Documents Users Group

February 7, 2003

Palo Alto College Learning Resources Center

Attendance: Dorothy Blow, John Barnett, Camille Fiorillo, Amory Irby, Michael Kaminski, Ben Longoria, Victor Lopez, Tina Mesa, Tina Petimezas, Azucena Rodriguez-Guerra, Claudia Shaw and Kathy Amen.

There were many announcements and discussion points brought up, grouped together below by institution. Please let Kathy know if there are additions or changes.

Palo Alto:  We were happy to meet Azucena, recently moved over from circulation to take Pat Broome's job in documents. Ruth Swan, the SAPL volunteer who attended our Christmas lunch, has also been hired here, in Reference. Folks in this part of town are particularly excited about the new Toyota plant. Camille said that programs are being set up at St. Phillips for training courses but they are hoping to get some at Palo Alto as well. Camille noted that the dean of the library school at North Texas will be making, essentially, a recruiting trip to San Antonio in late March. She is scheduled to spend some time at various institutions; she'll be at Palo Alto on the 28th. So if any of you know of people interested in library school, they might want to meet with her. TLA Legislative Day is February 12. Camille will be going and John might also be able to. Perhaps they can report on their impressions at our next meeting.

SAC:  Tina reported that their subscription to the Rand Texas Statistics database is in place and it's a nice resource.

SAPL:  Dorothy reports that they are doing heavy IRS business again. They have the forms but are not providing assistance, since they are so short-handed. They have a listing of places where volunteers will help people with their taxes. The telephone reference and regular reference departments have been merged at SAPL.

St. Mary's:  Kathy reported on a new Law Library policy requiring any non-St. Mary's students using the facility to pay for a guest card ($50 annual fee). This presumably includes attorneys, private citizens and students of other schools (but work is underway to allow students from area colleges and universities free access). Provision is made for users of documents, although they must make arrangements in advance, so the library is not running afoul of the letter of the law with GPO (just its spirit--editorial comment by KA). Kathy suggests that anyone who needs to use the Law Library call ahead to see if they will be admitted. Dorothy said the Bexar County Law Library is an alternative resource for the public, but it is only open weekdays and there are no librarians to help patrons. On another topic, Kathy is interested in compiling some sort of listing of government information pages in Spanish. John and Tina volunteered to help her with this. The Blume Library at St. Mary's was successfully, more or less, re-carpeted over the holidays.

TLU:  Speaking of carpeting, TLU wants to recarpet its main floor, but this plan is complicated by the fact that shelves would have to be moved to comply with ADA space requirements, too. This may make it too expensive a proposition. They are experiencing a noticeable increase in use of documents now that they are putting records in their catalog for them (from Marcive). One problem Claudia is having is that she is needing to add 856 fields in such a way as to make the links display in the catalog. We suggested she talk to her systems person, since for the rest of us getting Marcive records the URLS for online titles display automatically. Perhaps some settings could be adjusted to get this to happen at TLU.

Trinity:  A traveling exhibit from the National Library of Medicine is on display through February at the Coates Library. It's called "Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature" and there's a web page with more information. It moves on to the Health Sciences Library after its stay at Trinity. Next month Ruby will be having hip replacement surgery and will be out for several months. Michael will let us know when she'll be in the hospital and we'll send her something. We all wish her a speedy recovery!

UTSA:  They will be expanding onto the 4th floor at the 1604 campus, as the adminstration, which currently occupies that space, gets their own building. They are also having sprinklers put in. John reported that they have purchased the 2000 Mexican census data; they also have some historical material. More information on their splitting up collections between 1604 and Downtown: Architecture is moving downtown, and their Current Urban Documents microfiche is downtown. The ERIC microfiche is at 1604 and likely will remain there.

General topics of concern:  Hiring freezes (at UTSA and ACCD) and the alarming moves to eliminate state libraries. The situation in Florida has been reported on govdoc-l and Kathy heard some Washington state librarians express concern abouat that state library's future at the FDLC in October.

Our next meeting will be March 7 at Texas Lutheran College, 10:00 a.m. A dutch-treat lunch in Seguin will follow for all who can stay.

Respectfully submitted,

Kathy Amen, Secretary/Treasurer