SCOPA Meeting Minutes
19 February 2001
Present: Richard Boursey, Cindy Crooker, Ellen Doon (Chair and Recorder), Calvin Hsu, Michelle Light, Step Schmitt, Rochelle Smith
Absent: Jae Williams, Diane Turner
Forums
All agreed that the recent forum by Ann Okerson, Jim O'Donnell and Jim Blackaby, "LC 21: a Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress" was a successful start to the year.
Ellen reviewed the upcoming forums:
- Mary Brown, Chair of Southern's MLIS program, will speak on March 1, 10:30-12:00. Richard will introduce her.
- Scott Bennett will give his talk, "A Golden Age for Libraries," on March 14, 3:00-4:30.
- Audrey Novak has agreed do another forum on Orbis 2, sometime in April. She asked to defer it until then because by that time she will be able to discuss not only the decision about the vendor but the next steps in the process and the implementation plan in general.
Other SCOPA events scheduled for the Spring semester are the Orientation for New Librarians on April 5, the 2000 Grants recipients reports some time in April, and Scott Bennett's retirement speech some time in May. If the committee is to continue the tradition of presenting two forums a month, work on other forums needs to begin now so that we have programming for the summer and fall.
Other forum ideas were discussed:
There is still no word from Kris Hammond, of Northwestern's Intelligent Information Lab, but Ellen has asked Alan Solomon to contact him personally again. Hopefully we can schedule a forum with him this semester.
The idea of a grant writing workshop, discussed at a previous meeting, was raised again. Because hiring a professional consultant would be beyond SCOPA's budget, the workshop would have to be given by someone local, who has had much successful experience in this area. Michelle suggested someone from the Yale Grants Office, perhaps in combination with a Yale librarian. Michelle volunteered to contact the Grants Office and report back at the next meeting.
Ellen will ask Diane Turner for more information about a book by Rachel [Hyland?], the first Yale Librarian-in-Residence, about that program, and try to set up a forum. Diane brought up this idea for a forum at an earlier meeting.
The "summer series" idea, or knowledge/news sharing among the different Yale libraries was discussed. Cindy said that it doesn't necessarily have to be a series, and suggested concentrating on the non-science libraries, such as arts and music, as SCOPA has done many forums focussing on these areas in the last year. Richard criticized the idea of arts and music libraries in the same forum, however, because while the arts library is currently in a period of transition and change, the music library went through its significant changes several years ago now. The issues that concern each library would be too different for a coherent discussion. Michelle suggested focussing each forum on an issue that may be handled differently in each library but is a common concern for all, such as archiving digital information. Step suggested featuring all the digital projects currently underway on campus together in one forum. A subcommittee of Ellen, Step and Michelle will meet before the next general SCOPA meeting to discuss possibilities for this type of local information sharing forum.
Other business
Step reported that she met with Jae last week about the SCOPA website, and has been training her, but that Jae is now fully in charge of the website. All the minutes from this year are now mounted with the exception of the last meetings, but they should be up soon. Ellen added that she also met with Jae about implementing the specific updates that were discussed at previous meetings, and that those updates will appear over the next few weeks.
Comments to Jae Williams