2007 Annual Minutes (June 24)

Sunday, June 24, 2007


Washington, DC, Regency Hyatt Capitol Hill, Ballroom

The meeting was called to order at approximately 10:30 a.m.

Members present:


Gregory Crawford, Chair


Deborah Costa


Ruby Licona


Colleen Seale


Robert Daniel Vega


David Vidor

There were no guests.

Agenda:

1. The minutes of the Sunday, January 21st, 2007 meeting from ALA Midwinter (Seattle) were approved.

2. Greg announced that the RSS Board passed our committee’s Guidelines for Measuring and Assessing Reference and User Services and Resources yesterday, by a vote of 5-2. They need to be approved by the RUSA Board to become official. They are on the agenda for Tuesday, June 26th’s RUSA Board meeting. [Note: The Guidelines did not pass the RUSA Board at its meeting on June 26.]

3. We discussed venues, like the RSS Update, for distributing the Guidelines (or whatever they’re called if they do not pass the RUSA Board) to provide information and gather feedback. Our goal is get our work out there in front of people, whether or not they are “official.”

4. Continue planning for future program:


We resumed the discussion from yesterday on an open forum for January 2008. We want to have people talk about qualitative and quantitative measurements of reference service and how one can use the data collected. A suggested title was: “Biggest Bang for your Buck: Pleasing your directors, trustees, and everyone in-between.” Suggested speakers to kick off discussion were Carolyn Radcliff, someone familiar with administering WOREP (Wisconsin-Ohio Reference Evaluation Program) like Amy Paster from Penn State’s Life Sciences Library, and perhaps someone from a public library (like the Free Library of Philadelphia since the meeting will be there). Ruby said she would contact an old acquaintance about someone from Philadelphia. Another title offered for the discussion forum was “Quick and Dirty Reference Assessment: Qualitative, Quantitative, and everything in-between.” A good question for discussion might be something along the lines of what does an institution hope to get out of assessment. We could envision a discussion in which a few people talk about what they’ve done and others talk about what they need. Rob agreed to write up a description of whatever we decide to do. We decided to develop a list of questions ahead of time. We will request a room of 32-50 people with round tables of 6-8 in order to facilitate discussion. We will let other discussion groups know what we are doing and advertise through RSS-l. David, as incoming chair, will be contacting committee members in the fall to work out the details of the discussion forum.

Submitted by David Vidor.