Occasional Progress Report 6 -- July 11, 2013
Hi everyone:
Here’s the latest on what’s been happening with 2CUL Technical Services Integration (TSI). This report, along with past updates, is also available in the Project Reports section of the TSI wiki.
1. The TSI Steering Committee has been on a bit of a hiatus during the past month, as the various TSI functional working groups make their way through the investigative phase of their respective charges. All nine working groups are aiming to submit their summary reports on this phase of their assignment by the end of July.
2. The Original Cataloging Working Group (the last of the functional working groups to be appointed) began its work in earnest last month. It is chaired by Susan Summer (Columbia), with Chew Chiat Naun serving as the Cornell lead. Russell Merritt (Columbia), Sarah Ross (Cornell), Pam Stansbury (Cornell), and Melanie Wacker (Columbia) make up the rest of the team, which is holding its first in-person meetings at Columbia later today and tomorrow (July 11-12). Bill Kara (Cornell) and Joyce McDonough (Columbia), representing the E-Resources Working Group, as well as members of the Non-MARC Metadata Working Group, also held face-to-face meetings recently – at Columbia and Cornell, respectively. Later this month, Sarah Elman (Head of Technical Services at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia) will be visiting Cornell for an overview of CJK technical services in LTS and a tour of Cornell University’s Kroch Asia Library. For more on the work of all the 2CUL TSI working groups and teams, see the links in the “Functional Areas and Teams” box on the TSI wiki.
3. 2CUL-related activities at the ALA Annual meeting in Chicago last month included a presentation by Bob Wolven at the ALCTS Heads of Cataloging Interest Group. In his talk, Bob gave an administrator’s view of the challenges we face in assessing cataloging from a cross-institutional perspective – specifically, in the context of 2CUL. He stressed how the decisions we make regarding cataloging and other technical services operations will often reflect how we weigh common, but competing, underlying values. Bob’s presentation is available on the TSI wiki from the 2CUL Articles & Presentations page -- see the most recent entry in the chronologically arranged list. In a different kind of meeting, several of the TSI steering committee and working group members who attended ALA got together for a “2CUL TSI Happy Hour” in Chicago’s historic Palmer House lobby bar. Former Director of LTS Cataloging & Metadata Services at Cornell, Glen Wiley, joined us to catch up on 2CUL news (and gossip). Glen now holds a similar position (without the 2CUL component) at the University of Miami Libraries.
4. Also at ALA, a subset of the 2CUL Alma Negotiating Team (Xin Li, Bob Wolven, Kate Harcourt, and Jim LeBlanc) met with representatives from Ex Libris to continue work on a draft contract for joint implementation of an Alma LMS. These negotiations are moving slowly, but surely forward. Of particular note is our concern to be able to test Alma more fully before we commit to implementing what is a conceptually slick, but not yet fully functional system (at least in our minds). Ex Libris understands this concern and we are working towards a solution to address it. For those interested in what development partners and early adopter library staff are saying about Alma, there is an unmoderated Alma discussion list (ALMA-L) to which Ex Libris customers may subscribe – see ELUNA Alma Email Lists for more details (thanks to Columbia’s Mark Wilson for this information).
5. The TSI Administrative Team met with its Human Resources and Assessment liaisons earlier this month to begin broader, more formal planning for “building a 2CUL culture” in the integrated technical services operation – and beyond. Notes from that meeting are available from the Administration page on the TSI wiki (scroll down to “Meeting Notes”). We've begun to describe our approach to TSI as “middle-out.” As opposed to “top-down” (in which library administrators play the lead role in planning the integration) or “bottom-up” (in which planning begins with very broad, comprehensive input from library staff), we are relying heavily on staff at the supervisor and coordinator levels to help craft the integration, based on their expert knowledge of processes and on input from key individuals in their respective units.
That’s all for this time. As always, please feel free to direct questions to your supervisors or to any member of the TSI Steering Committee: Kate Harcourt, Adam Chandler, Colleen Major, Boaz Nadav-Manes, Robert Rendall, or me.
- Jim LeBlanc (on behalf of the 2CUL TSI Steering Committee)