Instruction and Reference Program Committee (IRPC) Meeting Minutes, 8/18/03

Announcements:

• Pat Schafer thanked Bob Kibbee and Nancy Skipper for taking the IRIS
  Reference Services co-chair positions for the past year and announced that Bob will now serve as Head of Reference Services with Nancy as Associate Head of Reference Services. Pat also announced the good news that Ida Martinez will be continuing in IRIS Reference in an academic position.
• E-Reference has been removed from the Library Gateway. Starting Wednesday, the URLs in Voyager should be correct for using as links in Guides. The old “campusgw” links for resources will still work during a transition period, but guides should be checked as soon as possible for needed corrections. The ENCompass Find e-journals list will be launched at noon on Monday [done].
• Angela Horne reminded people about the change to MyLinks functionality, resulting from the removal of e-Reference. Online help materials have been updated and a note has been posted on the MyLinks web site. A survey of MyLinks users may be planned. The Personalized Library Services Group will be discussing next steps for this service.

Web Guides Working Group
Paul McMillin explained the goal of this group, which also includes Lance Heidig, Angela Horne, and Kornelia Tancheva. They have received a CUL internal grant to try to automate library web guide creation and storage, while maintaining as much flexibility for different styles and different library units. For example, automation could include the ability to import data from Voyager as well as stored descriptive information from past semesters into web guides. Different models at other universities are being investigated as well as opportunities for collaboration. The group is interested in forming an "Advisory Group" to help with this project. Anyone interested in joining the Advisory Group or interested in more information should contact Paul McMillin (phm1@cornell.edu).

Gateway Changes
Maureen Morris highlighted upcoming changes to the Library Gateway. [Maureen subsequently sent a message to IRPC with more details about these]. Changes will include a Faculty Services page, a guide to available technology at unit libraries, a more prominent Purchase Request form, the Library Events Calendar. Maureen urged IRPC members to look at the Research and Subject Guides page to determine if anything needs to be updated. Related to the guides discussion, Ross noted that Racial Diversity and Religious Diversity guides would be created in response to President Lehman making these issues a high priority for the campus.

Privacy Policy
Building on previous discussions about privacy issues related to reference transactions, Virginia and Nan presented some draft language to better inform users about privacy issues when using chat reference and email reference. It was decided that they should pursue adding this information for the chat reference service [most likely it would show up as a link on the Ask A Librarian page], but that the way unit libraries handle e-mail reference varies too much for standard language at this point. Paul McMillin has been investigating a way to easily purge name and e-mail information from questions and will share this with this group when it is available.
This would allow saving questions for training and reference purposes, but ensure patron confidentiality.

IRPC planning for '03-'04
Nan led a discussion on behalf of the IRPC Steering Committee to gather ideas for future IRPC meetings or events. The importance of sending out early agendas was raised. The group seemed enthusiastic about another IRPC Retreat in the Spring.
Other possible future discussion topics: Life Sciences Initiative; Electronic Document Delivery; Training issues (students and staff); ENCompass experiences; Outreach issues (Ross encouraged the group to make this a cross-functional discussion).

One more announcement related to Interlibrary Loan: Users will be
required to put a specific date in the "Cancel After Date" field. The option to enter "Never" will no longer be available.