LAUC-LA Executive Board Meeting
January 22, 2008
1:00-3:00 pm
Schoenberg 1230 (Green Room)

Present: Melissa Beck (recorder), Sharon Benamou, Valerie Bross, Cathy Brown, Hong Cheng, Peter Fletcher (guest), Julie Kwan, Toshie Marra, Maureen Russell, Heidi Sandstrom (chair), Amy Tsiang

1. Call to order

The meeting was called to order at 1:08 pm.

2. Secretary's report

The November 26, 2007 Executive Board meeting minutes were approved as written.

3. Chair's report (Sandstrom)

Heidi reported on the recent meeting of the Committee on Libraries and Scholarly Communication, held December 6, 2007. Faculty members seem gratified to be involved in the YRL renovation process. The new copy card system has been generally well received, with very little negative feedback. Heidi will send out a synopsis of the Committee’s minutes when she receives them.

LAUC-LA committee charges had been on hold until Heidi heard from Statewide committee chairs. We now have two charges from the Diversity Committee and the Committee on Professional Governance. The latter’s charge is to gather quantitative and qualitative information about the value and importance of the peer review process. Board members expressed concern over this charge and explored the following questions:

1. Why is this question being asked? (Is there an external source outside of LAUC asking for this investigation?)
2. Do we want to set up peer review as something to be challenged?
3. How would we be able to gather the type of data being requested?

Heidi will follow up with the President of LAUC regarding Board members’ concerns.

4. Vice-Chair’s report (Sandstrom, on behalf of Botello)

The Mentoring Committee will hold a luncheon for new librarians March 20, 2008. We need to determine the new librarians hired within the last year who were not able to attend the September event. Members of the Mentoring Committee and the Executive Board should attend as well. A survey on mentoring went out to the LAUC-LA membership at the end of December 2007 and results will be reported as soon as they are analyzed. Miki Goral is working on the update to the LAUC-LA brochure.

5. University Librarian’s report (Strong)

Gary anticipates 5-15% budget cuts on the UCLA campus this year. His goal is to keep as much of the library’s current allocation as possible.

Board members asked if the library can explore technological means to disseminate important information, for example the recent presentation on the OCLC/Melvyl pilot project. Gary responded that Webcasts are quite expensive, and that the campus service ReadyTalk costs $500 per hour and is limited to a certain number of people. LAUC-LA will look into podcasting as an inexpensive alternative. Valerie Bross volunteered to take this on, and will try it with the next LAUC-LA event, which will be CAPA’s training sessions for ad hoc peer review committees (see below).

6. Committee Reports

CAPA (Kwan)

CAPA has been busy and already completed eight appointments. They would like to have two training sessions (one morning and one afternoon) for ad hoc committees as soon as possible. These informal sessions will cover the role of ad hocs, the types of actions they review, and how one should prepare for the meetings. It is also important to stress that ad hoc committee members should feel comfortable to disagree with one another in the course of reviewing any action, and to record their differences of opinion in their report. This can help to clarify the issues surrounding a particular action both for CAPA and for the University Librarian.

The question arose as to how to get credit for those librarians who serve on ad hoc committees. Currently, this service does not get recorded on the Librarian’s Data Summary due to the confidentiality of the ad hoc system. Technically, all UCLA librarians serve as the de facto “standing committee” for these actions, but in reality some never respond to email requests to serve. One option might be for CAPA to send a message to LAUC-LA members asking who is able to serve on an Ad Hoc Committee for the upcoming review period; however, how that list might be used is still uncertain.

Research and Professional Development (Cheng)

The brownbag workshop on grant applications held on December 14, 2007 was attended by almost 30 people, and the Committee has already received an application from one of the attendees. Mini grants are still open for applications, and Hong will send a reminder message out to the LAUC-LA membership after the next Committee meeting.

7. Old Business

Cathy Brown gave background on the use of BruinPost as a means of soliciting nominations for the Librarian of the Year award. It was indeed a successful means of garnering worthy nominations from teaching faculty, and it was MSC to allow for a standing budget item for the Committee on the Distinguished Librarian of the Year to use BruinPost for this purpose.

8. New Business

Re: previous topic above, a discussion ensued about the confusion caused by the fact that the committee’s name is the Committee on LAUC-LA Distinguished Librarian Award, yet the name of the award is Librarian of the Year Award. The discussion was sparked by an email from Pat Hawthorne requesting that we change the name of the committee to avoid confusion with the rank of Distinguished Librarian within the librarian salary series. There are two separate issues:

1. We agree that it is not under the purview of the Library Administration to instruct LAUC-LA what to name our committees;
2. Should we change the committee name regardless, just to avoid the confusion for ourselves?

Heidi will send a charge to the Committee on Professional Governance to investigate the changing of the Bylaws and a possible proposal to change the name of this committee.

Heidi will forward minutes of Management Council, PSC, TSC, and other committees as they are forwarded to her as Chair, LAUC-LA. She will also be on the lookout for other reports of interest to the Executive Board.

9. Adjournment

he meeting was adjourned at 2:54 pm.