1/21/11

Steering Committee Update—Jan. 18, 2011

Present on call: Alan Boyd, Mark Christel, Ray English, Carol Holliger, Catalina Oyler, Susan Palmer, Mary Prophet, Deb Peoples, and Michael Upfold 
Notes by Ray English

1.  Technical Infrastructure Committee.  Alan reported that the agreement with Matt Rolf for the Interface Specialist position is being finalized.  He will have an initial appointment through the end of June, which can be renewed after that.  He will have a home base at Ohio Wesleyan and will also telecommute.  His schedule will be shared as soon as it’s established.  Catalina, Alan, and Susan are also working on guidelines for his work.

2.  Staff Development Committee.  The Staff Development Committee has been looking at various web-based training options.  They have paid for a series of ALCTS webcasts related to managing institutional repositories.  The webcasts can be viewed live on the origination date and will also be available online afterwards.  The first webcast – on on January 26 – will be at Oberlin and it will focus on copyright for non-textual materials in IRs. 

Catalina will also be doing metadata workshops at the individual schools.  These will be similar to the ones she did at Wooster.

3.  Collaborative Projects.  The group discussed what constitutes a collaborative project.  We agreed they would, ideally, begin with principals (i.e. the faculty) from two or more schools coming together to plan a project in advance.  But it was also recognized that collaborative projects will develop in different ways.  We will work to anticipate collaborative areas in advance.  The theater project from Wooster was approved.  It was also agreed that we would try to bring faculty from Wooster and Dennison together for a conference call, along with other faculty in theater at other schools who may be interested.  Catalina will develop a list – from her campus visits – of possible areas for more positive collaboration.

4.  Campus Updates. 

Wooster is receiving a proposal for a geology image database that illustrates geological change over time.  It will be reviewed next week.  They also have a February 14 deadline for new proposals.

Oberlin is expecting several proposals at the end of this week (January 21).  Catalina and Alan have worked on the format for scholarly articles in the DRC.  This should prove useful to other schools who want to load local faculty scholarly articles into their campus instances of the DRC.  Catalina has also worked on a methodology for batch transfer of citations from databases such as Web of Science into RefWorks and then into the DRC.  This may allow a much more efficient process of identifying both current and retrospective faculty publications.

Ohio Wesleyan.  A project – on the history of maps of Columbus – is close to approval.  Two more projects are in the works, one involving medieval manuscript leaves and another involving podcasts from a journalism class.  Catalina will be doing her metadata workshop there on March 18.

Kenyon.  Not much is new at this point.  A new round of proposals is expected sometime in February.

Denison.  Denison also has a call for new proposals in the works.

5.  Summon Discovery Layer.  Michael reported that all is going well with the implementation.  The Summon staff person who is coordinating the implementation has first contacted Oberlin, Ohio Wesleyan, and Wooster, since all three have A to Z lists.  Contact with Kenyon and Denison will follow.  Michael will be arranging a meeting of CONSORT staff to discuss the implementation.  The six-week timeline for the implementation started on January 5.

6.  Next Grant.  There was a brief discussion of whether we would want to start the process of applying for a next NGL grant.  It was agreed that we should first take a look at spending for the current grant.  We can then see if we want to do a one-year extension or apply for new funding.

1/19/11

Digital Collections and Metadata Webinars!

Interested in copyright and digital collections? Come learn more at the ALCTS webinar Copyright and Contracts: Moving Beyond Text in IRs hosted at Oberlin College. This webinar will allow attendees a chance to navigate the legal landscape of IRs with creative content, and intends to include time for audience Q&A. Find out more at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/confevents/upcoming/webinar/irs/012611.cfm

The Copyright and Contracts webinar is on Wednesday January 26th from 2-3pm and will be offered at the Oberlin College library. If you can't make it on the 26th a recording of the webinar will be made available.

To increase staff familiarity and knowledge with digital collections and metadata, the NGL Staff Development Committee is sponsoring webinars for Ohio Five staff. To find out about more upcoming webinars see https://sites.google.com/site/oh5nextgenerationlibrary/events.