Steering Committee Update: May 20th, 2010

• Susan Palmer reports that the Mellon grant gives us three years to complete the grant work, with final report due March 31st, 2013. Interim reports are due March 31st, 2011, and March 31st, 2012.

• The Staff Development committee has finalized the program for the June 18th activity at Wooster. The program, Exploring the Academic Digital Landscape, includes 3 speakers, Tom Hayes and Jared Bendis from Case Western and Mark Tebeau from Cleveland State. The new Digitization Specialist, Catalina Oyler, has been invited to attend.
  

• The Technical Infrastructure committee will be meeting in Wooster on May 26th. One major topic is the half-time web development position.

• Campus Committees: The OWU committee has had an initial meeting and has solicited summer pilot proposals. Five proposals were submitted and the OWU committee intends to select two proposals for the summer. The Kenyon committee has received four proposals and will be meeting soon to consider them. Denison has approved two projects and has sent one back for revision. Wooster will be sending out their call for proposals this week, with a deadline for June 15th. Oberlin is awaiting proposals with a deadline of June 15th.

Steering Committee Update - May 10, 2010

• The starting date for the Ohio5 Digitization Specialist will be July 1st for a two year position. This suggests a minor timing issue for the grant, which runs for two years starting January of 2010. We may have to ask Mellon for a no-additional-funding extension until July of 2012, both the cover the Digitization Specialist position and those spring semester projects.
• Now the Digitization Specialist search is almost complete, the Steering Committee turned to the question of the 1/2 time position to support the web site. Alan and the Technical Infrastructure committee will develop a position description and will collect information from each campus about current and potential projects to inform the process.
• Wooster, Oberlin, and Kenyon reported their progress in collecting faculty proposals for digitization projects, with deadlines for consideration in May and June. The response has been great so far.
• The Steering Committee reviewed June 18th staff development meeting, which looks to be very attractive and useful for the Ohio 5 library staff.
  

New Major Committee Document

A survey of current digitization resources at each institution has been posted on the Major Projects Documents webpage.
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A new web page, highlighting major new documents for use during the project has been established. These documents are also found in the File Cabinet section of our Google Sites area. This page is accessible via the link in the left sidebar at the Project Main Page.

Feedback on Mellon candidates

Thanks to everyone who could attend the candidates' presentations, either live or via video conference. Pls. send feedback to your institution's representative on the search committee (Amy Badertscher, Alan Boyd, Mark Gooch, Carol Holliger, or Heather Lyle) by the day tomorrow, Friday.

Steering Committee Update - April 15, 2010

• The steering committee will meet on Monday, April 26th at 11:00, primarily to discuss the progress of the search for the Ohio5 Digitization Specialist before the search committee meets for the final time.
• The steering committee discussed our common understanding of the way in which the Digitization Specialist will divide her work time among the five institutions. The discussion emphasized the need for equitable support at five institutions that are at different stages of bringing digitization services to the respective campuses. One possibility is to create a memorandum of understanding to document this.
  
• The steering committee felt that a good first step would be an initial set of visits by the Digitization Specialist to each campus, to get a sense of the digitization capacity at each campus, an understanding of the campus culture, and list of the projects and ambitions at each institution. Those campus assessments would be reported to the steering committee. Following the report, the steering committee would establish goals and guidelines for the Digitization Specialist.

Steering Committee Update--March 31

Present: Amy Badertscher, Alan Boyd, Theresa Byrd, Scottie Cochrane, Mark Christel, Ray English, and Susan Palmer

1. Committee updates

The Technology Infrastructure Committee is finishing up the hardware survey and will post that soon. The staff survey is still being developed.

The Search Committee for digital initiatives coordinator will have a conference call on March 31 focusing on five of the seven candidates who had in person phone interviews. They will select three finalists. The next step will be in-person interviews.

The Staff Development committee has had two meetings so far, has scheduled a conference call for March 31st, and an in-person meeting for April 13th. Planning for the summer workshop will be done at the April 13th meeting. The Steering Committee advised that early June might be the best date for the workshop.

2. Librarian guidelines

Theresa will incorporate final suggestions for the librarian guidelines into her most recent draft. She will circulate the final version of the guidelines and Alan will post them.

3. Ohio Five Academic Officers

Ron and Amy reported on the progress of the grant, including an overview of the project, the work of committees, hiring the digital initiatives coordinator, and the various sets of guidelines.

4. Miscellaneous

In response to a question from Scottie: each campus committee will have discretion about the size of budgets for individual proposals from faculty-librarians. We will not develop criteria for evaluating proposals beyond what is stated in the guidelines.

Notes by Ray English

Steering Committee Update--March 23

Committee Updates:

The Staff Development Committee

The Staff Development Committee met for first time on March 16 and is in the process of planning professional development digital training opportunities for library staff.

The Technical Infrastructure Committee

The Technical Infrastructure Committee hasn’t met since their last call.

The Search Committee

Alan Boyd indicated that the search committee is mid-way through the preliminary interview telephone calls for a select group of candidates. The search committee is working to develop a short list of candidates. Regarding the search, the Steering Committee had a general discussion about the pool of candidates, quality of pool, preference for location of the Mellon Digital Coordinator at a specific OH5 campus, and number of digital jobs currently open.

Other

The Steering Committee members and other committee members will be able to participate in the interviews for the Mellon Digital Coordinator by having the candidates use our teleconferencing equipment to make a presentation as well as to participate in a question and answer session.

The Steering Committee members reviewed and revised the NGL Librarian Guidelines.

The directors agreed that at the upcoming directors’ meeting at Oberlin College scheduled for April 7^th an agenda topic will be the revitalization of the OH5 library subcommittee.