May Library Office Notes

ANNOUNCEMENTS

HR NEWS

IT NEWS

FACILITIES

EVENTS AND TRAINING



ANNOUNCEMENTS: University Librarian Note

FY17 Budget Hearing Remarks
Note: The University’s budget hearing process changed this year and involved a more intensive analysis and discussion of the budget narratives submitted. Each hearing began with remarks from the dean of the school or college. My remarks follow.

I want to start by discussing the process that brought the Library to the conclusions you have in our budget narrative. We in the Library undertook a thoughtful and broadly engaged process to integrate our strategies with the way that we invest the entirety of our funds. We undertook our strategic planning process in concert with our budget planning process, and ensured that both of those conversations were broadly inclusive. Read more…
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ANNOUNCEMENTS: Illinois Research Connections Now Publicly Available
Illinois Research Connections (IRC), the new searchable web portal that showcases Illinois research expertise, is now publicly available: http://experts.illinois.edu. IRC currently provides profiles for more than 1,800 STEM and social science faculty and institute researchers and is populated with more than 101,000 publications and growing, as the database is updated weekly with new publications indexed in the Elsevier Scopus database. Faculty and researchers are encouraged to review and edit their profiles at this time. FAQs and update instructions are located at http://go.illinois.edu/IRC.

Please note: the goal has always been to be inclusive and representative of all disciplines on campus, including the arts and humanities. To achieve this goal the Library is currently working to pull publications information from non-Scopus sources. The portal will ultimately grow to include up to 2,500 faculty and researcher profiles all in one central location. In time, grants and patents information will be added to IRC as well.

Leadership of the IRC effort will transition over the summer. IRC Project Manager Rebecca Bryant’s last day was April 29. The Library is actively recruiting for her successor and we anticipate making an appointment sometime this summer. For the interim, please refer all questions to the irc-help@illinois.edu email. The Library IT Help Desk is monitoring the email, referring questions about communication and outreach to Beth Namachchivaya (sandore@illinois.edu), and technical questions to Bill Ingram (wingram2@illinois.edu).

IRC is supported by the University Library/Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCR).
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ANNOUNCEMENTS: EBSCO Usage Consolidation
Reporting for our largest 38 vendors, the EBSCO usage consolidation and uploading service provided at the University Library provides its users usage statistics that may be integral when making decisions on what e-resources are of the most value. To access the usage consolidation reports, follow the directions below:

Go to www.ebsconet.com
Customer Code: CG44999
Username: EBSCO
Password: EBSCOEBSCO
Click on “Usage Consolidation” link on the upper left corner right above the EBSCOnet logo.

For any other e-resource usage statistics, please follow the following path: G:\Collections Info\EResourceUsageStats. When usage statistics are needed beyond those that can be provided by our EBSCO usage consolidation service, Library faculty and staff will make a request to the resource provider and save the usage statistics from the following years to this folder for future use.

If for any reason the e-resource vendor is not listed in the aforementioned locations, please submit an E-Resources Usage Statistics Form located at the following link: http://www.library.illinois.edu/assessment/eresources/

If you have questions or need assistance, please contact Esra Coskun at coskun@illinois.edu.
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ANNOUNCEMENTS: Update from the Task Force to Create a Promotional Path for Academic Professionals in the Library
The task force’s main goal is to identify and recommend to the Executive Committee and University Librarian the steps required to establish a promotion program for Academic Professionals (APs) within the Library. This newly appointed task force has met five times since late March. As part of its work over the next several months, the task force intends to make recommendations that include establishing an overarching AP promotion program that includes one or more paths. The task force has devoted the first month of its existence to establishing a set of principles and an assessment plan to guide the work of identifying, assessing, and developing promotional paths for APs. As its next step, the task force intends to assess existing programs on campus and at other institutions to identify elements that are desirable for a Library promotion program.

In addition to guiding the work of the task force, we intend to share the set of principles and assessment framework with APs, faculty, and staff to gather early input about the important high-level goals and desired elements of the Library’s AP promotion program. The task force includes a liaison from the Library Committee on Academic Professionals (LCAP)—Josh Harris. The task force has submitted an interim report to the University Librarian and the Executive Committee. In May and June we plan to develop the framework of a promotion program along with examples of promotion paths, and to hold a series of forums in July and August to incorporate feedback and suggestions from APs, faculty, and staff that will shape the program.

