Area 51 meeting notes, Mar. 16, 2012

Present:  Mike Roy, Terry Simpkins, Carol Peddie, Chris Norris and Mary Backus
Guests: Mary Stanley, Joseph Watson (1st item only)

Today’s meeting began with a tour of 118 Main Street.  Mary Stanley took us through the newly renovated building, which could possibly serve as office space for LIS staff.  Currently, the upper offices are being used by retired faculty and the lower level is vacant.  There is potential office space for 8-9 staff members.  Mary Stanley will send a copy of the floor plan to Joseph Watson and he will bring it to the Space Team for discussion.

This year’s February Board of Trustees meeting was held in Monterey, which Mike attended.  While he was there, he had conversations with various MIIS folks, the high points of which include:

  • videoconferencing conversations are happening all over the place, both at MIIS and MIDD.  We will pull together a meeting of some of the LIS folks involved with these to update everyone on what’s being discussed in different venues
  • MIIS is exploring wireless vendor optionsMIIS is also maintaining an AS400.  Sadly, we’re not alone.
  • There continues to be interest in the idea of staff exchanges
  • the MIIS library has some interest in exploring OCLC’s WorldShare and SubsPlus

Mike will ask Jim Keyes to present at the March 21st all-staff meeting.  LIS awards will also be handed out at this meeting. If Jim isn’t available, we’ll fold the staff meeting into our in-service day.

Mary presented a proposal for a “penalty points” system for overdue library materials for review.  Mike suggested that we gather reactions from FLAC and SLAC, and also touch base with Alison Byerly.  We also asked for more information regarding why certain classes of users were exempt, and what the impact might be of not excluding them.  We will discuss again in the near future.

We had a brief conversation about how to communicate the outcomes of the management training. The plan right now is to have a de-brief session with all LIS managers, and then to have an all-LIS presentation about what we learned, and what we plan to do differently based on what we learned.

Future Agenda Items

  • Space Team to discuss 118 Main Street possibilities
  • Bradford Campus Manager

Thanks for reading,

Terry & Doreen

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