• Confirmation of November Forum
• Determining December Forum
• Update on RefStats
• Wikipedia discussion

November Forum

The Forum will take place on November 13 in Kroch 2B48 with additional chairs for Libguides forum. Nancy Skipper will take care of the food. Susette will ask Tiffany to arrange for the projection equipment.

December Forum - International Outreach

December 18 was decided as the date for the International Outreach Forum. Jim suggested Mary Ochs as speaker from Mann. Other speakers identified were Sarah Howe (who has returned recently from Greece). Stuart Basefsky from ILR, and Maureen Morris from Olin. Matt will also investigate recruiting a speaker from Law School. Baseema recommended a panel discussion and committee members liked the idea. This will make the discussion more lively instead of formal presentations. The speakers will be requested to bring photographs for "show and tell."

Brief Update on RefStats system

Jim had some useful discussions with Camille and other members of the instruction committee. Jim confirmed that the R&O committee will continue to have ownership of the reference definitions. Now both instruction and R&O commmittees will be involved. In order to facilitate exchange of ideas, a wiki space (yes, another one!) will be set up and discussions will be conducted through the wiki. It would be part of the Research, Assessment & Usability Site so that Linda Miller can also participate in the discussions. Nancy Skipper added that she did attend the last Instruction Committee meeting and Tony Cosgrave was going to be the contact from the Instruction Committee.

A short discussion took place on whether consultations should be recorded on RSRS. Thomas Mills from Law also wanted it to be recorded as instruction statistics. Baseema mentioned that it would help if the RSRS offered the option to mark a transaction as a Consultation. Currently that option is not available thus it is not explicit that consultations should be recorded in RSRS. Currently Baseema is only recording them in ISRS.

Wikipedia Discussion

Susette gave an overview of the Library outside the Library mandate. Susette introduced the explorations regarding the possibilities of using Wikipedia as an outreach tool to promote library content outside the library. Susette reported on her illuminating discussion with Corey Earle of RMC who is an active wikipedian. Members of R&O were very curious about the different ways in which wikipedia can be used. Baseema asked if R&O and Committee for Professional Development (as Chris Miller was also present and is a member of CPD) would be interested in being sponsors for discussion forums, retreats and/or hands-on training session in wikipedia. R&O committee was in general favorable towards the idea of exploring wikipedia as an outreach tool.