Attendees:  Anne Kenney, Pat Schafer, Kathy Chiang, Pat Court, Zsuzsa Koltay, Carmen Blankinship, Katherine Reagan, Angela Horne

Guest Speakers:  Karen Calhoun and Linda Miller

PSEC will be looking at public service functions across the library system with an eye towards improvements, efficiencies, and the impact of 10% and 20% reductions.

Technical Services Review Process

·        PSEC met with Karen Calhoun to discuss Technical Services’ methodology and experience in conducting their analysis for the LARIS review

·        Karen distributed her “Notes on TS Review Process” to begin the discussion

Preliminaries

·        Develop a charge for LARIS lead team and LMT that explains the scope of the review

·        Technical Services assembled a review team

·        Decide which pieces of information are made public and which are kept private, and make these distinctions very clear to the working group

·        Technical Services set up a shared drive for their working documents

Data Collection

·        Technical Services worked only with LARIS data regarding FTE; they consulted with Human Resources when salary information was needed which protected confidentiality

·        Technical Services conducted staff interviews that produced a more in depth look at individual values and perceptions

·        Use data from ARL’s LibQUAL to compare Cornell to its peers for institutional benchmarking (http://www.arl.org/pubscat/libqualpubs.html)

Analysis

·        Begin with 10% scenario; think creatively for the 20% scenario (difficult to maintain the existing service levels in a 20% scenario)

·        Gather ideas, demonstrate the savings, and make impact statements; recommendations will follow

·        Technical services categorized ideas into:  “Makes sense”, “Could do if we had to”, and “Awful ideas”

Write report (oral and/or written)

·        Present scenarios and recommendations

·        Technical Services made the Executive Summary public and then kept the Full Report for the LARIS lead team and LMT

Beginning the PSEC Review Process

·        Charge and Scope:  Which library functions are defined as public services?  Access Services (1), Exhibits and Public Programming (9), Information Reference and Instruction (11), ILL Borrow Direct (13), and Stacks Management (16.3 & 16.4)

·        Timeframe:  Three year staged process

·        Review Team:  PSEC members decided not to form a smaller group

·        Confidentiality:  PSEC agreed to make the charge public, but the specifics of their deliberation and recommendations private

·        PSEC has a website:  http://www.library.cornell.edu/psec where information can be shared, and the LARIS data resides

·        PSEC will have weekly meetings beginning on August 20th and ending on September 10th to focus on this review

·        The LARIS data has been collected and parsed for PSEC review by Linda Miller

·        PSEC will work with salary summary information to protect confidentiality

·        Staff interviews:  PSEC may not have the time frame to do much of this

·        Data for analysis:  LARIS, LibQUAL, Convenient Business Hours, Student Assistant data, staff age demographics

·        A 10% reduction could lose 10.94 FTE; 20% reduction could lose 21.88 FTE

·        Look at library hours and service coverage- Reference services are provided 74% of the time that the library is open across the system

·        Think about re-building public services from the ground up; according to LibQUAL “affect of service” is less important to users than “personal control”

ACTION ITEMS:

ü      Become more familiar with LARIS data- fold in Student Assistant data and Stacks Management data

ü      Decide which functions/areas to protect

ü      Project where the library system will be in five years

ü      Brainstorm for ideas

ü      Ask Lee Cartmill whether lines that are already lost count in the savings for the scenarios

ü      Ask Sarah Thomas to send a memo to inform staff about the analysis of the LARIS data

PSEC will be meeting on:

Wednesday, August 20, 1:30 – 3:00pm in 702 Olin

Wednesday, August 27, 1:30 – 3:00pm in 702 Olin

Wednesday, September 3, 1:30 – 3:00pm in 703 Olin

Wednesday, September 10, 1:30 – 3:00pm in 702 Olin