Collections Budget Review

Thank you to our liaisons for working with faculty and our electronic resources staff for collecting the data necessary to suggest reductions for our fiscal year ‘16 collections budget. I know that managing a significant cut in a short time frame while still providing high quality services in a busy new academic year can be very challenging. As we continue to progress down this path we have been receiving feedback and are working with all those who have expressed concerns. We are doing our best to communicate the overall fiscal picture that we are facing, explaining the methods we are employing to make informed decisions, and emphasizing the importance of their participation. We are also taking note of ways in which we can improve the process to help make the second round of reductions more effective and efficient. While there is no doubt that this is a difficult situation, the response has reinforced our value to the UConn community as faculty are expressing a sincere need for our resources and services.

Martha’s Mashup – Monday, September 21

I look forward to seeing you all at my Mashup on Monday. We will be joined by Beverly Wood to discuss where we are currently with the Homer Babbidge Master Plan, including sharing some conceptual diagrams. If you can’t make the meeting, there will be ample opportunity to see the concepts and provide feedback on them.

Annual Report to the Provost 

Amidst the planning going on for the upcoming year, I submitted our Annual Report for 2014-2015 to the Provost last week. It was a wonderful reminder of the good work that you all continue to do on behalf of the UConn Libraries. Included in the report are three goals for the Library in 2015-2016. These are based on our Purposeful Path Forward as well as the goals that the Provost has set for the Libraries.  I hope you will take some time to read through the report, which can be found here.

Role of Special Payroll

I have been asked about the use of special payroll in the Library and I wanted to take a moment to address this. The use of special payroll across campus comes with specific criteria for use and regulated by Human Resources, but in general is designed for short term, temporary services that fill critical needs.

The funding often comes from one time funds, primarily salary savings although we have used grant funds as well. I know we use the term ‘salary savings’ quite a bit so let me be a little more specific. When we have an open position, for example after a retirement, the University takes back 40% of the yearly base salary and fringe as a management vacancy tax. The difference between the give back to the University and when the position is filled again is what we call salary savings. As for the open position itself, refilling it is not guaranteed. Instead, we are tasked with making the case for a refill as is or reconfigure it for a different job or skill set. The plan to refill that position is then vetted by VPC against the libraries priority job openings and the result is sent to the Provost’s office for approval or denial.

As we work through that process, it is the role of Vice Provost’s Council to identify projects that need to be done outside of current staff responsibilities and find ways to manage this in both the short term and long term. Often the short-term is done through special payroll. The process required is quite different from a permanent hire because of the temporary nature. There is an assumption that you have a qualified candidate in mind so you are asking for HR approval of the person and the work, not just the work as you would when sending through a permanent job description. Special payroll positions may also be advertised if necessary.  HR checks the job duties, the salary range and duration. A special payroll hire has no job benefits, including sick time and vacation, or health insurance.

The nature of special payroll allows for a mutually beneficial relationship – we can make progress on some short term projects or fill gaps, and a special payroll employee can work to gain skills and still have flexibility to find permanent work. We have seen a significant amount of benefit from the hiring of special payroll in the past few years, moving forward some high value projects and priorities including specialized cataloging, temporary desk staff, collections maintenance, service reviews, financial services support, bridging the gap between the scholars’ collaborative and Digital Media and Design, and implementing lynda.com. As we navigate our budget constraints, including the challenge of trying to adapt to new kinds of work, we will continue to strategically hire temporary employees through this process when appropriate.  If you have any specific concerns, please let me know.

Vice Provost’s Open Forum
The agenda for the next forum on August 19th can be found here. Please RSVP to Kristen if you are able to attend.

Days Away to Plan

There is no doubt that change is happening in and around our organization and our ability to adapt and keep an eye on our purposeful path will take some creative thinking. I know many of you have already made adjustments to how you do your work as individuals and units, so I believe this is a good time to continue to do that on a wider scale. In the next few weeks we will take some steps to start strategic conversations with two groups. IT staff and the staff who are liaisons as their primary duty.

We are currently working on the agendas but in both cases we will utilize the time to review current services, identifying those things we will no longer need to do, those things that will be done differently, and new activities we must begin to engage in.

Our collective vision in the Purposeful Path Forward is one that relies on innovative technology, exploration of new models of teaching and research, and rethinking how we present our resources and services to our users in this new environment. It is clear from our vision the roles of these units are vital to our success and I am looking forward to the conversation. More groups will be convened in the coming months.

One UConn Library Update
There was a One UConn Library meeting on Monday at the School of Law where we continued to lay out our plan. We will be embarking on a review of each of libraries’ roles and what we have in common, what is unique in these environments, and where there may be gaps that need to be filled in order to create a seamless experience among our users.

