Agenda for Oct. 10, 2006
Review new draft of Departmental Mission and Vision. Note addition of 1, 2, and 5 year goals.
Note that section on renaming department not yet written. This may be an area where we can help Joan. I kind of like the sound of "Department of Metadata and Intellectual Access" myself, but I'll be interested to hear your suggestions. Chapter 6 in the Brad Eden Book ("The Name and Role of the Cataloger in the Twenty-First Century") could be useful, but given its 2003 compilation date, the study is already pretty dated. There have been some interesting threads in AutoCat on this issue. Try entering the phrase "New name for tech services" into the archive search box, and see what comes up. [I'm putting together a table (currently very incomplete) with some of the Autocat examples, along with suggestions from our group].
A related piece of unfinished business: promoting the department's expanding range of services. For example, do we issue regular announcements via email (cf.: Jenn Nolte's announcements of new Orbis record sets)? Do we set up a news blog with an RSS feed, to push latebreaking news out to the public? Other suggestions?
Recommended reading from Joan (this is very short article): Carlson, Scott, "Lost in a Sea of Science Data". Chronicle of Higher Education , 00095982, 6/23/2006, vol. 52, issue 42; full text via Academic Search. Catalogers may find themselves increasingly in demand to help organize and preserve experimental research data from university laboratories. Librarians at Purdue, for example, are already working with scientists there to supply metadata for data sets stored on networked servers. Due to the threats of software/hardware obsolescence, and turnover in laboratory personnel, it is suggested that a centralized, library-run repository may be a more effective solution in the long term. Does Yale have something like this in mind as it implements FEDORA/VITAL?