The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Category: Feature

  • Disaster Planning and Recovery Workshop: Part 2

    • Tom Clareson demonstrates how to dry photos using fishing line. (All photos credit: Irina Radeva.)

    On November 30, Anthony Timek and I attended the final session of a two-part Disaster Planning and Recovery Workshop sponsored by the New Jersey Cultural Alliance for Response (NJCAR), of which Rutgers is a member institution. You can read my report on the first part of the workshop in the November issue of the Agenda.

    This session was held at the Wall Township Police Headquarters and focused on recovery. Presenter Tom Clareson, senior consultant for digital and preservation services at LYRASIS, covered the stages of disaster, with a particular focus on the last three:

    • Planning
    • Mitigation
    • Immediate Response
    • Recovery
    • Long-Term Recovery

    In the first part of the day, we learned about creating a comprehensive communication plan, appointing a recovery team, formulating salvage priorities, and assigning duties. The second part of the day consisted of an indoor demonstration by Clareson of how to treat waterlogged items. Afterwards, the group went outside and we plunged our hands into freezing water in an attempt to recover wet books, periodicals, microfilm, VHS tapes, DVDs, and more. At one point we even had an entire microfilm unspooled and drying in the cold November wind. Overall, the exercise was very valuable, especially for those who were lucky enough not to have experienced a water emergency in their facility.

    One significant takeaway from the workshop was for each institution to establish a relationship with first responders ahead of a disaster and familiarize them with the building and the disaster plan. Another was to create partnerships with similar institutions who may be able to assist each other during and after a disaster. In the spirit of the latter, Rutgers University Libraries shared our Water Emergency Presentation and Mold Identification Tutorial with the New Jersey State Library, who posted the materials on their website along with similar resources on disaster planning and preservation. Check out an article about this workshop on the NJ State Library’s website here.

  • This month in the Agenda: January 1998

    The January 11, 1998 edition of the Agenda.
    The January 11, 1998 edition of the Agenda.

    This month, we go back two decades in the Agenda’s history to January 1998. The median household income was about $38,000; the world was ramping up for the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan; and we’d see blockbusters Armageddon, Titanic, and Saving Private Ryan all hit the box office over the course of the year. How did we ring in the New Year at the Libraries?

    Asking the Big Questions

    [P]rinted below are the questions in the charge [of the Steering Committee for the Libraries Long-Range Plan]…. As you can see, answers to the questions will give us guidance by which we—library faculty and staff—will then make specific plans for our future….

    What principles should guide how collections are developed and distributed throughout the system, including, for example, duplication of resources, dispersion of collections, new program development, and locations of departments/programs?

    What factors should influence the balance between print and electronic resources that the Libraries provide?

    To what extent should the Libraries satisfy the University’s information needs through collaborative resource sharing arrangements or document delivery, as well as the traditional ownership of information resources?

    What are the characteristics of service excellence to the university community?

    What quality, scope, and types of library space will be required to provide service excellence into the future?

    In what ways can the university community act to affect the current scholarly communication models to increase information availability and reduce costs?

    – The Agenda 20, no. 1 (January 11, 1998)

    Authority Is Constructed and Contextual

    At long last, the Rutgers library catalog will have full authority control for all name and series headings. The recently established LIS-Authority Committee is now investigating Sirsi policies for the implementation of authority functions and beginning a search for the vendor which will provide the best services. It will be writing an RFP (Request for Proposal) for authority control processing this spring, with an eye toward selecting a vendor in the early summer. The Committee, chaired by Rhonda Marker of TAS, welcomes all suggestions, wish-lists, and caveats from the library community regarding either vendors or online authority work.

    – The Agenda 20, no. 1 (January 11, 1998)

    Freshening Up

    The Libraries have recently received an allocation from University VP Joseph Seneca of $92,695 to upgrade academic facilities as part of the “Reinvesting in Rutgers” initiative the President announced in his state of the university message.