Collections Budget Update
Thanks to Patrick, Galadriel and Alice for their presentation this week on the plan to thoughtfully manage our collections. If you were unable to attend, the PowerPoint can be found on Ibis.

Demonstration Interactive Classroom
The HBL Lecture Center is now the ‘new’ demonstration interactive classroom!  We are working with UITS to make the final adjustments to the room which will be ready for orientation sessions for faculty and TA’s very soon.  As Beverly Wood indicated in a message to the Provost this week, “this has been a great collaboration among a subcommittee of the Classroom Committee (chaired by Joe Crivello), Library, CETL, UITS, Fac Ops and PAES.”  The room will now provide a space for developing teaching capabilities and engaging students in new ways in the classroom environment.  The room will be managed by CETL and the feedback loops will continue to inform scalability, future classroom design and changes in pedagogy.

Staffing
I would like to offer some further information regarding the recent staffing changes and subsequent emails and discussions. As mentioned in the Union Wire and in Alice’s letter, a number of UCPEA staff were affected by the recent layoffs. I would like to stress the layoffs are part of a University-wide effort to manage several years of past, current, and future deficits. The library was not a target, in fact most, if not all, academic units faced the same percentage of budget cuts. The library was able to minimize the cuts to staff by negotiating with the Provost to allow for more than half of the 9% budget deficit in FY 16 & 17 to come from the collections budget. While it has been past practice to absorb much smaller budget cuts by giving back open positions, this is not an effective way to plan for the future of our organization.

In the coming months we will be working across the organization to focus on job duties and responsibilities. We will look at what we can stop doing, how we can do things differently and more efficiently, and reallocating some tasks to help in balancing workloads. As Alice suggested in her note, this is the time to evaluate our positions and duties in light of the changing nature of academic libraries.

As with UCPEA, we have left the announcement up to each individual affected, honoring their wishes for privacy when desired. I realize this is difficult with such a small staff and most of you know the members, but I do hope that you will also respect their privacy.  I also expect that during difficult times such as these, we continue to remain professional with each other and other members of the community.

Open Educational Resources Update
With the help of the UConn Foundation, we have been in conversations with the Davis Educational Foundation regarding the possibility of grant support for Open Educational Resources here at UConn and Connecticut. We have pulled together a grant writing team that consists of Kate Fuller, Kathy Labadorf, Christ Petkovich (Foundation) and Daniel Byrd (USG) and will be meeting with the Davis Foundation today to further discuss their interest.

I have also mentioned in a previous message, the passage of House Bill 6117 which includes the development of an open-source textbook pilot program throughout CT. The President’s office is currently working to appoint members of the UConn community to that project.

And finally, as a member of BLC we have signed on with more than 90 organizations to support the call to the White House to take administrative action to ensure federally funded educational materials are made available as Open Educational Resources that are free to use, share and improve. A copy of the full letter, which was sent on Tuesday, can be found here.

Martha’s Master Plan Mashup
Keep an eye out for an early September date for my next Mashup, which will focus on the progress to date for the Babbidge Library Master Plan and the next steps in the process.

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.

VPC Open Forum
Our discussion of the Purposeful Plan will continue next Wednesday, July 8th at the Open Forum starting at 9:30am. This conversation will be similar to our last meeting where we discussed the action steps for the three programmatic priorities but will focus on the remaining two empowering priorities – Operational Excellence and Innovative Spaces. The agenda can be found here and please RSVP to Kristen if you are able to attend.  If you were unable to join the discussion last week, the minutes can be found here.

One UConn Library
I have been asked by the Provost to lead a task force called the One UConn Library, which will look to deepen our commitment to collaboration with our colleagues in the Law School and the Health Center Libraries. The overall goal is to better integrate and streamline our services across all of the libraries to provide a consistent experience for our users, wherever they are in the system. I have been working with the Provost and my colleagues in the other libraries over the last few weeks to set the stage for the work to come and the announcement was made by the Provost this morning. I strongly support this initiative as do my colleagues and I look forward to looking in-depth at the services we all provide and finding ways to make the experience better for our users. We will begin the process next week and are planning for recommendations to be made to the Provost by the end of this calendar year. Below is the official note that came out from Provost Choi this morning. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Dear Colleagues,

The UConn Libraries, the UConn Law School Library, and the UConn Health Center Library all serve vital roles within their distinct University communities to inspire groundbreaking research and in advancing learning, teaching, and entrepreneurial thinking.  Together, the Libraries have a long history of sharing expertise and outstanding educational and research collections.  Most recently the three Libraries have worked together to launch an integrated library collection management system which will improve access and discovery to all the resources collectively available, in a simplified, consistent, and unified manner.

