The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Category: Articles

  • Update on the Priorities Process

    An archive of Krisellen Maloney’s articles is available here.

    In March, just ahead of the first Cabinet retreat, I described the three-step process by which we are drafting priorities and related budget requests for the Libraries. Things have been moving along quickly, but I wanted to circle back and talk about the outcomes of the second retreat that we had in early June.

    As a recap, prior to the first retreat, the directors worked with their faculty and staff to develop lists of local priorities. At the same time, the infrastructure units conducted environmental scans to identify projects that are already in the works and ongoing work. In preparation for the second retreat in June, the infrastructure units were tasked with assigning “costs”—including staff time—to various activities. The idea here was to develop a deep understanding of local needs and the capacity available in the central infrastructure units to support those needs.

    When all was said and done, we had a daunting list of almost 200 priorities (or more accurately activities) that the local units want to undertake over the next 12 to 18 months. These activities ranged from renovating bathrooms and piloting 24/5 hours at the RBHS Libraries to implementing new information literacy tutorials and purchasing new ebook and journal packages. It was important to see the lists. In addition to conveying real needs, the sheer volume of items also conveyed the frustration people are feeling throughout the Libraries. Although I believe we have made some progress towards clarifying communication and decision-making, there is more to do.

    As the infrastructure units began the process of assigning costs to the priorities, some patterns began to emerge. Through a series of iterations between subsets of the infrastructure units (Tibor, Mary Beth, Jessica, Abbey, Rhonda, and Tao) and Cabinet, we identified clusters of priorities where improved infrastructure—both decision-making processes and systems—are needed. For example, the library directors identified numerous weeding projects (20 priorities worth) that require support from the holdings management unit. Members of Cabinet are not necessarily the people best positioned to make these operational decisions. In addition to overarching issues that Cabinet should be addressing, there are several rapidly changing operational factors that come into play. We decided that what we really need is a mechanism to prioritize weeding projects throughout the Libraries. As a result, we are charging a group to “recommend” a transparent process to prioritize collection management projects (weeding, moves, etc.) that takes into account the available staff.

    All together, we plan to charge 8 new groups that will, collectively, address 70 of the priorities:

    Priorities Category Group’s Charge # of Priorities Charges Due: Who Is Following Up
    Cataloging Develop a process to prioritize cataloging projects (ongoing) 11 July 11, 2017 Agnew, Askew
    Weeding Develop a process to prioritize collection management projects (ongoing) 20 July 18, 2017 Yang, Cohn
    Digital Projects Develop a template for routine digital projects (ongoing) 9 July 18, 2017 Marker, Anderson
    Digital Projects Develop a process to prioritize digital projects  included above October 2017 TBD
    Web Recommend improvements to the Web environment 4 July 11, 2017 Marker, Pellien
    Tutorials for Instruction Investigate new information literacy modules 21 July 11, 2017 Directors
    Special Collections Recommend system architecture for special collections 5 July 18, 2017 Agnew, Yang
    Special Collections Recommend standards, policies and procedures for special collections  included above October 2017 TBD

    We anticipate that another 9 priorities will be addressed by the implementation of a new ILS or will need to be rearticulated once the new ILS is in place. Now that the contract has been signed, we will be moving forward with new groups to guide the implementation.  We are working on scheduling a kick-off meeting where ExLibris will provide us with best practices related to the number of teams that should be formed for a successful implementation.

    Four priorities are already underway or even complete. We anticipate one priority will be passed to the Discovery Working Group to handle and one will be put to the reference team when they are in place.

    We also identified 81 priorities that rely primarily on local expertise and resources and do not require significant support from the central infrastructure units. The directors will prioritize these with their local units. The library directors will also meet with the director of communications to discuss 12 activities related to communications and marketing.

    After all of this whittling, what remained were 19 activities that required clarifications about the scope or the amount of support expected from infrastructure units. We discussed these at the June 20 Cabinet meeting and you can review the outcomes in the Cabinet meeting minutes.

