Conference day 1, unidentified table D

First ten minutes? After introductions and discussions of our expectations, we looked at the list and asked, “What’s left off and why?”

* Web-based tutorials. Why not integrate with Libraries or CMS or both?

* Compliance with TEACH Act? Sure, but why not Patriot Act, too. Where does privacy/FERPA law end?

* Faculty willingness to include librarians as partners.

* Solid economic analysis of the cost of providing metadata.

* We touched briefly on the complications posed by libraries’ licensing requirements of some databases.

* How do you avoid “portal creep”? Is it your CMS? Your library?

General Discussion

Discussion that the sixteen options weren’t equally weighty. Some were yes/no – others have lots of subtopics embedded. One cluster of the 16 deals with organizational structures, another with the kind of problem that will be solved.

* Who will design and implement a metadata training program for faculty/staff who need to apply metadata?

1. Organizationally, who else should be at the “enterprise discussion table”? Possible voices are the AV Services group, the public broadcasting group, the registrar, the archivist? From a user perspective (e.g., faculty or student), our organizational boundaries either are murky or confusing. Indeed, more services will always generate a demand for more and smarter user support services and broader training programs. (Faculty will say: “we don’t want training, we want support when we need it. Somebody needs to answer that phone!”)

2. We didn’t share a common understanding of “learning objects.” We used the example of how many PPT’s are at each university and how we could find out whether any of them might have one or more slides relevant to a faculty member. Does WebCT Vista adequately provide metadata tags?

3. We do not have a clear sense of the economics and scale of applying metadata in an enterprise system. What does it cost a faculty member to produce a PPT slide (depends on the slide – some are lavishly funded by research $$$). But currently we have no way to share at a granular level.

4. Current staffing cuts have forced changes to the contents of librarians’ jobs. Other issues deal with licensing issues (e.g., a database is restricted to students at a particular campus, which affects distance students).

5. As new services are envisioned, how do we get input from faculty BEYOND the early adopters? Sure, there are faculty senate committees – but at what level and in what way is input gathered? Even more critical, how do we get input from Graduate Students on both library and CMS issues? They are very big and important users of both systems.

6. Risk tolerance: how do we tolerate failure? On central infrastructure systems, failure cannot be tolerated. Period. Can you really innovate – or spur innovation – when you’re working on an enterprise scale? Small innovations are easy – scale is always hard. (E.g., Blackboard extensions.)

7. How can the libraries collaborate with faculty on information literacy? How adequately have we estimated students’ information literacy? (Students do not come to university with a mature sense of finding and evaluating information; nor are they very well informed about copyright.)

8. We have said very little about the role and importance of instant messaging among students, both for community-building and for collaboration. Should we have chat rooms for Library communication? Should this be part of the Libraries’ systems, the CMS, or both?

9. We said very little about #8 (content rights management, including digital rights management; compliance with law and policy; TEACH Act).