LIBRARY EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
September 19, 2000

Present: Younger, Bessler, Dannelly, Marmion, Blackstead, Casad,

Kathy presented the current endowment priorities for review and update. We need to update the case statements as appropriate and decide whether there should be one additional statement included. When these are complete, Kathy would like to include the case statements in our public web site, particularly for use by regional development officers.

There is concern about the relationships between our program strategies and priorities and the nature of opportunistic endowments and gift receipts. The Libraries will seek to define gifts in the broader sense of library missions. This topic will be presented at the next LAM meeting

Dan reported on a new usage survey of desktop applications, NT@ND premium applications, to evaluate what we make available to Library staff and faculty. Due to new restrictions on the distribution of applications, the University and the Libraries are facing higher costs for nearly all application packages. So in order to establish the real needs, Information Systems and Access will be sending the survey to all ULON employees. It is important that all respond so the we will have a realistic needs and funding assessment for future desktop computing.

Ex Libris will host a meeting to discuss EDI with several Aleph users and materials vendors later this year. Marc Truitt is attending the International Council of Aleph Users meeting in Berlin with Ex Libris' support. There was a discussion of evaluating the importance of our role in the international Aleph community.

Dan and Jennifer will attend a meeting of the University's Web Advisory Council (Jennifer is a member of the Council and Dan is an invited guest), at which one agenda item is web site content management software. The university is investigating purchasing such software, and there are concerns that while it may work well for management of the University's public site, it may not be effective for the presentation of library content. The outcome of this is likely to impact the development of our web site.

Jo reported on the progress of planning for compact shelving in the Engineering Library. The planned changes should provide an increase of 50% in shelving for bound journals and shelf space for 6,000 to 7,000 monographs.

Jo met with Clint Davidson, VP for Human Resources at Duke University and an outside consultant to the UND HR department in the evaluation of programs and HRIS systems. The areas that she identified as working well are employee relations support and training. Areas that could be improved are increasing the number of staff in HR, improve creativity in recruiting, make compensation flexibilities better known. It would also be helpful if more policies were publicly available on the HR web site.

Gay reported on an initiative to provide collection assessment and evaluation in Irish studies. This is at the request of the Keogh Institute.

Gay also reported on materials budget status and the review process that she is initiating over the next several months. She will use LEC as a sounding board in addition to the CDC. The careful initiation of a plan to cancel the paper subscriptions of Academic Press titles received in electronic form will be discussed at CDC later today, as will an initiative to cancel the paper copies of indexes and abstracts received in digital form. The indexes and abstracts need to be done quickly in order to make this year's last serial cancellation date. Pat Loghry will establish that date.

Theresa announced that we have hired a new Building Services Supervisor to succeed Dave Thornton. Ross Ferguson will begin work on October 2 and will be able to work with Dave for two weeks prior to Dave's retirement.

Jennifer asked the status of the Blackwell Table of Contents investigation by Bib Access. The final report and recommendations were received after the LEC meeting.

LEC discussed the procedures and timetables for Reappointment and Promotions and for the Annual Evaluations. Reappointment decisions must be completed by September 29, 2000. Performance evaluations should be done by October 29.

Next agenda:

Annual review process and basic criteria for merit increases.

Reported by Gay N. Dannelly

Return to Director of Libraries Page