The charge, membership, meeting summaries, and background information are available at the task force web page in the Committee handbook:
http://www.library.illinois.edu/committee/task_force_promotional_path_APs_library/Membership_Charge.html
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ANNOUNCEMENTS: Research and Publication Committee Revises Award Policy, Makes Three Awards
The Research and Publication Committee (RPC) encourages Library faculty and Academic Professionals who need support for their research activities to submit an application to the RPC. There are no deadlines for submission; applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. The Committee’s revised award policy—with additional details on applying for conference travel and registration in specific circumstances—is available at http://www.library.illinois.edu/committee/rpc/rpcpol.html.

The RPC congratulates four people who were awarded funding to support research this past month:

  • Antonio Sotomayor, for travel to Cuba to pursue his research that studies the role that the Young Men Christian Association (YMCA) played in the politics of United States expansion into Cuba. This research is part of a book project that will compare and contrast the YMCA in Cuba and Puerto Rico in order to discern patterns of U.S. imperialism, relating particularly to the study of Latin American religion and sport.
  • Harriett Green, for funding to support conference registration at the 2016 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, to be held on the University of Illinois Urbana campus. Harriett’s invited research paper—“Digital Humanities and Qualitative Inquiry: Digging into Data on a Large Scale”—will be published in the proceedings of the conference.
  • Erin Kerby and Christie Wiley, for funding to support focus groups and transcription of focus group interviews in their study “Experiences in Managing Research Data: Graduate Students and Post-Doctoral Researchers in the Sciences.”

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ANNOUNCEMENTS: Recognizing Excellence

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ANNOUNCEMENTS: CAPT Meeting Minutes
The most recent meeting minutes of the Content Access Policy & Technology (CAPT) Committee are posted at http://www.library.illinois.edu/committee/capt/.
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HR NEWS: Faculty and AP Searches
Below is a summary of current academic searches as of April 29, 2016 (click on graphic below to enlarge). A more comprehensive listing is sent via LibNews each month.

search-status-may2016

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IT NEWS: Library IT No Change Period
Leading up to and during finals, Library IT will observe a no-change period to avoid accidental outages during this critical time for our services. Changes may still occur to address security or stability issues, but anything that can wait until after finals will be delayed.

Following precedent, the Library will follow a different schedule from Technology Services.

  • Library IT will avoid changes from May 2, 2016, 12:01 AM through May 13, 2016, 11:59 PM
  • Technology Services will avoid changes from May 5, 2016, 12:01 AM through May 17, 2016, 11:59 PM

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IT NEWS: Use Caution When Opening Email Attachments
Because of the recent ransomware scam that has affected campus, we want to remind everyone to use extreme caution when opening any attachments received through email. If you receive a message with an attachment from a person or organization you do not know, do NOT open the attachment. The malicious attachments could look like anything, for example, Microsoft Word documents or Adobe PDF documents. To learn more about the recent attacks visit this website:
https://techservices.illinois.edu/news/2016/beware-ransomware-scam
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IT NEWS: Library IT Infrastructure Migration (Update)
As reported last month, Library IT has begun a project to migrate our production servers to Technology Services’ Virtualization Power Plant (http://itpowerplant.illinois.edu/initiatives/virtualization/).

We recently hit our first milestone in the server migration—successfully migrating early adopters to the Virtualization Power Plant. The migrations have been scheduled in waves according to the type of service:

  • Early adopters (April 25)
  • IT administration (April 28)
  • Web (May 18)
  • Collections (May 19)
  • Databases and printing (May 23)
  • Archives (May 24)
  • Grainger (May 25)
  • The rest (May 26)

The scheduled completion is May 31.
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FACILITIES: Project Information
Please visit the Office of Library Facilities web page (http://www.library.illinois.edu/administration/facilities/) for project information
(under Facilities–>Project Information).
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EVENTS AND TRAINING: Technology Prototyping Service Open House

technology_prototyping_open_house_Spring_2016

May 5, 1-3pm, Room 149A and 149B Undergraduate Library

The team would like to showcase several of the technologies developed and in development this semester. All Library staff and faculty are invited, but is also open to the public. Our portfolio page lists all the projects we worked on this semester: http://sif.library.illinois.edu/
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If you would like to submit content for the June issue of Library Office Notes, please submit it to John Wilkin, JoAnn JacobyBeth Sandore, or Tom Teper by Friday, May 20, 2016.