MARS EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEETING

Tuesday January 28, 2003

Radisson Warwick—Chancellor Room

 

MINUTES

 

PRESENT:

Executive Committee Members:

LeiLani Freund, Chair; George Porter, Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect;  William McHugh, Past Chair; Naomi Lederer; Alesia McManus; Mary Pagliero Popp; Doris Ann Sweet; Pat Riesenman

 

Committee and Task Force Chairs and Representatives:

Mary Mintz; Jana Ronan; Becki Whitaker; Lesley Bell; Carolyn Larson; Y. Diana Wu; Lori Morse

 

Guest:  Carol M. Tobin, RUSA Past President

 

Chair LeiLani Freund called the meeting to order at 8:30 am.  She announced that Carol Tobin, Past President of RUSA would attend today’s meeting.

 

A. Committee and Task Force Reports:

  1. Management of Electronic Reference Services Committee (Lesley Bell) –  Lesley Bell reported that MERS had met twice at the conference.  On Sunday two members of the NISO Committee on Question Answering attended.  The NISO Committee document was technical, but there was a good discussion at the Sunday meeting.  MERS would like to have an additional meeting with the NISO Committee members in Toronto.  They are not sure whether this should be an open forum or lead to a program.  If the committee would like to do a program on the NISO document on question answering in Orlando, they should have it approved at Toronto.  Lesley was advised to work with Alesia McManus, the MARS representative to the RUSA Conference Program Coordinating Committee.

The committee also discussed the Checklist for Reference Web Pages.  The Publications Committee had sent a number of revisions for the document and MERS decided to scrap the checklist.  The members do not know how it will be used and do not feel that it will be relevant.  LeiLani asked that Lesley notify the Publications Committee.  Bill McHugh asked Lesley to send a print copy of the document for the archives.  Naomi Lederer also asked that a memo about why the publication was dropped be included with the copy sent to the archives. 

  1. MARS Preconference (Lesley Bell) – Lesley also reported on plans for the preconference on digital reference scheduled for Toronto.  All of the speakers have confirmed and 3 sponsors have been identified.  Part of the plan was a joint session on evaluation with the MOUSS preconference on evaluation of reference services featuring John Richardson as the speaker.  MOUSS has since changed the whole focus of their preconference.  Richardson will now come to our conference in the late morning to speak about evaluation.  The whole morning session will cover evaluation.  There seem to be some questions about whether Mr. Richardson has already committed to us and several other speakers were suggested including Christine Koontz, Sara Weissman and Susan McGlamery.   Becki Whitaker asked about the poster sessions and whether some of the speakers from the Atlanta program on the care and feeding of those doing digital reference might reprise their notes as poster sessions.  Alesia agreed to email Jody Fagan.  Jana Ronan thought that the Virtual Reference Discussion Group could do a poster session and George Porter suggested that Kathleen Kern and Bernie Sloan also be invited.  LeiLani recommended that the Preconference Committee put out a call on MARS-L to encourage poster session proposals.  She also commended Lesley and the Preconference Committee for the quality of the program they are planning.
  2. MARS Program (Lesley Bell) --  Lesley discussed the MARS program in Toronto entitled “The Information Commons Challenge:  Take Ownership of Technology Before It Takes Ownership of You.”  There will be three speakers:  Michael Edmunds of the University of Toronto, Linda McKenzie of the Toronto Public Library, and Allison Cowgill of Colorado State University.  Each will speak for 20 minutes, answering a number of questions posed by the committee.  Tentative questions include:  What they think of the Information Commons as the future of libraries; whether there was a backlash when the Information Commons had no books; issues related to private sponsorship; relationship between the Information Commons and the library (Michael Edmunds is not a librarian); and whether the profession will continue to exist if it does not embrace the technology.  LeiLani stated that there was a desire to bring in someone from Arizona, but the one and one-half hour time slot was too short.  LeiLani and Bill both noted that a business meeting must be included and can take no more than 10 minutes. 

Mary Mintz asked if there would be PowerPoint slides to show the physical characteristics of the three facilities.  Lesley responded that they plan to put this information on the MARS web site before the conference.  LeiLani said that the RUSA Board agreed this would be a hot topic.

  1. MARS Achievement Recognition Certificate Committee (Doris Ann Sweet) --  Doris Ann announced that the committee had met and carried out its work.  An announcement will be made in the near future.
  2. Hot Topics Discussion Group (Mary Mintz) – Mary Mintz talked about the discussion on Saturday at 11:30 am.  She noted the challenge of an early in the conference meeting time. She had found out just before the conference that ExLibris was having its own forum on MetaLib at the same time; she contacted ExLibris and all agreed that it was too late to make the change.  Close to 50 people attended the Hot Topics session.  Presenters were:  Rich Bennett, University of Florida, Ed Tallent, Boston College (who presented an update from last summer’s MARS program) and Mark Denlow of the Univesity of Notre Dame.  The program was more presentation than discussion.

The committee has several ideas for the Toronto session.  They will discuss privacy later and give the topic of evaluation of virtual reference to the Virtual Reference Discussion Group.  They are considering the issue of expectations for reference librarians to support special software, such as personal bibliographic software (EndNote, ProCite).  There was some concern that this might be too geared to the academic library.  LeiLani stated that the RUSA Board had talked about exploring use of PDAs, for library databases and services.  Doris Ann Sweet noted that they are experimenting at Simmons and have an expert.  Jana Ronan suggested finding someone from a medical library.

  1. MARS Best Free Websites Committee (Lori Morse and Carolyn Larson) – Lori Morse talked about the committee’s meeting on Sunday afternoon.  Two visitors expressed interest in joining the group.  The committee modified its criteria, firmed up its timeline, and talked about the length of member appointments.  The committee has been in existence since 2001 and the co-chairs are willing to continue, but need to consider membership procedures.  George Porter suggested the co-chairs get back to him with suggestions for one or more vice-chairs.  Pat Riesenman suggested using the consultant slots.  LeiLani agreed to investigate the policy on consultants and stated that she would ask some of the members to serve on the new fee-based web sites investigative group.

Carolyn Larson announced that some of the MARS Best annotations are starting to appear in annotations on Library of Congress bibliographic records.  A keyword search on “MARS Best” will locate them.  Becki Whitaker suggested a press release on RUSA-L and MARS-L.  Carolyn agreed to follow up.

  1. MARS Historian (Pat Riesenman) – Pat announced that the Planning Committee will address changing the title of the position in the official documents from archivist to historian.  She stated that she had asked Donavan Vicha from RUSA about archiving of electronic documents.  With Jian in place as webmaster, work can begin.  LeiLani noted that we would have to consider this issue later when the new site is up.  Questions about the URL addresses for MARS pages were brought up and it was agreed that more information was needed.
  2. Nominating 2003 (Nancy Buchanan) – Nancy was unable to attend the meeting, but LeiLani made a brief report for her.  Candidates for chair-elect are Alan Stewart and Doris Ann Sweet.  Candidates for member-at-large are Sue Hocker and Nancy Portnow.   LeiLani commented that the RUSA Board expects that electronic voting will likely be in place by 2005.
  3. Nominating 2004 (Bill McHugh) --  Bill announced that the committee had met and will contact possible candidates.  He noted that he had a lot of experience in arm-twisting. 
  4. RUSA Conference Program Coordinating Committee 2004 (Alesia McManus) – Alesia announced that program updates for Toronto are due by January 31 and proposals for Orlando are due May 15.  The only programs now on the schedule for Toronto are those for the MARS Chair, Management of Electronic Reference Services, and Education, Training and Support.  George Porter suggested we discuss the program proposals on the MARS ExComm list before the Toronto conference.   Alesia will remind everyone of the deadlines. 

Alesia announced that Orlando preconference proposals are due now.  So far only a  preconference on genealogy has been approved for the History section.  The RUSA Program Committee has pre-approved a preconference for MARS based on our past track record; that means we have an option to develop a preconference, but are not required to do so.  LeiLani stated that we would have to appoint a new committee and George suggested asking for co-chair volunteers by February.  Several topics were discussed, including reference interviewing and best practices in the digital reference environment.

  1. Liaison to LITA (Y. Diana Wu) – Diana Wu reported on two meetings she attended:  the 2003 Program Committee and the 2003 LITA Forum Committee.  At Toronto, LITA plans to have three preconferences:  eBooks:  After Hype and Death, What Really Works?  Technology Disasters: Planning for Them and Recovering from Them, and Breaking Free:  Recreating Your Library Web Site from A-Z.   A number of programs are also planned:   Science Fiction-Science Future; Public Portals and International Collaboration; Fair Use by Design: Programming Fair Use; Optimal Design Considerations for Web OPAC Interfaces; If It Is Free, How Can It Be Any Good?  Digital Storytelling; Unicode and Authority Control; Cliff’s Notes (Clifford Lynch) and The Library as Electronic Publisher.   There is no title yet for the President’s Program.  In 2004, there will be at least one program about wireless.

            Diana also reported that the LITA National Forum is scheduled for October 2003 in Norfolk, Virginia. The committee is still brainstorming about topics.  David Seaman of the Digital Library Foundation is a possible keynote speaker, to be asked to talk about electronic publishing.   There will also be programs about the National Digital Library for K-12, Archiving of Digital Materials, Copyright, the U. S. Patriot Act, Open Source, Human Computer Interaction, and Virtual Reference.

  1. MARS Representative to the RUSA Membership Committee (Becki Whitaker) – Becki reported that the RUSA outreach letter would include information for folks who cannot attend conference—a sort of electronic outreach.  She stated that Nancy Bodner had reported on the Recruitment Assembly.  ALA is looking for a national spokesperson for ALA and for the profession.  A reduced membership cost for the first three years will be implemented by ALA and retirees with 25 years of membership will get free membership and reduced registration costs at Annual. The RUSA Board has a goal of retaining first year members.  RUSA will write letters to first year members.  The Membership Committee is collecting reasons for continuing membership in RUSA to include in the letters. 

In the area of mentoring, RUSA needs to develop a plan for a single program.  There are currently multiple programs.  The Membership Committee has some confusion about what mentor means.  She suggested we tell the Outreach Committee to move forward with a MARS mentoring plan.  Naomi Lederer noted that mentees had loved the old mentoring program, but mentors did not like it very well.  Mentees got a “good feeling” but real mentoring did not occur.  She asserted that it is important for the MARS Outreach Committee to decide exactly what mentors should do.

Becki announced that RUSA Membership will try to better organize staffing the RUSA booth at the annual conference.  She also recommended that MARS resurrect the MARS brochure for the booth.  Suggestions from the group included calling for volunteers using MARS-L and putting the booth time on the schedule and letting the scheduling coordinator find people. 

Becki also noted strong concern about the loss of the RUSA Update.  Carol Tobin stated that she was unsure whether this had actually been approved.  Becky urged MARS to take the issue back to the table at the RUSA Board meeting, suggesting alternative solutions, such as highlighting a few sections in each issue with longer articles.  Becki asked that MARS present a resolution suggesting a rotating spotlight in print + electronic updates.  Pat Riesenman asked that we instead request that RUSA explore print alternatives and volunteer MARS for the job.  Carol Tobin suggested this might be better raised as a point of information and all agreed.  If the decision is already made, MARS can write a resolution.

 

B. Report by Past President of RUSA (Carol Tobin)

Carol talked about the proposal to create two groups from the current MOUSS—Resource Sharing/ILL and a frontline reference group.  These came out of both the MARS and MOUSS section reviews and the RUSA retreat last midwinter.  There are a lot of general issues handled in MARS.  Everyone does electronic reference these days.  There is some feeling that MARS might need to reinvent itself to be more specialty-oriented and hard-core (like BRASS), focusing on things like vendor relations or statistical analysis.  Bill McHugh noted that electronic is not the summation of reference.  Everyone agreed that division-wide conversations are needed.  Doris Ann Sweet asked about whether Reference and User Services included access services?  She saw a need for such a group to have a home, perhaps with MOUSS. 

In answer to Mary Popp’s question about what MARS should do, a number of ideas were suggested:  be willing to be flexible as discussions move forward; remind the RUSA Board that people join multiple sections and their jobs overlap multiple sections; suggest that each RUSA section have a generalist committee; consider changing the MARS name to Emerging Access to Resources Section (with the “e” in lower case).  All agreed that we need to continue to be part of the discussion and take a leadership role where appropriate.

 

The meeting was adjourned at 11:05 am.

 

Respectfully submitted,

Mary Pagliero Popp