Minutes of SIRS meeting 
of April 27, 2005 

Present:  R. Laguerre, G. Moreton, B. Nail-Chiwetalu, 
Y. Norris-Gonzalez, H. Pedersoli, C. Todd (recording), 
E. Yocco, M. Zeliff 

1.  Review of data collection project.  Michael shared 
the latest report that he and Melinda have created from 
our desk data.  This report examines time of day/day of 
week/reporting of inadequate/adequate/overstaffing levels 
of desk staffing.  We discussed the report. 

2.  Information Commons.  Cindy reported on yesterday's 
meeting with LEC regarding IC.  LEC now has drawings and 
cost estimates.  Charles Lowry will be meeting with Jeff 
Huskamp (OIT) to discuss next steps. 
All of us need to watch the IC webpage to monitor discussions
 http://www.lib.umd.edu/groups/infocommons/home.html 

3.  Round Robin.  As of last night, Mozilla Firefox has now 
been loaded onto public computers throughout the libraries.  
We will be checking each computer in the Electronic Research 
area to make sure that none of equipment failed to load this 
browser.  As of last night, MS Office has been loaded onto 
the eight Gateways sitting in the room back there with the Dells. 

4.  Librarian weekend shifts for Summer 2005 (staff was 
permitted to leave meeting if they chose).  After discussion 
we agreed to experiment with the following librarian staffing 
at the Info Desk during summer weekends. 

Saturday (one shift) 10-3 pm  (the library is open 10-6 pm) 
Sunday (one shift) 2-7 pm (the library is open 2-10 pm) 

Since these are long shifts, SIRS agreed that the librarians 
can take a 15 minute break, however we agreed that the break 
would be taken in the Service Plus office and that the librarian 
would be "available on call." 

The librarians are necessary at openings because staff do not 
come in until later in the day and are responsible until closing. 

This represents a 2 hour decrease in the number of hours that 
librarians are available on the Saturday desk from last summer.  
We will be monitoring user comment and activity data over summer 
to see how this works. 

We discussed different strategies for seeing that users have a 
good mechanism for getting help from librarians.  Barbara, Glenn, 
and Heleni were charged with discussing within their teams how 
to insure that desk staff can best refer user questions on.  
SIRS will take this up at our next meeting. 

We discussed Summer weekend signup.  We will try this in the 
S+ Office using the same technique as in the past.  Cindy will 
try to have this available either Monday or Tuesday of next week. 

We agreed to use the DRAFT Summer Schedule 2005 template now 
on the SIRS page for Monday-Friday scheduling for this summer.