The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Category: Universitywide

  • Visual Identity Resources from the Communications Department

    Examples of signage templates that are available online in Word and Powerpoint. Users can modify the text and image to fit their needs.

    The central communications office faces a unique challenge. While we are tasked with improving the appearance of the signage and marketing materials used at the Libraries, we recognize that these signs must serve local needs and be tailored for local use. It is not always feasible for the communications department to create these local materials, so we must by necessity focus our efforts on providing resources and templates to make it easier for our colleagues to quickly and easily produce professional materials that fit with the Libraries’ and the university’s visual identity.

    Recently, we have expanded our visual identity resources to include a new logotype with the Rutgers shield, updated letterhead, and updated and expanded signage. To find these materials, navigate to the Staff Resources section of the website and click Marketing in the right menu. You should also review the revised visual identity guide for the university to learn how to use the shield logotype.

    We will continue to expand these toolboxes and add new resources (I have asked the university for a powerpoint template which I know would be useful to many of you). I also anticipate adding additional downloadable materials–brochures for undergraduate students, alumni and guest borrowers, graduate students, faculty, special collections and university archives, and more–in the coming weeks. This is a good time to reach out if you have an older brochure that needs updating or have a new service/information to promote.

    Signage Update

    At a recent cabinet meeting, I presented findings from a signage inventory the communications department undertook in March and April of this year to assess progress. The percentages of templated signs in the libraries range from 1% (Smith Library*) to 27% (Robeson). This inventory was our mid-year assessment of a year-long project (approved by Cabinet in September 2016) to implement new sign templates.

    As a result of our signage inventory, we are making new print-and-go signs to cover common needs—things like “Staff Only” to “Don’t Reshelf Books.” We plan to create two new templates each week through the summer. We also created “Welcome to X Library” signs for each library location that will soon be posted to the website that make it easy to post hours, policies, and additional information at entrances. Lastly, we are now providing templates in both Word and Powerpoint to accommodate users who prefer to work with Powerpoint.

    Our goal is to make signage templates that are easy to use and useful throughout the libraries—but we need your help. We are working to identify new signage needs, but we hope you will also share signs you design for your location so we can crowd-source signs that may be useful to others in the Libraries. If you use the template to create a sign that should be included in the signage library, send it to the communications department. We would also like to hear from you about your experience with the signage templates—what worked? What didn’t? What would make this work better for you? Please email Jessica Pellien with your feedback and suggestions.

    * Important to note that they have subsequently converted almost ALL their signs to the templates.

  • 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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  • 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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  • 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