Public Services Committee Minutes: December 11, 2017

Conference Call

Members Attending: Marissa Ellermann (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale); Susan Franzen, co-chair (Illinois State University); Anne-Marie Green (Kishwaukee College); Aaron Harwig (College of DuPage); Sarah Hill (Lake Land College); Joanna Kolendo (Chicago State University); Nester Osorio (Northern Illinois University); Cory Stevens, co-chair (Lake Forest College)

Members Absent: Richard Stokes (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

CARLI Staff Attending: Elizabeth Clarage and Denise Green

Announcements

  • CARLI Updates:
    • Denise informed the committee that there was a previous announcement about a new CARLI staff member, who will be joining in January and work with Cindy in electronic resources.
    • Elizabeth announced that the CARLI Office would be closed from December 25th to January 1st; the office will reopen on January 2nd.
    • Elizabeth informed the committee that CARLI loaded the MARC records of the Open Educational Resources into a database, so that they appear in I-Share; the MARC records are also available to those that are not a part of I-Share or would like to load them into another system.
    • There will be a webinar on January 17th put on by the Open Educational Resources Taskforce on getting started with Open Educational Resources.
    • There will be three in-person workshops in April given by staff from the Open Textbook Network that will be coming to Illinois.  They will be training trainers, who will then instruct others in their institutions.  Trainings will take place on April 23rd at Governors State; April 24th at Loyola University Chicago; and April 26th at Heartland Community College.
    • Two webinars are coming up.  One on February 1st, 2018 on using rightsstatement.org for rights statement for digital collections.  The second one is a copyright Q and A on March 6th.  Registration is not yet open.
    • The CARLI calendar contains all upcoming event dates and registration information.
    • The RFP for the new library service platform was publicly posted on the Illinois Procurement Bulletin for Public Institutions of Higher Education.  The I-Share Taskforce is going to be reviewing responses to the RFP.   This is all confidential.  Demonstrations will be for the Taskforce only, unlike in previous years, because of new procurement laws.

Discussion:

  • Open House Discussion
    • Sue contacted the following Joliet area libraries:  University of St. Francis, Joliet Junior Community College, and Lewis University.  She did not hear back from the University of St. Francis or Joliet Junior College.  She expects to hear back from them at some point this week.  
    • Sue talked to Lewis University, and they currently do not have a single point of service.  They have two desks, reference and circulation, which are located on the opposite ends of the library.  Sue talked to Lindsay Harmon at Lewis, and she thinks that they did have a single point of service before their remodel.  Lindsay will talk to staff that might have been around during this time, and can detail the reason behind the change to a multiple service point system.  Elizabeth pointed out that it would make for an interesting presentation to find out why Lewis decided to go back.
    • The committee discussed a timeline for any additional open houses.  If the committee decides to do another open house, Elizabeth suggested that everything should be organized by the end of January for an open house in late March or early April.  An open house can also be moved back to May.
    • The question was raised if one open house was sufficient.  Marissa stated that current plans with the Joliet area are a good place to start, and the committee should wait and see what these places say.  Other members agreed.
    • The idea was raised that one library from Joliet can host and Lewis may present about what they had in the past and what they learned.
    • Denise had some feedback from Quincy University, Illinois Wesleyan University, and Governors State University.  They are exploring if they might present during the Millikin event.
    • Denise suggested that it was a good idea to have some case studies presented, and for the committee not to just visit single point of service sites.  A lot of libraries have consolidated branches and have virtual branches and that might be another angle to explore.  These changes are driven by building concerns, changes in research methods for disciplines, and sometimes to save costs.
    • Sue shared that at Milner there has been some discussion about consolidating services because of staffing issues.  Nester suggested that it would be interesting to investigate what duties librarians are performing instead of reference and if these duties are more important.
    • Aaron located articles that discuss single point of service.  Studies range from 2001 to 2016 and are from around the country, not just Illinois.
    • Nester suggested surveying the places that have written about single service points.  The goal is to find the trends and to obtain a global prospective.

Decisions:

  • November minutes were approved.
  • It was decided that the committee would collect studies on single service points to be listed on the committee’s website.  

Tasks Assigned:

  • Joanna took minutes.
  • Sue will report next time on the Joliet locations.
  • Aaron and Nester might work on locating articles on single point of service.
  • Elizabeth and Denise will set up something on the committee’s web space to deposit the documents located on single point of service.
  • Aaron will send the articles to Denise to be placed on the committee’s web space.

Next Meeting

The next Public Services Committee Meeting will take place Monday, January 8th from 2:00 – 3:00 PM (conference call).