    The overarching theme that emerged through this process is a need to continue to focus on building infrastructure, particularly in developing transparent processes for decision-making. This may seem to be highly bureaucratic, but in reality, it will push decisions closer to the work and enable people with the most relevant information to be part of the process.

     

     

  • Faculty and Staff Appreciation Luau

    This year’s Faculty and Staff Appreciation Picnic will be held on Thursday, August 17 from 12 to 4 p.m. at the Rutgers Gardens Log Cabin and Pavilion (140 Log Cabin Road, North Brunswick, NJ 08902). There will be fun and games, music, and a delicious BBQ-style menu (with plenty of healthy and vegan-friendly options). Best of all, this year’s picnic is luau themed, so get ready to celebrate Hawaiian style!

    Please RSVP here.

  • Rutgers Launches Rutgers Health – Here’s What It Means for the Libraries

    Rutgers Launches Rutgers Health – Here’s What It Means for the Libraries

    What is Rutgers Health?

    “Rutgers Health is the clinical arm of Rutgers–the areas of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and other Rutgers units devoted to caring for patients. A single brand for all of Rutgers’ patient care and services.” (from: www.rutgershealth.org/about-rutgers-health/rutgers-health-structure)

    The Rutgers Health Group will serve as a single faculty practice, unifying existing specialties and clinical practices, comprising approximately 1,000 Rutgers-employed health care professionals. Members of the faculty practice will be from New Jersey Medical School, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and other RBHS and Rutgers schools–dentists, nurses, pharmacists, social workers and psychologists, and other health care professionals working in clinical settings throughout New Jersey.

    The Rutgers Health Network will be an integrated network of Rutgers’ affiliated hospitals, community clinics, medical groups, wellness centers, and other affiliates collaborating to provide value-based care to patient populations across the state.

    How will the Rutgers University Libraries support Rutgers Health?

    There are two major user groups with full access to library resources–members of the RBHS faculty, students, and staff and members of the clinical (voluntary) faculty who oversee students and residents in affiliated hospitals and clinics throughout New Jersey.

    As Rutgers Health launches, it is challenging to predict how utilization and demand for libraries-licensed high quality clinical and patient care resources will grow. Should you encounter questions about Rutgers Health which impact the libraries, please contact your colleagues at the RBHS Libraries.

    Contributed by Judy Cohn and Victoria Wagner

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  • Lessons from Town Hall – Connecting at the Local Level

    Lessons from Town Hall – Connecting at the Local Level

    Last week we tried something new with the Libraries Town Hall. We shifted our focus north to Rutgers University–Newark and spent some time looking at the relationship between the mission of the University and the planning and activities within the libraries.

    We were fortunate to have Sherri-Ann Butterfield, who will assume the position of executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer in July, provide us with an overview of the Rutgers–Newark initiatives where Dana Library plays a central role: the Honors Living-Learning Community (HLLC), Express Newark, and the P3 Collaboratory (Pedagogy, Professional Development, and Publicly-Engaged Scholarship). Dr. Butterfield gave us a whirlwind tour through these initiatives, highlighting the role of the library from teaching one of the foundation courses in the HLLC, to being one of the founding pillars of the P3 Collaboratory, to the amazing “Records at Play: The Institute of Jazz Studies @50” exhibit currently on display at Express Newark.

    Rutgers–Newark has made remarkable progress under the leadership of chancellor Nancy Cantor. In her short tenure, the university has achieved a distinct identity as an anchor institution in the community. Its focus on excellence in student inclusion and success and community-engaged scholarship is setting Rutgers–Newark as a national model. She has a robust and active strategic planning process as demonstrated by regular updates of the strategic plan, with the newest released in Spring 2017.

    Following Dr. Butterfield’s presentation, Consuella Askew and Adriana Cuervo gave us an overview of Dana Library’s year-long planning process and the resulting document, “Framework for Change: Vision and Goals for the John Cotton Dana Library.” The framework describes an evidence-based approach to the development of services, collections, and spaces that contribute to the success of the university’s students and faculty and to the perception of Dana Library as a valuable and active campus partner.

