— HR report: 9 mth. faculty and 10 mth. staff work schedules have been worked out by HR. Once a faculty or staff person begins working such an appointment it’s permanent. Also, the schedule must be agreeable to supervisors and departments.

— Facilities: MSL’s 2nd and 3rd floors are going to be renovated over the semester break – a new circ desk and study areas, new carpet and painting, etc.

— HSCL integration: Acquisitions will be making invoice payments in PeopleSoft from posts the HSCL staff input into Aleph. Judy is setting up a meeting with her, Rachel, HSCL administrators, Jack & I to talk about the procedures we’ll use and other questions or issues affecting the TS integration.

— Space Planning: Judy stated that Acq. & Cat. are occupying ‘prime real estate’ and would like to use the rooms for study space or collaborative research areas. She wants to find new space for the two departments so Admin is considering renting a floor in a building (yet to be built) near Waldo & NE 23rd Ave. – on the “East Campus”. This building would be brand new and might offer expanded space that could be tailored to our specific needs. Betsy & I are asking for feedback from the staff: at this coming Monday’s Unit Managers Meeting, the Unit Managers will discuss the issue and will be asked to share with their respective staff about the ramifications and to collect input. We’re also being asked to consider the looming possibility that staff working in room 200 will be relocated to the west end of room 300, as the two depts. (minus Gifts) would be smooshed together into one floor. This smooshing would most likely be temporary as the main idea is to get the two depts. out of rooms 200 & 300; so we could find ourselves moved into a building on campus that is being vacated (e.g. first floor of Matherly). Yet another log on the fire.

—– Remember, Judy & Rachel are visiting the department in May. Look for an agenda to come out of the Unit Managers Meeting…

This notice is for Aleph accounts only, if your students do not use Aleph then please disregard this notice.

Student Work Study/OPS, Volunteer and non-permanent worker Aleph accounts must be renewed each semester.

Spring semester accounts will expire on Thursday, May 7, 2009.

Please have someone in your department request account renewals through the GROVER system

for any students/volunteers/non-permanent staff currently working this spring who will be returning to work for you the summer semester.

***** Please provide the ALEPH User IDs for all renewals. ******

Thank-you.

Congratulations and thanks to Kerstin in the Paying Unit and Beverly Caggiano at USF. Aleph ARROW now produces a payments per budget report that shows complete line item data including title and date paid. We now have Arrow functionality that has been 5 years in the making. Way to go Kerstin and Bev!

President Machen will publish proposed 10% budget reductions from all colleges tomorrow, 4/16/09. According to the latest information I have, it will be available on his UF website at http://budget.president.ufl.edu/ According to information there, UF must achieve budget reductions of $72-$75 million in the next fiscal year.

How green is my department? Just a note from the Library Green Team that best practice for energy savings is to turn off your monitor when you leave for the day. Please do not shut down your workstation, however; Systems needs them running for periodic updates they push out to our machines. Best practice at the end of your day is to either do a re-start or log off.

Last week, the Serials Unit, joined by Doug and Paul,  met with Justin Clarke and Patricia Rodgers from Harrassowitz. Some of the topics we discussed include invoices, orders in Otto Serials, and claims.

The main discussion was about invoices and some problems associated with them, such as discrepancies between invoice numbers contained in the EDI file and those delivered through snail mail.  Recognizing the importance of  the issue, Justin proposed and we all agreed on a new way of invoice delivery.
From now on, Harrassowitz will send PDFs of invoices with their e-mail notifications. To avoid duplication, they will stop sending paper copies of invoices.  Although this means that we will have to print the invoices, we believe that the new way of invoice delivery will allow for a timely and more efficient way  of  invoice processing, including downloading, posting and payment.

With regard to invoices that come with standing orders materials, after learning that three copies of the invoices are not needed here, they agreed to send two copies only.

Similarly to what we agreed with EBSCO a few months ago, we asked if Harrassowitz could create separate accounts for print, print+online, and online journal subscriptions. Justin responded positively to our request and promised that Harrassowitz would do separate invoicing for each format.

And lastly, we found out that Harrassowitz accepts EDI claims. I’m reading their online documentation and will work with them and our staff to have this project accomplished soon.  EDI claiming will definitely speed up the claiming process and reduce staff time devoted to this task.

Let me know if you have any concerns and/or questions.

Thanks, Raimonda

Chris will be acting Chair – thanks Chris – and Jack will be the primary backup. Chris make sure to keep everyone posted on your schedule during the time I’m out. Rachel may contact staff with questions regarding orders, materials budgets, e-resources, etc., so be prepared. I hope you all enjoy the one-on-one meetings you will have with Rachel on April 16th — see the Blog post for unit schedules. Unit Managers will want to set individual meetings within their block of 45 mins., so check with them for more info.

I’ll be returning on April 22nd and won’t have Web access or email while in Colombia (also no phone, paper, or tv – yes, that’s still possible!). I will do email and may even Blog from the Acq. Conference in Oxford during the week of 4/13-4/20. Best, Steve

(1) Rachel and Judy will be visiting us during our quarterly department meeting on Tues., May 5, from 10-11 a.m.

(2) Rachel will be visiting with each staff and the units in the afternoon on Thurs., April 16, during the following times:

Paying Unit: 1:00-1:45

Serials Unit: 1:45-2:30

Monographs Unit: 2:30-3:15

E-Resources Unit: 3:15-4:00

Agenda for the Dept. meeting with Rachel & Judy will be forthcoming. Thanks, Steve

Last week, at the CD/Resource Sharing Conference in Tallahassee,  a four-person team created content, presented, and facilitated a full-day preconference. The team consisted of Claire Dygert (FCLA), Cecilia Botero (HSCL), Paul Lightcap and myself. Here is the short summary of the program taken off the web site: “This two-part program will begin with a series of focused exploratory discussions on the positive and negative aspects of E-Books, with the goal of developing a collaborative E-Book purchasing model that could effectively be employed by the college and academic libraries in the state of Florida. Topics and issues to be covered include E-Book selection, marketing, and discovery, as well as the training needed to create a successful E-Book program. In the second part of our program, we’ll meet with an E-Book aggregator, an E-Book publisher, and a Book Services Vendor to discuss how they could work with the model(s) developed in our earlier session.”

My thoughts on the preconference:

Summary Point Taken from the E-Books Summit
(1) Usability is key. Accessibility is still not there. At the very least, e-books should be as good as print but really should be better.
(2) Pricing models are not clear to either vendors or the library community. Both need to work together to come up with models that are acceptable to both.
(3) It is clear that libraries want to move to cooperative e-book purchasing; libraries do not want the e-book pricing models to be like the e-journals (i.e. each library buys a copy of the same title so 5 libraries in the consortia hold the same resource); instead, libraries want 5 different titles shared by all. Access needs to be through a state-wide license not on the simultaneous users model). E-Books should be shared throughout the SUL, specialized libraries, like Law, Health, CCLA, CLA, or even drilled down to specified disciplines like business or psychology.
(4) In order to do an efficient job of cooperative collection development, libraries need to identify the usage habits of different groups; for example, medical students might use e-books differently than LAS students; graduate students might use e-books differently than 2-year community college students.