Meeting Notes
October 9, 2001
Present: Adam Chandler, Charlie Finger, Bill Kehoe, Don Schnedeker, Ira Revels, Oya Rieger (chair), and Leah Solla.
Note: The meeting minutes and the attached proposal have been reviewed by Debra Lamb-Deans, Katie Margolis, and Kornelia Tancheva who were not able to attend the meeting.
Members discussed the attached proposal to develop a CUL Web page to describe CUL's distributed learning support services for faculty. Here's a summary of the Committee's discussion:
- Currently, the Library Gateway does not offer customized sections targeting faculty, students, or staff (similar to what CIT is doing). We think that most of the unit libraries do not take this approach either. It will be useful to create user-specific pages to describe various services (not limited to distributed learning) offered for them. This approach may also help us to be more visible on various Cornell web sites, including CUInfo.
- Cornell's distributed learning providers need a site that they can refer to in order to better understand how we can contribute to this new learning realm. Such a site ideally will represent the CUL services in general terms - with links and referrals to unit libraries for more specific information. For example, CIT’s “Distributed and Distance Learning Resources at Cornell" page can point to the envisioned CUL Distributed Learning page.
- This page will bring everything together so that the user will have a common entry point and become aware of the general parameters of our consulting services. We predict that consulting requests will be different depending on the colleges and departments and will consequently require a customized approach.
- Creating a general page describing the role of the Library in supporting faculty and off-campus students will also encourage the unit libraries to develop such pages describing their customized services. The Office of Distributed Learning can work with smaller libraries in their efforts in developing supporting services.
- Our users do not necessarily know about our services and what we can do for them. Currently we are making an assumption that our users are well aware of our services and collections. We have been supporting faculty and students in distributed learning since the introduction of the Gateway in the early 90s. However, the Library has not yet developed a systematic program to promote its services closely relating them to actual distributed learning activities.
- It is hard to define "consultancy" across the libraries. We are usually not very comfortable with making quantitative judgements and pointing the faculty to "best" resources. We are more comfortable with offering them the search results for their evaluation. We can do a better job in inserting our expertise in our reference consultancy services.
- CIT has free and fee-based consultancy services. We should investigate the applicability of such a system for CUL. We have not started to promote our specializes services (such as archiving, electronic publishing, metadata, digitization, GIS, etc.) yet. We have the skills and expertise but may lack sufficient resources (and programs) to offer our services more broadly to Cornell faculty and the administration.
- If we have a distributed learning referral page, we need to also develop a mechanism to gather feedback about its use (feedback button). We need to make sure that such a common gateway will be useful to the targeted audience. This page also may help to identify additional user needs.
- We need to structure such a CUL Web page carefully as some unit libraries may not be ready for additional demand. We want to promote our services in general but also limit risks of being overloaded with consultancy requests. On the other hand, it is important to build and prove demand for our services to be able to secure additional funding.
- As we develop online components to our services, we need to take advantage of the instructional design principles (not only interface design).
- An earlier meeting with the access steering committee members focused on the effects of distributed learning (technology-mediated instruction) on various access services. This group also recommended the development of system-wide, general guidelines for faculty and students to articulate the Library services provided (and not available) for them in support of their distributed learning and teaching: http://www.library.cornell.edu/DL/Access Services 7-17-01.pdf
NEXT STEPS
Oya will develop a prototype CUL DL web page (structure) based on the committee's discussion. We'll review the site during our next meeting. After this preliminary review and revision, we'll share the Web site with other CUL groups to get broader feedback. Oya has already informed Nan Hyland from the Library Gateway Committee about the development of this Web site. [Refer to minutes attachment: CUL_DL_Learning_Web_Page.]
Meeting notes by Oya Y. Rieger
CUL Staff Web Site | Committee Index | DLAC Index
11/07/01 vwb