    As part of the annual RCM process, we have received new funding for a full-time archivist and the renovations necessary to develop an archive in Dana Library. In 2016 we also received $100,000 for renovations and new furniture in Dana Library and will receive another $100,000 in 2017. The chancellor has also acknowledged the work of librarians with seed grants to Adriana Cuervo for the Citizen Historian Project (2015), Bonnie Fong for Boot Camps for Graduate Students (2016) and Krista White for Digital Storytelling as 21st-Century Pedagogy (2017). Under Consuella’s leadership, Dana Library will house and be full partners in the P3 Collaboratory.

    The energy surrounding the Rutgers–Newark transition is contagious and the university is gaining national recognition for its innovation. What is best, however, is that the library is at the center of these important campus initiatives. Kudos to the efforts of our colleagues in Dana Library and the Institute of Jazz Studies.

    What does this mean for RUL? In the March Agenda, I talked about Rutgers University Libraries’ planning process. I would like to take some time now and talk about how the process that Consuella has undertaken in Newark fits within the library-wide planning environment. The risk of being first under the spotlight is that you become an example. However, if they are not in development now, each of our locations—Rutgers–Camden, Rutgers–New Brunswick, and RBHS—will all have plans or frameworks that describe how the libraries fit into the broader University environment. These efforts will directly tie us to the distinct missions of our campuses and provide the foundation for our planning.

    The challenge is that even at the very highest levels, our four university environments are different. For example, the Overarching Goals for Dana Library are to:

    • Innovate to support 21st-century library use.
    • Increase community engagement.
    • Increase operational excellence, efficiency, and fiscal sustainability.

    Short-term objectives include developing the Dana Archives and selective weeding of the collection to make space for study and collaboration. Longer-term objectives include enhanced educational technology, rethinking strategies related to Government Documents, and improved digital services (e.g., digital humanities). These goals and objectives are tailored to meet the needs of the Rutgers–Newark environment and mission, and we cannot simply transplant them to RBHS or Rutgers–New Brunswick. Simply put: unique university goals require unique library goals. In the February Agenda, I discussed the challenges that we face as we support the multiple unique missions of the University.

    As we go into Phase 2 of our planning, we will have to determine how to balance the finite central infrastructure to meet the needs of Rutgers–Newark, while continuing to advance the wider university. Ultimately, we will be most successful when we can find broad-based initiatives or areas of focus that support more than one campus. Those of us not in Dana know that there are needs in each of the campuses, including data management, research information management, digital humanities, improved instructional objects, improved collections, and Open Access initiatives. Internally, we know, for example, that we need improved support technology support for Special Collections, improved discovery, an improved website, improved ability to track internal policies and procedures, and improved collection assessment capacity. In our current environment, it is highly unlikely that we will receive increased funds for central services. Instead, we will need to create scalable, reusable infrastructure to extend our existing capacity.

    With three senior level interim positions, FY2018 will likely be another year of building infrastructure. It will also be a great time to step back and connect with our campuses to determine where our libraries fit and how we can become further integrated into campus needs and missions. Thanks to Consuella and Adriana’s presentation at Town Hall, we know this works. In Rutgers–Newark, we see that this is a great time for libraries. Through careful planning and collaboration with administrators, the expertise of the library is central to almost every aspect of research and education. We need to learn from this experience and find ways to replicate this success across four very different campus environments, while also maintaining the balance and economies of scale that our infrastructure units provide.

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  • Summer AuthorTalks Return to Alexander Library

    • Tisha Bender P.U.N.C.H. AuthorTalk, June 2016

    We are happy to announce that the Libraries are once again collaborating with Rutgers’ Office of Summer and Winter Sessions to cosponsor a series of talks at Alexander Library this summer. Save the following dates and stay tuned to the Agenda and our website for more information on the talks as they approach. We hope you will share the word with colleagues and students and plan to join us yourselves!

