Library Committee

Voting members present: Bradley Boovy, Marit Bovbjerg, Erica Fleishman, Carolyn Fonyo, Janet Nishihara, Melissa Santala, Tim Zuehlsdorff
Voting members absent: Kate Kerish, Hua-yu Li
Ex-Officio members present: OSU Libraries – Anne-Marie Deitering
Guests present: Kerri Goergen-Doll, Selina Heppell

Housekeeping

• Identification of a meeting secretary (takes minutes, rotates each meeting)
  • Bradley Boovy volunteered to take minutes for this meeting.

Welcome and Introductions

• Library Committee (LC) membership, affiliations, term ending:

Melissa Santala – Chair ’22     Mechanical, Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering
Carolyn Fonyo ’22                 Graduate School      
Kate Kerish ’22                    INTO OSU     
Erica Fleishman ’23               College of Earth, Ocean, & Atmospheric Sciences 
Hua-yu Li ’23                       Public Policy  
Janet Nishihara ’23               Educational Opportunities Program
Bradley Boovy ’23                 Language, Culture & Society
Marit Bovbjerg ’24                 Biological & Population Health Sciences    
Tim Zuehlsdorff ’24               Chemistry     
TBA – Student Member (undergraduate)                
TBA – Student Member (graduate)              
TBA – Student Member           
Anne-Marie Deitering – Ex-Officio     OSU Libraries
Selina Heppell – Executive Committee Liaison        

Review and Collect Comments on AR 21 and AR 31 Revisions

• AR 21 revision
  • The chair (Melissa Santala) read the text of proposed revisions to AR 21 to collect comments which she would communicate to the Faculty Senate (FS) Academic Regulations Committee Chair (Michelle Swift) by the deadline of noon on November 8. The revision would lower the credits required in a term to be eligible for the honor roll from 12 to 6. Melissa Santala noted that the rationale for the revisions to AR 21 is that DAS, with the support of Ecampus, noted that not all students take a full 12 credits, so lowering the number of credits required to six would be more inclusive.
  • Marit Bovbjerg and Melissa Santala both voiced support for the proposed revisions.
  • Carolyn Fonyo asked how a full-time student is defined (12 credit hours) and suggested that full- and part-time students be defined within the text of AR 21 for clarity. She also suggested the rationale for the requirement of 6 credits (It is the minimum to be eligible for financial aid) be included in the text.
  • No further concerns were raised. The Chair agreed to send comments to the FS Academic Regulations Committee Chair that full- and part-time students be defined within the text of AR 21 and that the rationale for threshold of 6 credits be stated in AR 21.
• AR 31 revisions
  • The Chair read proposed revisions to AR 31 which proposed changes to who could sign a recommendation letter for a student applying for an Academic Fresh Start. The proposed revision struck directors, college deans, school heads from the list and added associate deans and college head advisors. Seconding of the recommendation was also struck in the proposed revision. 
  • Melissa Santala and Marit Bovbjerg agreed that initial recommendation seems most important and captures the rationale. They also agreed that removing roles that could approve a recommendation for an Academic Fresh Start removes flexibility. No other concerns were raised.
  • The Chair agreed to give feedback to the Faculty Senate Academic Regulations Committee Chair voicing concern about making the AR less flexible and asking whether it’s necessary to remove these other roles.

Review of the 2020-2021 Annual Report

• Initial discussion future report to the Faculty Senate on budget concerns
  • The Chair noted that the annual report is short due to the lack of activity of the LC in 2020-2021. She then focused on suggested future activities of the LC. Based on which included giving our best feedback to the library staff members on issues such as draft surveys, library budgets, etc. The LC may also advocate on the part of the library. In a FS Chair meeting with Erika McCalpine, Vickie Nunnemaker and the EC Liaison Selina Heppell in September, the LC Chair suggested the LC could present it concerns, summarized, to the Faculty Senate. The presentation to the FS would educate faculty on the library and library budget. She suggested the presentation be held off until the new Dean of Libraries is appointed, so it might be held off until winter or spring quarter.
  • Marit Bovbjerg expressed agreement that educating the faculty about the library’s work would be helpful in getting faculty support for library needs.
  • Anne-Marie: I appreciated that you talked about the budget and open and sustainable scholarly communication. Just injecting money into the library won’t go very far if we’re not working on the open and sustainable scholarly communication initiative. The costs in the sector will always outpace the funding we get from the university. The open and sustainable project is about what we can demand from publishers that will make publications more open, the control faculty have over their publications, and what we can get from publishers. We’re talking with the EC a week from today about this. The way I would think about this is we want to be strong enough in our negotiations so we can walk away with a deal that aligns with our values and what we need to do with our research. But we also have to have some of the related conversations of walking away from some of the contracts because we can’t afford them. I like the idea of waiting till winter so we can talk through some of these things.
  • Kerri Goergen-Doll: I agree that winter would be a better time to talk about that. By winter we’ll be halfway through our budget and will have a better idea of how we need to correct.
  • The Chair suggested scheduling the next LC meeting early in winter quarter and that the commit could work in content to present to Faculty Senate.