Building upon this relationship, and the inherent collegiality of our Library staff, I am convening a task force to define a future based upon an even deeper collaboration.  The task force, chaired by Vice Provost Martha Bedard, with membership from all three Libraries including:

Martha Bedard, Chair
Holly Phillips
Jocelyn Kennedy
Darcy Kirk
Janice Swiatek

is charged with recommending organizational structures, modes of communication, service improvements and efficiencies, and decision making for an integrated One UConn Library. The overall goal is to improve and enhance access and services to all in a time of fiscal constraint and rising costs, while exploring opportunities to meet the challenges of providing an ever expanding and complex range of services that includes communities with unique needs.  I will review the recommendations with Deans Liang, MacNeil and Fisher and implement the appropriate changes in structure, organization and service.

Best,
Mun

Mun Y. Choi
Provost & Executive VP for Academic Affairs
University of Connecticut

Happy 4th of July
I hope you all enjoy the long holiday weekend!

VPC Open Forum

The Open Forum this Wednesday will focus on the action steps for the Purposeful Plan of Action. The minutes from the June 10th meeting can be found here.

Scholarly Communications Design Studio

This is an exciting project that I mentioned at last week’s VPC Open Forum as well as in other conversations with staff and thought I would take a moment to dig a little deeper into what it is and what it means for the Libraries. The Scholarly Communications Design Studio is a collaboration with Digital Media & Design (DMD) and the Humanities Institute and will change the way the University approaches scholarly work. The idea is simple – to take the collaboration often done at the implementation stage of a project, like we have been doing with the Scholars’ Collaborative, and bring that collaboration in at the start. This allows the opportunity for fresh insight and deep, sustained conversations with professional designers, web and app developers, librarians, data management experts, editors, and scholarly publishers. It uses the two years of successes of the Scholars’ Collaborative and work done by DMD and the Humanities Institute as pillars to reach the next level of scholarly communication.

Being led by Tom Scheinfeldt, Associate Professor in DMD and History, the proposal was accepted for funding by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The support from the Mellon Foundation is due, in part, to the University’s commitment to refill the position vacated by Anna Kijas in February. The position has been reworked and will now be the Digital Scholarship Librarian/Scholarly Communications Design Studio Managing Director. This position, as well as the center, will be housed here in the Homer Babbidge Library. This is a key piece of the collaborative theme in our Purposeful Plan of Action, particularly when considering usage of facilities space. This need is part of the conversations we are having regarding the Babbidge Master Plan so more on how it will fit in physically will be coming in the future. In the meantime, the project will move forward with the planning stage which includes surveying and fact-finding from other institutions, determining the right organizational structure to maximize our resources, creating an advisory board of experts in the field, and defining the design process. This planning stage has been funded by Mellon at $95,000 and we anticipate it will go through December, 2016. On our end, we will begin advertising the position shortly and Greg Colati has agreed to serve as co-investigator along with Brendan Kane from the Humanities Institute. The planning stage will lay the groundwork if we successfully meet the grant requirements, for a subsequent, three-year, $1,000,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2017.

I am excited to see this project as it unfolds. There will be much more information coming from this project but if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me or Greg.

Open Educational Resources
Our efforts to lead the charge to educate faculty and students on the open educational resources available to use in the classroom made great strides this week. On Wednesday we held workshops for faculty and staff focused on the myriad of affordable learning resources available to help reduce students expenses without sacrificing quality of teaching. The workshop was held in two parts – the morning was designed for faculty and the afternoon for staff. In both workshops the attendees ranged from skeptics to believers with everything in between. There were faculty from numerous academic departments, regional campuses, instructional designers and of course our own staff. Our speakers brought a wealth of information and we are grateful for their time. They included  Nicole Allen, Director of Open Education for the ARL initiative SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Charlotte Roh, Scholarly Communication Resident Librarian for UMass Amherst, and Nicole Finkbeiner, Associate Director for OpenStax College, a leading provider in open source textbooks. Both workshops were well attended and we will continue to provide similar opportunities this fall. Thanks to the in-house working group who organized the program (Kathy Labadorf, Kate Fuller, Dawn Cadogan, Carolyn Mills and David Ruiz), with some additional help from Merlita, Kristen J, Jean, and Jane.

The second development this week was the unanimous passage of House Bill 6117. The bill, introduced originally by Representative Haddad, 54th District does three main things: (1) requires the Board of Regents for Higher Education and UConn to establish an open-source textbook pilot program that assess the use of high-quality digital open-source textbooks and promotes their use; (2) completion of a report about the pilot by July 1, 2016 addressing the potential costs savings and barriers to the program; and (3) outlining best practices for utilizing these resources moving forward. This bill was championed by representatives from USG and ConnPIRG and I was pleased to work with Representative Haddad to clarify the language before it went to the House floor. The next step in the process for the Bill is to go to the Senate.

Finals Numbers Impressive Again This Year
We continue to be the primary location for students to get their work done during the crunch of finals. The total gate count from Friday, May 1-Sunday, May 10 was 70,255. Thanks again to the staff who helped with relaxation programming and our security crew who kept the wheels turning for 24/7 hours.

