• Announcements and review of minutes
• Linda Miller will join us so we can discuss the ALA User Centered Design conference she will be attending in January.  I have appended the descriptions of the program below and also in last weeks minutes.
• Suggestions for groups/libraries we would like to see represented on our committee to send to PSEC as they choose a new member.
• Potential use of the Student Library Advisory Board for assessment/usability questions.
• Further discussion of the brown bag/forum (focus of the event, who to invite, when/where to hold it, etc...)
  

Minutes, November 10, 2005

Submitted by Deb Schmidle

1. The minutes of the last meeting were reviewed with no changes or additions
   
   
2. Linda Miller joined us to discuss the ALA User Centered Design conference she will be attending at mid-winter ALA. Both she and Deb Schmidle will be attending LITA’s User Centered Design preconference in January. The preconference will be presented by Brenda Reeb and David Lindahl, both from the University of Rochester. Linda will attend both days of the preconference, while Deb will only be attending the Friday session. Both will report back to the committee on their findings.
   
   
3. Linda Beins has accepted a position at the Finger Lakes Library System and will therefore be leaving the committee. We discussed possible replacements for Linda. While PSEC has the final decision, Maureen will pass our suggestions on to Kathy Chiang for the consideration of PSEC.
   
   
4. We discussed the possibility of using the Student Library Advisory Board as a source for feedback on some of our usability/assessment questions. The Board meets twice a semester and has a broad representation across academic disciplines.We continued to discuss the idea of a brown bag forum to introduce our committee and to focus on policy development issues. We agreed that we should come up with a set of questions to put to the participants, including their past experiences with user assessment (both success stories and any barriers they encountered.) We will formulate these questions in the coming month. We have set a tentative date of 31 January for the brown bag session, with future sessions a possibility for Spring ’06
   
   
5. Adam reported on a session he recently attended at the Charleston Conference. Stephen Abram (Vice President of Innovation for SirsiDynix) and Dr. Bob Molyneux (Chief Statistician at SirsiDynix) discussed a major project to develop a North American database of library user measures and use profiles.  The first iteration of this project is the collection of billions of user statistics for OPAC, web and third party searches for public libraries across the U.S. This project is called the Normative Data Project (http://www.libraryndp.info), and is in partnership with Florida State University.  Abram and Molyneux also discussed the results of the Personas Project research, a major national focus group using mass narrative techniques to discover the deeper reasons for end user and librarian search and information behaviors.

Action items for next meeting:

• Maureen will continue to finalize the charge
• Maureen will send Kathy a memo outlining suggestions for Linda’s replacement
• Maureen will check into room availability for the January 31^st brown bag.
• Adam will look for an article related to the Charleston session he attended.

The next committee meeting is scheduled for Thursday, December 8^th (note: this date may be moved forward)

Adam Chandler will be the scribe for the next meeting.