    Azzan Yadin-Israel, Professor, Jewish Studies, Rutgers–New Brunswick
    The Grace of God and the Grace of Man: The Theologies of Bruce Springsteen     (Lingua Press, July 2016)
    Thursday, June 29, 4–5:30 p.m.

    Bruce Springsteen’s words and music have been part of the American landscape for nearly half a century, and are today cherished by millions worldwide. Indeed, Springsteen has been known to inspire religious devotion among his fans, and his shows with the E Street Band are often compared to a revivalist congregation. However, there has not been a comprehensive scholarly study of the biblical and theological motifs in Springsteen’s lyrics until now. Reading Springsteen’s songs as one would a poem, The Grace of God and the Grace of Man sheds new light on Springsteen’s work.

    John Bader, Former Dean of Academic Advising and Undergraduate Academic Affairs, Johns Hopkins University
    Dean’s List: 10 Strategies for College Success     (2nd ed., Johns Hopkins University Press, March 2017)
    Thursday, July 6, 4–5:30 p.m.

    Deans at America’s top institutions—including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and Columbia—join John Bader to tell students what they need to know to have a rich and rewarding college experience. A complete reworking, this second edition includes information on managing workloads and faculty relationships, as well as new material focused on first-generation challenges and international students. Dean’s List offers a thoughtful, commonsense approach to higher education that allows students to make the most of their four years on campus—and beyond.

    Third talk TBA. More information coming soon!

  • Year End Carryover Accrual Review For Employees Who Accrue Paid Time Each Month

    Employees that are eligible to accrue paid time off should review year-end carryover accruals and discuss with supervisors to use excess vacation time prior to the June 30, 2017 deadline.  Staff may carry over one year accrual plus the time accrued for the month of June. ARS Administrators are strongly encouraged to review and insure that absence records are up to date as we get close to year end. Prior to approving time off supervisors may want to confer with the unit ARS administrator to confirm the accuracy of employees accruals.

    In accordance with University Policy 60.3.14, all earned compensatory time must be used prior to the first pay period in June; comp time not used by the first pay period in June will be paid out as overtime by the end of the fiscal year.

    Depending on specific negotiated agreements and university policy, excess vacation may be donated to the Compassionate Leave Program or the Staff Leave Donation Program for legacy UMDNJ.

  • Celebration of Scholarship Digital Exhibit Now on View

    The 2017 Celebration of Scholarship digital exhibit can be viewed at libraries.rutgers.edu/celebration.

    The digital exhibit for the 2017 Celebration of Scholarship is now available for viewing. It features the works of 125 members of the Rutgers faculty in disciplines ranging from fine arts to pharmacology at Rutgers–Camden, Rutgers–Newark, Rutgers–New Brunswick, and Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences.

    Some highlights include:

    • A medical student didactic in which participants discuss episodes of Seinfeld through the lens of a psychiatrist;
    • The first-ever art history of video games;
    • A project to translate all 30,000 lines of extant Anglo-Saxon poetry into modern English verse;
    • A feature film about the life of the director’s grandfather, a 90-year-old Japanese-American widower living in Honolulu;
    • A blog presenting 20 years of research on eating, body image, and weight management so that it is accessible to a general audience;
    • A chapter celebrating the accomplishments of law librarians of color;
    • A book detailing research on mathematical models of vehicular traffic networks;
    • Histories of New Brunswick and Newark, as well as a look at life on the shore in the wake of Hurricane Sandy;
    • And many projects led by our colleagues, including Janet Brennan Croft, Bonnie Fong, Sarah Jewell, Marty Kesselman, Megan Lotts, Christie Lutz, and Judit Hajnal Ward.

    Learn more about these and other works by exploring the exhibit at libraries.rutgers.edu/celebration.

  • Rutgers Archivists and Librarians Rock Newark MARAC

    The Spring 2017 MARAC conference was held from April 20-22 at Newark’s Robert Treat Hotel. MARAC, which stands for “Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference,” is a volunteer, regional consortium of archivists who live and work in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Overcoming skepticism that people would be eager to come to Newark, the results speak for themselves: 413 people registered–the second biggest conference in MARAC’s 45-year history!

