Library Executive Council
Minutes of the Meeting - March 30, 2004

Present: Goetsch, Lowry, Rough, Ruschoff, D. Vikor, Williams, and Wilson
Facilitator: Wilson, Scribe: Rough, Timekeeper: Goetsch

Outcome: J. Dillion and J. Love detailed 2003 successes and previewed events scheduled for 2004. Many events have been planned though December and they will soon be on the Library’s calendar. LEC was asked for assistance in recommending additional members for the committee, which is understaffed. The winter sale and raffle was very successful in raising funds and library staff will not be asked for contributions this year, although they would certainly be welcome. The Goodwill Committee was praised for its work to improve the workplace climate. The Committee honors the requests and confidentiality of all staff members before any public statements are made about specific events. LEC recommends that the committee give the staff a financial report.

Outcome: Masnik and Love presented a comprehensive report of accomplishments for the past year. Highlights included numerous brown bag lunches, Secret Blossoms: the Art of Ability music and poetry reading (from which a chapbook will be published), and the Brown v. Board of Education exhibit, which received special notice and praise on campus. The committee plans to reexamine the Libraries’ diversity and organizational climate by using focus groups and a staff survey in May. The main goal is to integrate diversity initiatives into the working structure of the library. LEC specifically recognized and praised Ann Masnik for her hard work in the area of diversity for so many years.

Outcome:
DRUM (Digital Repository University of Maryland) is the local “brand” for DSpace. Campus dissertations will be the first documents moved into DRUM. Organization of information is the biggest challenge with data structured as “communities” of similar types of publications, eg. (1) UM Faculty Personal Collections, (2) Collections Managed by UM Libraries (dissertations), and (3) UM Community-managed collections such as HCIL. The many benefits to UM faculty include: a promise to preserve the data for the future; easy methods for loading information into DRUM; easy methods for linking data; and easy generation of metadata. There were questions about the revision of documents previously published in DRUM. The current plan is that “vetted” data would stay as originally posted, and multiple revised versions would be possible. LEC will receive a demo in about a month, and library staff by the end of the summer. The PR team will be brought in to help do publicity, and the Web team will be asked to feature this prominently.

Outcome: Ruschoff reported that LIMS is working toward replacing the existing IWG (implementation working group) with a new group that will help guide LIMS plans for the future. Wilson noted that ExLibris software version 16 is seriously overdue. If it does not arrive soon, this will jeopardize a summer implementation of the upgrade. Installation requires an extended downtime and it can only be done in the summer or winter break. There has been progress toward implementing self-check machines, but there are some remaining licensing issues. Bindery management software implementation is pending. Recognizing that the current method for sharing costs for LIMS operations is not equitably distributed across the campuses, a plan is being devised to restructure individual campus obligations in order to insure fiscal equity. It is expected that this load balancing will take five years to complete.

1. Both April All-Staff meetings have been canceled due to scheduling conflicts and the fact that there is no urgent business to conduct. There will be a general budget briefing in May and a report and update from the Gifts-in-Kind Project Advisory Team.
2. Lowry or Williams will make a presentation to the LFA at the April 19 meeting about the 2005 ACRL conference. There is a strong belief that UM faculty and/or staff should try and make a number of presentations at this conference.
3. There will be a UM System meeting on peer-to-peer file sharing at UMBC on Friday, April 9. There is a threat in the Maryland legislature to ban it without regard to its positive potentials. The emphasis of the meeting is on policy, not technology. Rough will be sent to represent the Libraries since Wilson is unavailable.
4. ITD received approval to send a staff member to attend a multi-day XML workshop.

Submitted by Allan Rough

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