    The Libraries submitted a proposal as part of the academic facilities upgrade component of this initiative. The specific projects that were funded include upgrading the Mathematical Sciences library facilities (carpeting, draperies, acoustical buffers, etc.); replacing the telephone and wiring infrastructure at the Kilmer Library; and upgrading voice wiring at Douglass.

    In addition, Media Services was allocated $1.7 million to upgrade the smart classrooms on the New Brunswick campus and to improve the Kilmer Library media classrooms.

    Decisions regarding programs to be funded on the Newark and Camden campuses facilities are being handled through their respective provosts, who have not yet reported.

    – The Agenda 20, no. 2 (January 25, 1998)

     

  • This Month in the Agenda: December 1979

    This month, we go back to the Agenda’s inaugural year—1979. Jimmy Carter was President, Sony had just introduced the Walkman, and a gallon of gas costed $0.86. What was happening at the Libraries?

    Ski trip flyer
    Anyone up for a ski trip? (Hope it was better than that drawing…)
    Calling All Friends!

    An organizing party was held on November 20 to plan for the future of the Friends of the Library. Representatives  from the University Trustees’ Library Committee, University faculty and administration, Rutgers Foundation, and Library administration attended the early evening event in the Librarian’s office. They discussed various ways the Friends could raise support for the Library.

    – The Agenda 1, no. 42 (December 3, 1979)

    Movie Time

    FILM SHOWINGS
    Alexander Library, Wednesday, December 5 – Persona, New Jersey Room, 7:30
    Kilmer Area Library, Tuesday, December 4 – Italian Straw Hat, AV, 7:30
    Newark Dana Library, Monday, December 3 – Notorious, Listening/Viewing, 11:30

    –The Agenda 1, no. 42 (December 3, 1979)

    Need a Gig?

    RUL PROFESSIONAL VACANCIES
    Alexander Library: Information Services Librarian. $17,544 and up dependent upon qualifications.
    –The Agenda 1, no. 43 (December 10, 1979)

    Archives Shaping Up

    The Board of Trustees has allocated $45,000 to fund an Archival Study Project to be conducted under the administration of the University Librarian.

    The project will survey current and non-current records and disposition practices throughout the University to develop recommendations for a coordinated records management/archives program. The program will enable the University to fulfill administrative needs, conserve space, meet legal requirements, and preserve historical records. From RUL’s perspective, the archives/records management program is part of a broader plan to develop research collections.

    Hendrik Edelman has appointed George Kanzler, William miller, Edward Pason, Ruth Simmons, Donald Sinclair, and Emma Warren to serve on the RUL Advisory Committee of the Archival Study Program. They will deal with the implications of the Archival Study Project for the Libraries.

    –The Agenda 1, no. 44 (December 17, 1979)

  • Retirement and YOU!

    Retirement and YOU!

    A new year is approaching! If you are thinking about retirement and what is involved in the process you should check out the important on-line links below that offer key information to help you prepare.

    ABP Retirement: Welcome to the Alternate Benefit Program Retirement Seminar Presentation [PDF].

    PERS Retirement: Welcome to the Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS) Retirement Seminar Presentation [PDF].

    Additionally, UHR offers seminars to both ABP and PERS members contemplating retirement.  If you are interested in attending a seminar, please check the Learning and Development Course Registration System under Employee Benefit and Work-Life Programs managed by University Human Resources.

    Please note: Employees will need to submit an intent to retire letter to their supervisors to advise of the effective date of retirement once they have fully committed to retire.

     

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  • Getting to Know Calvin Lai

    Many of you will have seen by now that this year’s State of the Libraries meeting on December 6 features special guest speaker Calvin K. Lai. (If you haven’t yet registered on Eventbrite, please take a moment to do so. Enter SOTL2017 when prompted for a password.) In advance of his visit to Rutgers, let’s learn a bit more about his research.

    As director of research for Project Implicit, Lai explores implicit biases, or the tensions between our conscious experience and unconscious mind and the resultant disconnect between our thoughts and actions. These biases are evident when, for instance, our attitudes about particular groups of people (based on their gender, race, religion, weight, ability, and so on) are at odds with our explicitly stated values about those groups.

