Reference and Outreach Committee Minutes, 9-20-06

Attending: Sarah How, Virginia Cole, Suzanne Cohen, Bronwen Bledsoe, Jim Morris-Knower (co-chair, facilitator), Michael Friedman, Deb Schmidle, Nancy Skipper, Kornelia Tancheva, Oliver Habicht, Susan LaCette, Xin Li, Thomas Mills, Kizer Walker, Terry Kristensen, Angela Horne, Pat Viele, Maureen Morris, Fred Muratori, Susette Newberry, Linda Miller, Jill Powell (recorder), Susan Kendrick, Ellie Buckley, Staci Rogers, Randi Kepecs, Lynn Thitchner

Agenda: Outreach: How Far Out Do We Reach?

Handout – Jill distributed a handout on outreach – an informal compilation of what libraries on campus are doing regarding outreach. All libraries responded to the questionnaire she sent out. It will be available at the Ref  & Outreach website at this address http://publicservices.library.cornell.edu/psa/ReferenceAndOutreach/Reports.cfm. The document is meant to be a starting point for discussion.

Jim then started the session by reading goals from both Sarah Thomas and David Skorton:

Sarah Thomas goals:
       Be a better service provider
       Build and grow partnerships with faculty and students in research & learning
       Welcome, inspire, nurture
       Flexibility: embrace change and diversity
       Stewardship [Web Feat, Itso CUL, large-scale digitization, Get It!, Blackboard, Podcasts, blogs, information fluency]

David Skorton goals (from http://www.cornell.edu/president/speeches_2006_0907.cfm)

1.      To continue and accelerate the transformation of the undergraduate experience at Cornell, to achieve our goal of making Cornell the finest research university and provider of undergraduate education in the world.

2.      To optimize the environment for our staff.

3. To draw the disparate geography of Cornell's several campuses into one community – in essence, one campus.

4. To appropriately support the arts, humanities and social sciences on our campuses.

5. Last and perhaps most important from a global perspective: How can Cornell draw inspiration and resolve from its land-grant mission to use its enormous and varied resources and talents to positively impact the world outside our gates?

Discussion:

Partnering with faculty is very valuable, we can move into their space offering our help and tools – at Vet they create multimedia learning assets.

New goals may already be in effect. We need to be proactive in informing current administration what we are already doing. What may be a lightbulb for them is a well-worn path for us. Outreach to administration.

How do we fit it in our busy schedules, how to stay relevant.

Michael Friedman at Vet sends letter to new faculty telling them what the library wants them to know, such as how to recall book, library-to-library delivery, document delivery, interlibrary loan, etc. They follow-up with visits.

JGSM staff visit new faculty on a drop-in basis without a formal meeting.
Comments about faculty interests/research are written up and shared with
colleagues.

For faculty, outreach means K-12. Sarah How and others taught teachers on a professional development day for K-12 teachers on March 24, 2006. Participants are interested in ongoing help, but outreach to that community involves a lot more time than we may be able to give. We need to decide what we can and cannot do.

How do we measure outcomes? In collection development  it might be the amount of money college departments give   to the library, or whether a grant gets approved. But it’s harder for other areas, such as Mann’s New Student Welcome. Lots attend, eat food. How to measure its success – based on attendance?

Suggestion – taking new programs as pilot, measure outcomes, set priorities, consider political agendas before doing too much.

Way to be available to public – metaphor to being lost in a department store. Want to turn around and find help, but don’t want staff following you around. Will your audience find a dept blog or repeated emails intrusive?

People use our services a lot more than we know – measuring that is difficult. We can create department lib web pages and have department link to it. Statistics show that the English Dept. one is being used. Fred puts new resources on it on a regular basis. Examples of these pages include:

Latino Studies: http://latino.lsp.cornell.edu/ ( library link under Network Resources)
English: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/english/index.html (Library Resources link)
Theatre, Film & Dance: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/theatrearts/ (library link under Resources tab)
Anthropology: http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/anthro/index.php (library link under Links tab)

Anecdotal stories, thank you notes are good.

Pat Viele sends weekly Pat’s Picks of useful URLs.

Annoyance factor? Suzanne reports that Stuart at ILR has active notification list where he sends messages frequently. He gets lots of thank you notes and good feedback about it.   Users handle it by filtering, other means. Annoyance doesn’t seem to be a problem here.

Receptions with food are great outreach tools, but are also expensive.

Most people come to us at point of need. The outreach events remind them that at their next point of need they should come to us.

Barton Hall Services Fair – you feel very needed, students and parents are very receptive to information about the library.

Fred goes to faculty meetings, faculty are grateful for that, sometimes they worry the library is making decisions without their input, so they like it when we maintain contact.

Jill will add to the spreadsheet outreach to faculty regarding e-only journals and scholarly communication issues.

Michael Friedman tells the story of his faculty member who wanted to use 1 chart in his lecture and the publisher wants $400, even though it was authored by him. This is a good hook to get faculty to listen about scholarly communication issues.

Instruction sessions – faculty wind up learning a lot from the sessions too. They come up afterwards to say that they didn’t know about certain databases.

Wegman’s outreach, or seeing patrons around town who ask us questions.

If we plan activities around the measurability, it could be problematic, since the outcomes can be intangible. (Networking, receptions, etc.) Xin feels we have to set priorities based on measured outcomes or some evidence.

Mann put up staff names and faces up near their service desk – how to measure the effectiveness of that?

Libqual does measure attitudes of patrons, and we measure high on that.

Counting versus measuring isn’t the same thing. Need to set up measuring criteria. Could be what do you remember 5 years after you left the university? Instruments used to do measurement can be flawed. The question “where do you find information” elicits Google, but if they asked “where do you find information for your honors thesis,” they would likely get a different answer.

We should identify priorities and figure out how to measure them. Our group could help decide this. We can give list to PSEC via Kornelia. One example would be working with underrepresented audiences.

Outreach to alumni, such as reunion weekend is very big for RMC.  Petrina Jackson will go to North Carolina to talk to alumni regarding a fraternity that was started at Cornell. Engineering shows movies during reunion on technical topics (Building Panama Canal, etc.).

For the next Reference and Outreach Forum we will have speakers on outreach talking about on-campus outreach. Later we will have a forum on off-campus outreach. Other topics include using new technologies for outreach, setting priorities for outreach, outreach failures, usability and assessment.

Xin Lee mentioned the budget for PSEC , including outreach activities. If we project how much we need we can ask for it – Xin needs this by March for the following fiscal year.

Adjourned at 10:30 am.