Instruction and Reference Program Committee (IRPC) Meeting Minutes, 02/16/04

Peter Hirtle announced that  Miriam Nisbet is scheduled to speak on Thursday, 18 March on " Libraries in the Digital World: Threats and Opportunities ." The place and time is still to be determined. See http://www.cit.cornell.edu/oit/UCPL.html .  Miriam is Legislative Counsel for the American Library Association.  

Pat Viele introduced Diane Kurbeck, Project Leader for CIT. Diane spoke to us about CyberTower. CyberTower is a collaboration between Cornell Adult University and CIT. It is a free service funded through the Provost. The target audience are alumni and prospective students, but anyone can login. An ID and password are required for keeping track of the demographics of users. There are three main parts of CyberTower: study roons, forums, and views and reviews. Diane feels that the study room would be the best area for library instruction.
  • there are about 25 study rooms currently
  • one study room will be taken down at the end of the semester, as the faculty person is leaving Cornell
  • once the faculty person has the lecture ready, production of a study room takes about three months
  • there is a $2500 stipend to compensate for the faculty person's time
  • the streaming video portion of the study room should be no longer than 60 minutes, and it works best if the video is broken into segments
  • publicity has been mainly through mass email mailings to alumni and prospective students, ads in the alumni magazines and through the class officers
  • there are about 10,000 hits per month on the site
  • Diane is working on getting better statistics
  • study rooms have an expected life span of several years
  • it is possible to up-date a study room, but so far no one has opted to do so.
  • in the future there may be a study room for admissions specifically for recruiting students
  • the site is not google accessible, but the "tour" is outside of the study rooms and might be open to google searches

Ideas for using Cybertower include:
  • a series on Internet searching
  • links to existing pages, like the how to evaluate web pages information
  • study room about CUL special collections
  • links to instruction sessions:  "if you want to learn more, here are some classes....."
Lynn Thitchener demonstrated the CourseInfo pages that she uses to supervise and train six students who work as Information Assistants from 10PM to 2AM.  Lynn is herself a distance education student working on her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee:
  • all questions and answers are kept for review and then put into an archive
  • the archive seems to have about 300 questions per month
  • there is a class assignment alert -- a warning to expect certain kinds of questions
  • the students enroll themselves in the "course"
  • Lynn conducts a 3-hour intense orientation meeting before each semester and then meets with each student individually sometime during the semester
  • there are PowerPoint presentations for training the students
  • the system was very easy to use
  • the "course" seems to be working very well
  • it is password protected, however,  IRPC members can view the site by logging into Courseinfo at http://courseinfo.cit.cornell.edu . Use "IRPC" for the User Name and "view" for the password.

IRPC Retreat:  March 22, 2004  Warrren Hall 401  8:30AM - Noon

Suggested reading:  "Partnerships and Connections"
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2003/crlnewsnov903/integratingoutreach.htm

Theme:  Outreach
Schedule:  8:30AM - 9AM registration and poster sessions
Opening comments:  9 - 9:10AM Bob

Nan Hyland will moderate the two panels.

Speakers One: Jean Callihan and Howard Raskin

Break:  10:10 - 10:40AM

Speakers Two: Jill Powell and Leah Solla

Wrap-up: 

Details will be posted to CU-Lib and CUCD-L as well as IRPC-L.

Details will be posted to the IRPC web page:  http://www.library.cornell.edu/staffweb/IRPC/index2.html

We encourage everyone to bring examples of brochures, newsletters, and other outreach artifacts.  If you plan to do a poster, please notify one of the committee members.

Nan Hyland  nch9@cornell.edu
Bob Kibbee  rk14@cornell.edu
Angela Horne akh8@cornell.edu
Jean Callihan jc374@cornell.edu
Pat Viele ptv1@cornell.edu
 
2003 Cornell University Library
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