Updates from the Interim University Librarian – Anne-Marie Deitering

• Background on OSULP as an organization:  I’m the acting university librarian. In normal times, we would have a university librarian and two associate librarians. We’re talking now about OSU Libraries and Press. Cascades library and VetMed library operate separately. VetMed just has student workers and Cascades recently lost their librarian. We’re talking to Cascades about next steps in their search. The scope of this group is not just OSULP. The university librarian position has been changed into a dean position. The most important reason for that is that the university librarian had no cohort of colleagues to work with. By making the university librarian position a dean’s position, the person in this role will be able to connect with the dean’s council in a much more effective way. I’m excited about that change.
• Work during the pandemic: Most of our work during the pandemic was figuring out how to make our services work remotely. We did stand up a lot of new services, the most dramatic was that we digitized our course reserves and opened up requests for course reserves to students. That put a heavy load on Kerri Goergen-Doll’s unit, but the result was that those services had the impact we wanted them to. We also became the delivery arm for a number of units like UIT to get people equipment and materials they needed. It was exciting to see that work. The problem is that some of these new services won’t go away, but on-site services will come back.
• We also completed two major collections projects during the pandemic, and we’re still doing some work, though we lost our off-site storage facility. We’ve been thrilled with mask compliance. Our estimates were 75% compliant, now we’re at 60-85% compliance. We still have a lot of strain and anxiety about students who don’t wear masks, but more than two-thirds of our users are wearing masks.
• Budget update: I wanted to talk a little about the budget and the choices that Kerri Goergen-Doll and I made when we submitted it this year.
  • The first decision was that we decided to budget for full FTE. We checked our assumptions and talked to accountants and that exposed the gaps in the rest of our budget.
  • That decision means that next year we won’t have 1.9 million dollars to carry forward. If we don’t have that money, we’ll have to cut our spending. I’m feeling good about these decisions, but less good about the situation.
• For those who are new to the committee, the year-to-year support from the university is not bad. Administration understands journal cost inflation. Our problem is that the starting point for both our staffing and collections budget levels is lower than one would expect for a research library of our size.
• This is why the open scholarship group is important. The more we move towards open access, the more publishers are going to change models to get content to us. This is why it’s really important that we know what interests we’re representing. We’re representing the whole university when we do these negotiations, and we need to be able to negotiate more than price. We need to be able to share content with other libraries, keep backfiles if we cancel subscriptions, and allow our researchers to do computational research on it. We need a shift on this campus away from the idea that we need to own or license everything we ever need and invest in our ability to deliver content on demand. There are a lot of complicated issues here, and both conversations need to happen if we’re going to have a sustainable future.
• We’ve done the survey and looked at a lot of different principles. We’ve chosen the principles that I popped in the chat [see below], which a lot of other libraries rely on. We’re talking to EC next Tuesday and the Associate Deans of Research next Thursday. Then, we’re doing a presentation at Hatfield and meeting with the Research office. Our hope is that we’ll be able to present to colleges and departments from there.
• Kerri Goergen-Doll shared a link to the project in chat: https://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/OSSC 
• The Chair noted that in addition to giving feedback to the library staff, the LC may communicate the needs of the library to the faculty. The plan is to do this in a presentation to the Faculty Senate.
• The date, time, and locations of the forums for the Dean of Libraries search were noted (October 28 and November 1 in MU 49; November 4 MU 13. 1-2 PM). LC members were encouraged to attend.

Meeting adjourned.

Links

Dean of Libraries search – https://leadership.oregonstate.edu/provost/dean-libraries-search

Open and Sustainable principles – https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/

Minutes prepared by Bradley Boovy