Documents Users Group
Attendance: Dorothy Blow, Jeremy Donald, Michael Kaminski, Victor Lopez, Tina Mesa, Tina Petimezas, Wilson Plunkett, Christina Ramos, Azucena Rodriguez-Guerra, Ruth Swan, Ruby Wehmeyer, and Kathy Amen.
This being our first meeting of the new school year, we spent most of the time catching up and making announcements about goings-on at our various institutions. But we also took time out to elect Michael as our new president, by acclamation.
SAPL: They still don't have a permanent director (their assistant director is serving as acting head) but are interviewing people for the job. They got some new materials money in their budget, but city council is considering raising the cost for printing in the library to $.25, which is paid for through the library card. Another printing note: UTSA has started to charge for it at last, and everyone reports lots of printing at their institutions. So much for the paperless society!
Palo Alto: Azucena had a baby in April, her second--congratulations! They have caught up with processing receipts now but are concerned about upcoming cuts in their budget for adjunct positions, as well as the impending merger of their Computer Center and Information Concourse. This is necessitated by Toyota's moving into the CC's area to set up their training facility. The A&M presence at PA is growing and we've been warned that the next time we meet out there parking won't be as easy to come by as in the past! They are offering library tecnology classes, geared toward training folks for school library tech jobs, and they've gotten lots of students.
UTSA: John's position is being advertised and we hear that he is doing well at his new job in Pennsylvania. In keeping with UTSA's overall hopes of becoming a true research institution, the Library is moving toward research library status as well. Their enrollment is way up and parking is, as always, a big concern. Victor reviewed for us the subject divisions between the downtown and 1604 campuses: downtown is concentrating on architecture and criminal justice. His big news is that the1604 Library is open 24 hours a day during the week, a situation that may or may not become permanent.
SAC: Their comprehensive weeding project has been completed. A major new reference acquisition is the Gale Virtual Reference Library. Tina will let us know when the next edition of Library Soup, their entertaining newsletter, comes out. In response to a question from Dorothy, Tina noted that SAC has a good collection of legal reference materials in support of their paralegal classes. Amory was not at the meeting today because her mother had a serious stroke. We send our best wishes to her for a speedy and complete recovery.
Trinity: Jeremy is settling in as the new documents librarian and will be attending the FDLC next month. He and Kathy will report on that gathering for our meeting in November.
St. Mary's: We are working on getting all of our Census materials, including those in storage, into the catalog. In the course of this work, we've discovered a quick way of using Millennium to export cataloging records from other libraries. The major construction project for the front of St. Mary's is nearing completion and hopefully will be ready for an inspection tour at our meeting in November. Ben Longoria, former documents assistant, has a new job as THE librarian at a new institution, American International University, which will be opening here in town next semester. Good luck, Ben!
Some general concerns were expressed about electronic and microfiche documents. If, as we understand it, GPO is to digitize the material that they had been microfiching, how will we know, since there no electronic "shipping lists"? Kathy expressed a similar concern about the current Print-on-Demand initiative: how can you demand something if you don't know it exists? Kathy and Jeremy will attempt to bring back some information on these questions from Washington.
Michael asked about the State Plan revision and Kathy apologized for forgetting to bring that information to the meeting. [But here it is: The revised state plan is open for comment from Directors until the end of October. Based on these comments, the Committee (a Texas GODORT committee that Kathy is serving on) will prepare a final version by January for approval. When 2/3 of the administrators of depositories in Texas have signed off on the plan, it will become "law." Here is a link to the plan (there are links on this page to PDF and Word versions of it, too).]
Let Kathy know if you have any questions or concerns about the plan or the process of revising and approving it, and she'll pass these along to the Committee. Thanks, Michael, for making sure we didn't overlook this little item!
Thanks to SAPL for the hosting, the free parking (!) and all the goodies. Our next meeting will be November 12 at 9:00 a.m. at the Blume Library at St. Mary's.
Respectfully submitted,
Kathy Amen, Secretary/Treasurer
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