Martha on the Move
I had the opportunity this week to join other faculty and staff from the First Year Experience Program on a site visit to the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design (CEID) at Yale University. Housed in a space that was formerly used as the engineering library, the Center is open to the Yale community with the hope to empower students to improve human lives through the advancement of technology. This was a great opportunity to see how others are reimagining their library space and I look forward to more virtual and physical site visits as we reimagine our own space around inspirational learning.

I have also been serving as the academic library representative on the Board of Advisors for the Southern Connecticut State University’s Information and Library Sciences Program. We have been very active in achieving our goal to recommend improvements to the curriculum for reaccreditation of the program. I am joined by other colleagues from around the state, including representatives from industry, public libraries, and the CT State Library system.

Employee Appreciation Committee
As you know the Employee Appreciation Committee was formed this year to develop strategies and programs to strengthen our community and recognize individual excellence and commitment. They are working on a culmination event that will include a staff picnic to be held starting at noon on Friday, June 26th. More information will be coming, but I encourage you to hold the date on your calendar. VPC will be reviewing the committee’s charge and will be looking for more volunteers next year so if you are interested in joining them stay tuned for more information.

Purposeful Plan of Action
Thank you for your thoughtful participation in our open forums on the purposeful plan of action. I hope that you found the discussions useful and are excited at what our future will bring. The next step in the process is that the facilitators for each area of focus will be incorporating the feedback they received into their statements and drafting action steps. If you have any other feedback you would like to share with these groups, please do so as soon as possible. These will be submitted to VPC before May 19th so they can be reviewed. I will also report our progress to the Provost at my May meeting. Because this work is important to focus on, and the generally busy nature of the end of the semester, we will not be holding a VPC Open Forum next week, May 13th.

Finals Week
We are nearing the end of finals week and I would once again like to thank all of you who helped create an environment for which students felt comfortable to work and even play a little while here. Our door counts are consistent again this year, with back to back 11,000 + days. We were also visited by other folks who took time to help students relax such as the police department handing out candy and folks from Insomnia Cookies wandering the building with freshly baked and still warm cookies.

Staff Lounge Beautification
If you have been in the staff lounge this week you will see that it looks a little different. The addition of the door from the 24-Hour Quiet Study allowed us the opportunity to have the whole space repainted. We also hosted a brunch for donors in there on Sunday and the artwork was added to showcase some of the images found in the archives. The event was a part of our ongoing stewardship of donors, treating our guests to brunch and tickets to the CRT’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a nice opportunity to re-connect with some of our generous donors and we were honored to get to visit with Alex and Catherine Babbidge. Alex is the son of Homer Babbidge and Catherine is Alex’s daughter. It had been some time since they were in the facility and they were pleased to see how busy it was on a Sunday afternoon.

ARL Meeting in San Francisco
Last week I attended the ARL Meeting and had the opportunity to engage in a lot of great conversation about many of the things we are working on now. For example new developments in research data and preservation, Open Educational Resources, fair use, how libraries work in a global environment and the critical role the library has in providing services for the disabled learner. I look forward to sharing what I learned with all of you over the coming weeks.

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal Celebration
A reminder that tomorrow we will be celebrating the launch of the first online journal created in DigitalCommons@UConn. Please join us at 4:00 in the Scholars’ Collaborative for some refreshments and an opportunity to talk to the students behind the journal.

Staff Lounge Access for Students
The project to allow after-hours access to the staff lounge is nearly complete. I just wanted to once again remind folks that this space has been offered up to students as a compromise solution for their need to have Homer Babbidge open more hours. It will be opened when the library is closed as a quiet study only space, and they will not have access beyond the 24-hour quiet study room during the day. We will work with the Undergraduate Student Government to monitor the treatment of the space to ensure it is being used appropriately. Thank you for your patience throughout the construction.

Martha on the Move
This Friday I will be travelling with several other staff members to tour the new MakerSpace in the UMass Amherst Library. I hope to not only learn more about the space itself, but how it is being used, by whom, and how UMass was able to secure funding for the equipment and staffing.

Next week I will be heading out to the ARL Members Meeting in San Francisco. The theme of the meeting is “Global Connections of Research Libraries,” and program sessions will explore international copyright issues, shared print repositories, and tools and services for open science. I am also looking forward to a deeper discussion of the transition to ARL’s new Strategic Thinking and Design Framework. Many of our priorities were discussed with these national and international directions in mind so I expect those discussions will be helpful as we work on our own Purposeful Plan of Action. I will return in time for our donor event on Sunday, May 3, to which we have invited guests to join us for brunch and then a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Connecticut Repertory Theatre.

Thanks to all of you for your active participation and thoughtful comments this morning on our Mission, Vision, Values.