    Lai’s research focuses on different approaches to changing our implicit biases and the question of whether changing these biases is actually the best approach for mitigating their effects on our behavior. He also offers lectures and workshops to organizations that discuss how unwanted influences can impair organizational performance.

    If you simply can’t wait to learn more, visit the Project Implicit website to complete an Implicit Association Test on your own or check out Who, Me? Biased?, a video series on implicit bias from the New York Times that features Lai (above).

  • What does the “Academic Library Impact” report mean for us?

    Stephanie Mikitish is co-author, along with Lynn Silipigni Connaway, William Harvey, and Vanessa Kitzie, of “Academic Library Impact: Improving Practice and Essential Areas to Research,” a new report from The Association of College and Research Libraries. We asked her to provide an overview of the findings and what might be most applicable to Rutgers University Libraries. Enjoy!

    Educational stakeholders are increasingly calling upon academic libraries to document their impact, especially in the areas of student learning and success. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) commissioned OCLC to investigate how librarians and other library employees can define, measure, and communicate their contributions to these areas. As Rutgers University Libraries continue to adapt to responsibility centered management (RCM) with the rest of the university, librarians and other employees can utilize the report and tools developed by the project team and add to research on library contributions to student learning and success.

    RCM has remapped stakeholder groups into more defined units. The deans of the university’s schools now control more of their budget, and they will likely be more willing to fund resources and services that clearly and directly benefit their faculty and students. Currently, library faculty and staff collect and report numbers for entire groups of users, such as the number of books checked out by undergraduate students for the entire university, or for library location, such as the number of exits at Alexander Library or the number of reference questions answered at the Robeson Library reference desk. Some data are more school- and even department-centered, such as the number of bibliographic instruction classes taught for the Newark College of Arts & Sciences. Studies of student learning and success conducted at other RCM institutions can suggest future directions for the Libraries’ research in these areas. However, the quality of data collected is an important factor that librarians and other library employees must address.

    To facilitate future studies and reporting, library faculty and staff may need to rethink strategies for collecting relevant data in a more consistent manner with concern to individual user privacy. While some data, such as the exit gate count, is consistently taken at each library, other data, such as reference statistics, may be recorded using different units of measurement (e.g., time required to answer a question), even at the same location. Standardizing data collection is a large task, but research that documents and informs other librarians on how to go about this and how to use the data may be eligible for funding from ACRL.

    In order to promote research, ACRL will be offering grants to conduct and/or present research in the following 6 areas.

    1. Communicate the library’s contributions
    2. Match library assessment to institution’s mission
    3. Include library data in institutional data collection
    4. Quantify the library’s impact on student success
    5. Enhance teaching and learning
    6. Collaborate with educational stakeholders

    The project team identified the above areas based on literature on academic library impact on student learning and success and from interviews with librarians and provosts. Given the scope of the Libraries’ collections, spaces, and services, any work done to demonstrate our contribution to student learning and success would fall into one or more of the categories above. The components of the ACRL/OCLC project, which include a research agenda to guide future work on the topic and a literature search/visualization, can suggest what aspects of the Libraries’ resources are most relevant to Rutgers stakeholders, ways to measure reach and impact, and how to effectively communicate the results of such work.

  • Humanism in Medicine: Teaching Poetry to Residents

    I serve as the clinical medical librarian for the Internal Medicine department at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark. This means I attend the residents’ morning reports every Thursday and Friday at 8 a.m. as they discuss patient cases to help them learn how to diagnose and treat the patients they serve. When a question comes up which can be answered by an article, I look up the answer in the medical literature and the chief residents share the results with the others via Sakai. I also train the residents in searching techniques in various databases such as PubMed, Scopus, or VisualDx.

    Dr. Mirela Feurdean, internal medicine residency program director at New Jersey Medical School, approached me in September 2017 about doing something a bit different with the residents. “I know you’re a poet,” she said to me. “Would you be interested in teaching a poetry workshop to the residents?” In my personal life, I’m a published poet who teaches a weekly workshop in Jersey City, and I just published my first chapbook this year. So of course, I said yes.

