Instruction and Reference Program Committee (IRPC) Meeting Minutes
11/15/2004


Agenda item 1: Announcements

  • The Role of Teaching (Teleconference 1)
    Date: Friday, November 19, 2004
    Time: 12pm-2pm EST

    Location: 106 Olin
    Please bring your lunch. Tea and cookies will be provided.
    Registration: Library Learning Opportunities cu-lto-mailbox@cornell.edu
  • Over the holidays there will be a clean-up of the Elsevier titles in Find E-journals. Apparently there are titles to which we are not supposed to have access but have still been available in find e-journals. So, starting in spring semester, you may encounter patrons who will say that they had access to titles Fall semester that don't appear in Find e-journals.

    Over the Christmas break, Olin and Mann will offer reference service on some of the days.  Further information will be forthcoming.

Agenda Item 2: Michael Engle

  • DRC has agreed to fund XRefer Plus. 100 titles (to be selected) will be available. 
  • Reference Universe is available to us on trial. Michael welcomes our feedback.
  • Michael demonstrated searching OCLC Worldcat through Google.com. The system is rather "buggy". One nice feature is the ability to find a book in a library near you via a zip code search. The system might be a little faster for staff than going through the library gateway. It would be useful for those creating a webliography.
  • Nan Hyland mentioned a feature in amazon.com called  "bookmarklet." There is information on this at:

    http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/stories/2002/12/11/librarylookup.html

    You can do a similar thing with Worldcat:

    http://www.librarystuff.net/2004/09/worldcatgoogle-bookmarklet-created.html

Agenda item 3: Oliver Habicht and Michael Cook co-chair a newly formed committee.

  • The Public Service Public Computing Advisory Committee (PS/PCAC or PCAC) has met just once, last Tuesday. As soon as the membership is finalized, Anne Kenney will make an announcement via CU-LIB. The web site is http://www.library.cornell.edu/pcac/ , which contains a statement of purpose and membership and operations information.

    Oliver mentioned that the Guest-ID suggested by CIT would potentially allow guests to use NetPrint, for example. The proposed changes to Red Rover were the driving force behind the recent "fast-tracking" of the Guest-ID initiative. The changes to RedRover have been put on hold, so the Guest-ID initiative's time-line is now uncertain.

Agenda item 4: Common Reserve Task Force --Pat Schafer and Maureen Morris

  • A common set of policies and procedures and a single form and page for reserve is in the works. The page and web form will go live on Monday, November 22. The web form accomodates both electronic or print resources. Of special note is a cut and paste feature for citations, which makes the process much faster and more accurate. Each unit will be able to customize the loan periods for reserves. There is also a paper form for print and electronic reserves. It is the faculty member's responsibility to check on copyright issues.

    One future enhancement will allow a faculty member to pull up an old reserve list and re-send or edit the list. Another enhancement will allow the unit to split off electronic from paper reserves.

Agenda item 5: Paul McMillin demonstrated the "Greatest Hits" feature and asked for comments.

  • more white space between entries
  • suggested title change to "popular databases"
  • font size could be small in title "greatest hits"
  • There is an ADA station at Mann. This would allow preview of web page to make sure it is compliant.
  • Paul also is working on the problem of people using initial articles in title searches. An explanation appears and gives the option of searching on the title minus the inititial article.

Agenda item 6:  Martha Walker briefly demonstrated ArtStor. 

  • Artstor in on trial until November 21. CU will subscribe after that. Martha is offering two instruction sessions in the Uris computer lab:
    • Wednesday, Nov. 17 from noon to 1:30PM
    • Thursday, Nov. 18th from 9AM - 10:30AM
  • The collection currently has about 300,000 images and plans to expand. Because ArtStor is a collection of various collections, subject terminology is not standardized.  It is possible to set up a customized collection of images to accompany a lecture.

Agenda item 7:  Angela Horne spoke about the Business Instruction Working Group.

  • The 2nd meeting will be on Wednesday Nov. 17th at 10:30AM in ILR 237.
  • The discussion about career resources was postponed.

Agenda item 8:  Surinder Ghangas made the following suggestions:

  • If you have reported a problem, please communicate that information to CUL so that she doesn't get a lot of calls
  • When working on a problem, Surinder will communicate with one contact person each hour and that person should pass along a status report
  • If just one electronic resource goes down, contact LIBIT-L. They check every 15 minutes.
  • If the server goes down, contact NOC at 5-9900
  • Because there are so many possible places for a problem to be, it is not possible to automatically monitor applications.

 
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