    Befitting an archival conference in New Jersey taking place just blocks from Rutgers University–Newark, many Rutgers archivists and librarians participated in the conference as members of the Local Arrangements Committee (LAC) or as conference presenters. LAC members included:

    • Elizabeth Surles (LAC Tri-Chair), Institute of Jazz Studies
    • Natalie Borisovets, Dana Library
    • Tim Corlis, Special Collections University Archives (SCUA)
    • Bob Golon, SCUA (retired)
    • Angela Lawrence, Institute of Jazz Studies
    • Tara Maharjan, SCUA
    • Bob Vietrogoski, RBHS – Special Collections

    It took almost two years of LAC meetings to organize many of the conference events. These events included eight tours, including a tour of the Institute of Jazz Studies, and a tour of the Thomas Edison National Historic Park via a shuttle bus generously donated by Rutgers University Libraries. Other events included a “Community Service Project” providing pro bono help to local archives, a Thursday member meet and greet reception, a Thursday “Dine Around,” a Friday night reception, and even a Movie Night. LAC members also assembled over 400 conference packets, staffed the registration desk, and performed the proverbial “other duties as assigned.”

    Elizabeth Surles organized the Friday night reception that filled the Great Hall of 15 Washington Street, a recently renovated iconic Newark skyscraper now serving as a luxury Rutgers-Newark dormitory. Well over 300 conference attendees enjoyed sumptuous dining which included Portuguese hors d’oeuvres and an extensive selection of New Jersey microbrews. The reception was generously sponsored by Rutgers–Newark and the Institute of Jazz Studies

    Angela Lawrence and Bob Vietrogoski produced a “Newark Finding Dining Aid” guide to over 50 nearby restaurants. The guide was so well received that with only minor modifications, its listings became an official handout from the Greater Newark Convention & Visitors Bureau!

    Tara Maharjan created and updated the official conference blog and promoted the conference on social media:

    Rutgers librarians were also well represented throughout the conference’s program sessions. Presenters included:

    • Sheridan Sayles, Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), and former SCUA archivist Zachary Johnson: “From Ballot Box to Document Box: Exploring Contemporary Challenges with Congressional Papers.”
    • Krista White, Dana Library: “Digital Preservation of Faculty and Student Research.”
    • Ron Becker, emeritus head of SCUA: “Discovering Primary Source Materials and Road Trip Tales: The Newark Archives Project.”
    • Christie Lutz, SCUA: “New Brunswick Music Scene Archive,” a session chaired by Jonathan Sauceda, Douglas Library.

    At the New Jersey Caucus meeting, Ron Becker received a plaque in honor of his long involvement in MARAC, which included his attendance at the previous MARAC conference held in Newark – in 1974!

    Right now, the City of Newark is experiencing visible growth and renewal, especially in the neighborhood around Military Park, which features the newly opened Hahne’s Building and its Whole Foods. The Spring 2017 MARAC conference is another sign of Newark’s revitalization. By all accounts, MARAC in Newark was an unqualified success, and a major cause of this success was the hard work and scholarly efforts of many Rutgers archivists and librarians.

    For more on the conference in general: marac.memberclicks.net/assets/conferences/marac_newark_2017programp3-1.pdf

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  • Deep Dive: JAMAevidence

    Deep Dive will give a bit more insider’s info on some of our resources. Here, Roberta Fitzpatrick gives us some more information about JAMAevidence.

    In 1990, Dr. Gordon Guyatt, Internal Medicine residency program director at McMaster University in Canada began to teach using a new method which he called “Scientific Medicine.” He felt that many clinical decisions were not necessarily rooted in scientific fact and taught his residents to make such decisions based in part on evidence found in the published literature. It eventually evolved into what is currently called Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) or Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) or Evidence-Based Health Care (EBHC), combining a clinician’s experiences, well as information about the specific patient with the best evidence from journal articles.