    The first workshop was held at noon on September 22, alongside free pizza for the residents. The residents were a bit shy, but 11 (out of 20 or so) ended up participating. I shared handouts with them that included a poem written by an award-winning internal medicine doctor, Rafael Campo, as well as a patient. I also shared a couple articles about how to use metaphors effectively when explaining science to patients. For example, research has shown that breast cancer patients who use battle or war metaphors to describe their experience with cancer have a higher incidence of depression than those who use positive words like “challenge” or “journey.” The words we use matter. The residents wrote poems employing medical metaphors, and some even submitted their finished poems to Ars Literarium, the literary journal of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and other RBHS Schools.

    The chief residents asked me to return the following month, and on October 20, we focused on short poems, learning a bit about the form haiku. This time, virtually all 20 or so residents participated. Even if they weren’t writing themselves, they snapped their fingers or clapped their hands to celebrate each other’s work as they started to share their writing. Dr. Ahmad Al Turk was inspired to write a clever quatrain, Odgen Nash-style.

    NSAIDs work for all
    Conditions that end with –itis,
    Summer, spring, or fall,
    But don’t get fooled with gastritis!

    By Ahmad Al Turk, MD

    The medical “joke” of the poem, for those without the medical background, is that NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin or ibuprofen) can irritate the stomach and cause gastritis.

    However, not all the poems were strictly linked to medicine, and some of the doctors wrote about other aspects of their lives. One resident was inspired to share a rap he had previously written, and he nervously approached the front of the conference room. As he closed his rap, which shared a story about a patient who survived a dire medical situation, he encouraged his fellow doctors not to “go numb” as they continue their work as physicians. His fellow doctors cheered and clapped, and there were tears in the eyes of many.

    I look forward to continuing these workshops to my residents, as I hope to help them de-stress during a hectic time of their lives.

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  • This Month in the Agenda: October 1984

    Welcome to the newest regular feature of the Agenda. In “This Month in the Agenda,” we’ll explore highlights from this month in the history of Rutgers University Libraries. For the inaugural column, we’ll travel back in time 33 years to October 1984. What news was buzzing around the Libraries?

    My, How the Times Have Changed
    A five year summary of library statistics spanning FY 79/80 to FY 83/84.
    East Asian Library Making Waves

    The East Asian Library and the International Center have received $14,000 from the New Jersey Department of Higher Education to establish an in-house automated information and delivery service to support East Asian research and curriculum development at Rutgers and within the New Jersey State Colleges System.

    –Weekly Agenda 6, no. 40 (October 1, 1984).

    Dinner, Anyone?

    Name the Libraries’ integrated system, commonly known as Geac, and win a dinner at The Frog and the Peach in New Brunswick.

    The online system now includes cataloging and circulation elements, but the name should be flexible enough to cover all additional subsystems as well as the online catalog

    Submit names to Kamala Truscott, Library Administration by October 31.

    –Weekly Agenda 6, no. 41 (October 8, 1984).

    The DeWitt Library Society of the Rutgers University Libraries invites you to share in the pleasure of an evening celebrating good books on Tuesday, November 13, 1984. The festivities celebrate the completion of a very successful year for our National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant.

    –Weekly Agenda 6, no. 43 (October 22, 1984).

    Movin’ On Up

    Changes in Position

    Timothy Corlis, Library Assistant II, Central Technical Services

    –Weekly Agenda 6, no. 41 (October 8, 1984).

    Cabinet Report

    Edelman: Working on Title II-C proposals in Special Collections: Consumer Archive, Latin American Archive, Afro-American Archive. Proposal deadline is November 1. Reported on meeting to be held regarding Performance Appraisals. Discussed METRO: G. Neely will attend meeting on 10/25. Senator Case’s furniture to leave the Librarian’s office; to be placed in Special Collections Seminar Room.

