Steering Committe Update September 28

1) Committee updates
Technical Infrastructure Committee- Staff for metadata working meeting has been identified. It looks like it will be a full day meeting on Nov 1 at OWU. At the meeting participants will review the OhioLink metadata application profile and will have a brief presentation from Kenyon about how they do metadata control. Then participants will go over the master spreadsheet which list most digital collections at the Five Colleges and the metadata elements that are used in each, from this the group will try to develop best practices that expand on the OhioLink metadata application profile.

Staff Development- On The Horizon: Emerging Learning Technologies workshop (Gadget Days) is underway. Everyone should have received an announcement by now.

2) Campus updates
Oberlin- One proposal revised and funded about Spanish literature/Hispanic studies interviews, funded at $1,800.

Denison- One proposal accepted for digitizing a herbarium collection in biology. Scottie is in process of meeting with recipients to get the approval letter and acceptance forms signed.

OWU- Steering committee set deadline at Dec. 1 and are working on getting proposals in by then. There is an Oct 22 workshop as kickoff which features one project and provides information to faculty about how to propose and expectations. They are creating a dedicated scanning room and are purchasing new equipment so that faculty and students can easily use it. The three approved projects are all still in process.

Kenyon- No report, committee hasn’t meet

Wooster- Their digital specialist is leaving. To replace her the library is working with the art history department to merge two half time positions so they can post for a full time person.

3) DRC update
OhioLink is updating to 1.6.2 this week, so don’t add anything to your DRC instance until next week. The new instances have been created, this update is moving everything to a new server environment. Alan says that everyone in the DRMC is excited for what is coming up and thinks the bad times are behind us.

There is some discussion about scholarly articles and their display in the DRC. Particularly citation display and some nifty things Harvard does we’d like to emulate. For now, interface improvements are waiting until the upgrade is done. Soon after the migration there will be test instances that can each institution can use to test modifications to their own interface. The plan is to have each institution develop its own instance of the DRC, then projects can be brought together through a single website or search.

4) Making proposals available.
The original plan to wait until acceptance forms are complete before making proposals publicly available is taking too long. Now Catalina will put a link from the blog so that they can be shared and used as examples for new projects, any newly approved proposals should be sent to her for inclusion.

5) Interface specialist position description/announcement
The position description sent out by Alan is approved. Alan and Susan will post the position with a deadline of November 1st. The technical infrastructure committee will be the search committee. There is some discussion about replacement staff and benefits. Benefits will not be provided b/c its half time, this will be more like an intern position. If we hire an internal candidate then benefits for them will be sorted out. As previously discussed the position will be posted publicly from the start, though internal candidates are allowed to apply.

6) Requirements and sample award letters
The recommendation was for a standard acceptance form and guidelines for writing approval letters. Review of acceptance form. What are the Mellon grant and consortrial policies referred to in the form? Susan provided a link to the Mellon policy, for consortial policy are we referring to faculty guidelines? Mark will changing the wording to name the Mellon grant policies specifically and change “constorial policies” to “faculty guidelines.” He will also update the wording so it states written copyright permissions are needed. Each institution will share standard letters for documenting copyright permission on the NGL Google site.

Approval letter guidelines are approved of by the committee, each school can write their own letters based on these guideline. Mark will update the acceptance form with the above changes and will make the polices referred to available and then send it out again for approval.

7) Equipment purchased with grant funds
If the grant pays for the purchase of equipment does the equipment belong to the faculty or the library? As an example, Denison purchased a specific camera lens though the library doesn’t own the camera its going on, so they are letting the lens stay with the department. The only other instance is at Wooster where digital recorders are being purchased and will belong to the library, this was decided through a discussion with the faculty member before the proposal was accepted. Decision that we won’t have a written rule but it should be decided locally for each project based on the equipment and circumstances.

10) Survey
We have a 88% response and probably aren’t getting any more. Catalina and Ron will work together to produce some meaningful results from the raw data.