Digital Reference Committee Meeting Notes (July 23, 2003)

The goal of the meeting was a debrief regarding our first ‘Digital Dateline’ lecture titled Evolving Reference Service held on July 22, 2003.

The pooling of ideas and notes from the day of the lecture produced the following list of ideas for our next lecture in the series.

1. Have sign-in sheets so we know who came and what library they work for or what school they are attending.

2. Post the Library’s ‘food and drink rules’ so our guest will keep the food and drinks in the Special Events Room.

3. Please directional sign to the Special Events Room on or near the McKeldin Welcome Desk.

4. Set up 100 chairs with 25 backups to be used if needed.

5. Have recycling boxes for cans and bottles.

6. Make sure the speaker repeats all questions.

7. Add to the evaluation form the question “Where or from whom did you learn about this lecture?” with some options to check.

8. Best time for next lecture, early October from 10:30 a.m. to noon.

9. Use both sides of the food table to move people though and possible use an added table for coffee and tea.

85 people attended and 53 returned their evaluation forms. The following are the results of the tally of the evaluation forms.

The vast majority of those attending rated the speaker highly and only a few objected to his limited sales pitch for QuestionPoint. We should have had a clear break between the talk and the information on QuestionPoint.

The ratings for the next topics were:

Very Interested Maybe Not Interested

Synchronous / Asynchronous Reference 19 14 4

Commercial vs. Library-run QA services 22 9 8

Software Options 14 18 5

Internet Power-Searching 29 9 0

Legal Issues in Digital Reference 23 13 1

Marked all ‘Very Interested’ 11

Marked all ‘Maybe’ 2

The top two topics selected were ‘Internet Power-Searching’ and ‘Legal Issues in Digital Reference’.

Notes scribed by Neal Kaske