    JAMAevidence, an information resource new to Rutgers and found at https://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/indexes/jamaevidence, is a natural extension from Gordon Guyatt’s original ideas and educational program. In order to assist health professionals in the practice of evidence-based health care, JAMAevidence provides guides to the systematic consideration of validity, importance, and applicability of problems and outcomes in health care. It consists of three textbooks, user tools, and forms useful to the critical appraisal process. Textbooks contained in JAMAevidence are:

    • Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature: A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, 3rd ed.
    • The Rational Clinical Examination: Evidence-Based Clinical Diagnosis
    • Care at the Close of Life: Evidence and Experience

    Contents of the first two textbooks have been published as an article series in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. The User’s Guides are key to understanding the process of critically appraising an article. The Tational Clinical Exam series and subsequent textbook walks the reader through the process of conducting a physical exam of a patient.

    Tools in JAMAevidence include Education Guides, which consist of a library of PowerPoint slides useful in providing instruction on evidence-based medicine concepts; a glossary of over 900 EBM terms; calculators; and two types of worksheets, ones for critical appraisal of articles and those for charting an information cycle.

    JAMAevidnce is simple to use; a navigation bar is located at the top of each page and allows the users to review the contents through pointing and clicking. There is also a search box that allows for retrieval of searched key words. The resources is available on a monthly basis.

    Those who are interested in learning more about EBM may want to consider a review of an article titled “History of evidence-based medicine” by Roger L. Sur and Phillip Dahm from the Division of Urology, UC San Diego, published in the open-access Indian Journal of Urology, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263217/.

     

     

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  • The Kopp Dataset Is Now Available in RUcore

    The Research Data Exploratory Team and members of the Software Architecture Working Group collaborated with Professor Robert Kopp and D.J. Rasmussen to ingest and provide access to an impressive collection of county-level climate change projection data that is now available in the RUcore Research Data Portal at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3SF2Z93.

    Rasmussen, Kopp, and collaborator Malte Meinshausen generated projections of future temperature, precipitation, and humidity by combining the probability of different global average temperature outcomes over the 21st century with spatially detailed projections from several state-of-the-art global climate models. The projections also include daily to multi-year weather variability, which is needed for economic models that estimate the impacts of climate change. The resulting data set is a 1.3 TB product that is freely available for use by researchers, decision makers, and climate change communicators. The need for local climate change projections is growing as decision makers are increasingly demanding estimates of the economic costs of future climate change and the value of avoiding associated damages.

    The climate projections from Rasmussen, Kopp, and Meinshausen were used in the book Economic Risks of Climate Change: an American Prospectus. This prospectus provides a climate risk assessment that estimates the economic impact of climate change on the U.S. and provides local estimates of economic risks in multiple sectors of the U.S. economy, including labor, agriculture, and energy. The complete dataset in RUcore provides open access to all data and methodology for the physical climate projections so that results can be reproduced and improved in future studies. The technical analysis in the prospectus was commissioned by the Risky Business Project. This effort was led by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Bush administration treasury secretary Hank Paulson, and former hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer. The aim of these three business leaders was to inspire risk managers in the business community to incorporate climate change related financial risks in their decision making process.

    The RUcore repository architecture provides a set of unique features that enables researchers to easily access the parts of this dataset that are most important. Each major directory, of which there are twelve, has its own Digital Object Identifier and can be individually cited. Perhaps most useful is that file and directory names are preserved and the user can walk the directory tree to select individual files and directories for download. This feature is important since downloading a complete directory in the order of 200GB will take hours. As an alert to prospective users, we provide an estimate of how long it will take to download the requested files and directories. In addition, one of the directories includes the software for processing the data, enabling users to repeat or augment the original authors’ findings. As part of the Libraries’ exploratory process, we learned a great deal about how to ingest and manage large datasets greater than 100GB. We had to revise our memory management strategies to accommodate directories with thousands of files. As part of our process, we validated the transfer of the 1.3TB dataset from the original site to the RUcore server to insure that there were no corruptions in the transfer process. All in all, we believe that this dataset and the access to it provided by Libraries will significantly contribute to the ongoing research in climate science.

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