Area 51 notes, Jan.26, 2012

Present: Mike Roy, Carol Peddie, Terry Simpkins, Shel Sax, Chris Norris
Absent: Doreen Bernier, Mary Backus

Mike began with a couple of updates:

  • President’s Staff is revisiting work on the College mission.  We expect it will require review and alignment of the mission from each VP, department, etc.
  • Mike and Terry reviewed possible agenda items for upcoming FLAC and SLAC meetings.  These tentatively include:
  1. FLAC: collection development issues, information literacy survey, help desk assessment,Moodle and Course Hub review, issues in open access, introduction to the assessment of our Research & Instruction services, service level agreements, Google/MSLive evaluation, network monitoring policy, printing issues
  2. SLAC: help desk assessment, information literacy survey, printing and related accoutrements such as staplers, etc., discussion about coursepacks/eres, introduction to the assessment of our Research & Instruction services,         Moodle and Course Hub feedback.

We had a brief conversation about expectations for liaisons outside of R&I.  We confirmed (pending agreement from Mary, who was absent) that LIS directors and managers should work with the Carrie as head of the liaison program to ensure that staff know and fulfill their liaison responsibilities, including meeting attendance, etc., although we may need to explicitly communicate this better with some of the newer managers.  We discussed annual performance requirements, and agreed that it makes sense to evaluate liaison performance similarly to how we handle team member performance.  However, since we have not really discussed this before now, nor communicated it to staff, we agreed to postpone implementing this until next year’s evaluations (Feb-Mar 2013).  For this year, we are asking that liaisons working outside of R&I include comments in self-evaluations specifically about their performance in the liaison role.

We also discussed a few issues around the idea of expanding the liaison program, both in terms of outreach to administrative departments, new Centers, or other cross-departmental groups, and also in terms of staff participation (i.e. opening the liaison program to more staff who may be interested and have relevant skills).  We agreed in principle that this could be beneficial, but recognized that we’d need to be careful about overlap with existing support groups (such as Banner LEADS).  For high profile administrative departments needs, the SLT could potentially serve in a liaison role.  Directors will start discussions when time permits with staff.  This may also be a good topic for an optional all-LIS Friday open meeting.

We discussed the issue of teams and the annual evaluation, specifically, a question concerning the inclusion of direct quotes from the Team 360 evaluations in staff evaluations (i.e., as opposed to the manager merely summarizing the team’s feedback).  There was the sense that the verbatim quotes should be used for truly illustrative purposes, and not just pasted into an evaluation in toto unless it was all relevant to the evaluation.  Mike will send a message to workgroup leaders clarifying that the team feedback may be used in this manner.

We continued last week’s discussion of the Google Apps/MSLive evaluation.  The way MSLive is structured makes it difficult to compare directly with Google Apps.  How do we assess the impact on various functional office? Is there really an urgency to migrating?  Has the issue of migrating data to the cloud been mitigated somewhat by recent and forthcoming changes to our network security, redundancies, and stability?  There is developing sentiment that this may not be exactly the right time to migrate from a resource perspective, from a change perspective, and from a lack of understanding about the impacts on functional areas.  Chris noted there is not a lot of overhead to maintaining our “pilot” Google Apps instance for the time being, and Carol noted that resources are very tight in crucial areas.  We also still need are required to pay for our MS licenses for the next 2 years, so there isn’t an real economic imperative at this point either.

Mike asked whether we should we begin gathering requirements?  This is something that could happen at a less urgent pace, and focus on determining existing uses and practices of these systems in order to determine exactly the functionality a new system should offer.  Mike will discuss further with College Administration.

Draft agenda for Feb. 2
Tim Spears will join @ 11:00 am discuss the employee survey
Set agendas for managers and all staff meetings
SLAs – process for approval/implementation
Calendar review
Feb 1: LIS in-service day planning team formed
Feb:15: Applications from workgroups for LIS interns due to LIS administration

Thanks for reading,
Terry

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *