The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Category: Units

  • 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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  • Excerpt from “Forgotten Heroes: New Jerseyans and Rutgers Alumni During the Great War” at What Exit?

    This month, What Exit? from Special Collections and University Archives featured two long forgotten New Jersey heroes, using materials from the Rutgers College War Service Bureau and the Terradell Family Papers.

    Excerpt:

    Portrait of Theodore Rosen. Undated, ca. 1926.

    With a growing number of Rutgers men in Uncle Sam’s olive drab, Earl Reed Silvers (RC 1913) established the Rutgers College War Service Bureau (RCWSB) in August 1917 to keep the 800 men in service up to date with frequent news of the college and each other. “As far as can be ascertained, no college or university in the United States kept in such close touch with her alumni and undergraduates in the army or navy,” reflected Silvers, “nor has any college the mass of material, war letters and relics, which were sent to old Rutgers by her appreciative sons.”

    Counted among the alumni who corresponded with Silvers and the RCWSB was Theodore “Theo” Rosen (1895-1940), Rutgers College Class of 1916, who served as First Lieutenant in the 315th Infantry, 79th Division.

    Creeping and crawling toward the German line in search of a machine gun nest on the early morning of November 4, 1918, Rosen found himself in the path of fire. One bullet rendered his right arm useless; the other tore through his left cheek, filling his mouth with blood and taking out seven teeth. The 23-year-old would lose the top of his left thumb, break his left wrist, have his right arm amputated, and suffer impaired hearing and vision before the onslaught was over. He only recovered consciousness as a P.O.W. on the operating table at Longwy, where he remained prisoner for the eight days before the Armistice in November 1918.

    Continue reading “Forgotten Heroes: New Jerseyans and Rutgers Alumni During the Great War” at What Exit?

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  • Annual Celebrations for Staff and Faculty of Rutgers University Libraries (2017)

    The University is recognizing faculty and staff who are celebrating a decade increment of employment at Rutgers. We are delighted to announce that 14 of our colleagues were included in the festivities and hope you join us in congratulating them on these accomplishments:

    10 Joseph Abraham (NBL)

    Martha Barnett (Shared User Svs)

    Abigail DiPaolo (Admin Svc.)

    Jie Geng (TAS)

    James Hartstein (NBL)

    Robert Vietrogoski (Smith)

     
    20 Roman Frackowski (TAS)

    Stephen Modica (Smith)

     
    30 Tracey Meyer (TAS)

    Nita Mukherjee (NBL)

    Robin Pastorio-Newman (TAS)

    Jeffrey Teichmann (NBL)

    Drue Williamson (NBL)

     
    40 Dianne Hamlette (RBHS)

     

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  • Rutgers Day in Photos

    Rutgers Day this year was a huge success thanks to the efforts of all the local committees. Each location put their own spin on the day’s events as you can see in the photos below. Whether they were strutting the red carpet in Camden, fishing for health with RBHS, learning about WWI with New Brunswick, building robots in Piscataway, or discovering jazz in Newark, our visitors were treated to spectacle, activities, and fun!

    Thank you to all the committee chairs and members who made this awesome day possible in five locations across four cities! This is one of the biggest events in which the Libraries participate and it requires a lot of hands on deck. If you didn’t participate this year, please consider volunteering to help out next time.

    If you like the photos here, there are more on our photo server (T:\CENTRAL\PHOTOS AND MEDIA\Event Photos\Rutgers Day\Rutgers Day 2017\).

    • The Voorhees Mall location highlighted the WWI Centennial and the new SCUA exhibit.

     

  • Rutgers Connect Tips and Tricks

    How to create a calendar appointment from an email message

     

    With so many events publicized via distribution lists like RUL_Everyone and other University-wide lists, it may be difficult to keep track of meetings, webinars, training sessions, speakers, and other events you might wish to attend.  The best way to make sure you do not miss these opportunities is to add them as appointments on your Rutgers Connect calendar.

    It is very easy to create an appointment on your Rutgers Connect (OWA or Outlook) calendar without having to retype the details from the email message. We have prepared step-by-step instructions to show you how.

    If you have questions, or need assistance with Rutgers Connect, please contact IIS via email at support@rulhelp.rutgers.edu, or by phone at 848-445-5896, option 7.

     

    Tracey Meyer, Information Specialist, Integrated Information Systems

  • The Results of Our Budget Request for FY2018

    The Results of Our Budget Request for FY2018

    In recent months, we have spent a lot of time talking about organizational changes and the advantages of breaking down silos. This month, I want to discuss a shining example of what we accomplish when we work together—the outcome of our FY2018 budget request.

    As noted in the meeting minutes for cabinet on April 11, we recently received our FY18 permanent budget allocation and there is a lot of good news to share. Overall our budget is increasing, even if the increases are small. There are, of course, also some disappointments, so let’s delve into the specifics.

    Let’s start with the very good news: we received a commitment of $500,000 to purchase Elsevier backfiles. This is a major collections purchase—possibly the largest in the Libraries’ history—and it required a lot of effort from Tao Yang, Gracemary Smulewitz, Abbey DiPaolo, and others to make it happen. Having these backfiles will dramatically expand our support for the university’s academic programs and bring us in line with our Big Ten peers.

    Each year, at minimum we ask for two budget items: funds to cover inflation for subscriptions to journals and databases and funding to cover negotiated salary increases. These items are areas where we have annual contractual increases in expenses. When our expenses increase in these areas and our budget does not, we must find other places to cut. The difficult problem is that both the contractual salary increases and inflation are ongoing, so we have to cut an ongoing expense. Here, we got a mixed response.

    We finally received funding for inflation. This is good news for us and even better news for our faculty and students. As you know, the costs of journal and database subscriptions go up each year, but in previous years, we have had to accommodate these increases within our existing budget. With inflation costs covered, we won’t have to have to cut existing subscriptions in order to cover the higher ongoing costs. We have new ongoing funding to cover the higher costs for materials.

    Unfortunately, we did not get funds to cover salary increases. This means that we will have to permanently use funding from some open positions. The total number of positions that will be affected is small with most having been open for a long time. The good news is that we remain committed to supporting salary increases for the excellent faculty and staff that we have, even if we have a small reduction in the number of employees.

    Lastly, a surprise! In addition to our requests to cover expenses, we also ask for additional funding to cover new services in the libraries. We limit these requests to items where the campus administrations have indicated support. This year we asked for funding for archives in Dana Libraries. Initially, we were disappointed to learn that our funding request was denied. However, we just received a revised budget from Rutgers University-Newark and they have decided to fund a full-time archivist and the renovations necessary to create an archive space. In addition, they are providing $100,000 to purchase new furniture for Dana Library

    This reversal is the result of the work of Consuella Askew and many of the faculty and staff in Newark in developing strong local relationships and an understanding of local needs, as well as their conscientious and creative use of earlier funds. The RU-N administration is committed to building an archive in Newark. Consuella recognized the need and was able to make a case for archives being in the library rather than in a separate unit. The resources that will come to Dana to create an archive will relieve some of the pressure that we have across the university for stewarding this important content. However, in order to benefit, all of the units with special collections must work together to create infrastructure that supports the broader system. I expect that this will be one of the priorities that come from our planning this year.

    Our initial budget request was deliberately targeted on items that would bring a demonstrable improvement or impact to our constituents. And as we continue to shift our priorities and strategies toward addressing the unique local needs of our libraries, it becomes more important than ever for us to find ways to work together to build common, reusable infrastructure that has noticeable benefits for our campuses.