    –Weekly Agenda 6, no. 43 (October 22, 1984).

    Spam Filter Needed

    Campus mail is designed to be used for University business between departments of the University. Campus mail should not be used for transport of personal mail, chain letters or other unauthorized uses. Employees who make unauthorized use of campus mail may be subject to reprimand.

    –Weekly Agenda 6, no. 43 (October 22, 1984).

    On Exhibit

    Elizabeth Cady Stanton Materials, Mabel Smith Douglass Library

    Through December 1 – “American Presidential Elections, 1904–1984,” Department of Special Collections, Archibald S. Alexander Library

    Through November 7 – Wood Sculpture and Drawings by Jane Teller, Mabel Smith Douglass Library

    –Weekly Agenda 6, no. 43 (October 22, 1984).

    Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the Libraries’ past! Special thanks to Erica Parin for her idea to start this column.

    Please send comments or suggestions about “This Month in the Agenda” to Matt Badessa.

  • Mid-Atlantic Futures Conference Report

    • Irina Radeva (r) and SC&I scholarship recipients.

    Last week, I attended the Mid-Atlantic Futures Conference held in Atlantic City, NJ. Four other School of Communication and Information students and I attended this exciting two-day event thanks to a scholarship provided by the Library and Information Science Department and were accompanied by two SC&I instructors, Dr. Ross Todd and Dr. Joyce Valenza. The gathering was a great way to come together with like-minded library professionals and discover how libraries can thrive in a world full of ever-changing technology and vast information.

    The main question posed by the conference was, “How do we predict the future?” Among those trying to answer were keynote speakers Kevin Mitnick, the most elusive computer hacker in history; David Pescovitz, the research director at the Institute of the Future; Nicole Baker Rosa from the Future Schools; and Rutgers’ own Dr. James Hughes, University Professor and former dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. Each speaker touched on the importance of knowing what libraries are and what they stand for, as well as keeping their eyes open not for trends, but for patterns that will point to the next big thing. There was a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality, and how they will affect both libraries and society. Acceleration strategist Phil Bowermaster proposed that the convergence of information and society is accelerating change, while communication specialist Rakia Reynolds shared a communication strategy that is both noticeable and disruptive.  Finally, Cindy Ball from Oculus Rift gave a demonstration of a virtual reality future that may be much closer than we think.

    So, how do we predict the future? We create it–with knowledge and imagination.

    I would like to thank Lilia Pavlovsky, director of the Master of Information program, who facilitated this opportunity for me, as well as Andy Martinez and Janet Croft for giving me approval to attend.

  • The Rutgers University Libraries Website Style Guide from Integrated Information Systems

    The Rutgers University Libraries Website style guide explains the rules and conventions that go into defining typography and the appearance of website elements on our website. Its goal is to provide a cohesive and coherent experience for website users and content creators. An internal style guide has been in existence since the redesign of the libraries’ website in June 2013. However, growing demand for custom content from colleagues and requests for mini-sites, established a need to make the style guide available to users across the libraries. Not everyone knows – or should be expected to know – how to create a webpage. The style guide provides a clear idea of what to expect when, for example, you want to display tabular data or, have an article on the website that uses pull quotes. Content creators amongst our library colleagues can use it when visualizing their pages. Developers can use it as a reference when coding new pages. It functions as a common reference for both.

    On a technical level, the style guide is structured such that it provides an example of the treatment of a website element, followed by the CSS code used to style the element, and the HTML code that displays it in the browser. On a general, stylistic level, it defines how pages are structured on the website, such as addressing questions regarding the appearance and location of navigational links within a mini-site. It also informs us about overarching style rules that users might be interested in knowing, such as the font family (Droid Sans) and generic typeface (sans-serif) that body copy defaults to throughout the site.

    The developers and designers in Integrated Information Systems are available to create webpages that use the style guide as a guideline, rather than a limitation, with possibilities for creativity and experimentation, to build the best experience for our users and our colleagues.

    Access the website style guide here: https://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/styleguide