provost

As many of you have likely heard, President Herbst has called upon Dean Jeremy Teitelbaum to serve as the Interim Provost. I am looking forward to working with him, educating him about the library priorities including staffing and collection concerns, and learning about priorities for his term. His recent support of $500,000 for the Library’s collection budget has been instrumental in maintaining our collections this year. I welcome further conversations about the importance of our services to the University with his leadership team, and with members of the University Finance office during our February budget hearings.

DD/ILL Location in School of Fine Arts Resource Center

In the event you missed the email from Erika, the Fine Arts Resource Center is once again a drop off and pick up location for interlibrary loan. Thank you to the DD/ILL staff for their work to make this happen for our patrons.

Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities Meeting

Last week I joined regional colleagues from other land grant universities for a discussion about how libraries are supporting agriculture and natural resource programs. This formative meeting included a lot of wonderful brainstorming and discussion of the Ithaka S+R Research Project on this topic. Thank you to Sharon and Carolyn for their excellent work in assessing how our own CAHNR faculty do their research for our local use, and as input to this national study. You can find the report here. There will be a brown bag about this shortly- stay tuned.

Homies Student Organization

You may have seen some information about a student group called The Homies: Friends of the Homer Babbidge Library. Headed by one of our students, Sam Mairson, they officially became a student organization at last night’s USG meeting. Their purpose is to “promote and assist the UConn Library by way of providing student advocacy and input on library issues, hosting events and fundraisers for the benefit of the UConn Library, and organizing volunteer projects.” They are currently working on increasing their membership, getting the required training for officers and starting their programming. They have discussed helping with some finals activities such as buttons (they handed out dozens last night) and are researching the Ignite fundraising opportunities through the UConn Foundation. If you have any questions or interest in helping the Homies, you can talk with Joel who is one of their advisers or Jean who has been working with them on some projects.

One Good Thing

Today I’ll share with you a comment I received about Ryan Marsalisi. “Ryan is so  agreeable it’s unbelievable. He is always friendly, responsive and concerned about doing a great job. I think he works exceptionally well with everyone.”  I have had the pleasure of working with Ryan and seeing him daily here in the Admin office and I couldn’t agree more. Thanks Ryan!

Congratulations to the Babbidge Builders

While they may not have won the gingerbread house decorating contest last week, it was certainly not due to their lack of effort. I enjoyed watching them work on building what they called the #foundationofthenation – the Homer Babbidge Library.

I hope to see you all at the Solstice Party on the 21st!

Martha