CCL Regional Meeting Report - Northeast Region
June 2016 (submitted by Lisa Foley)
The main theme at our June 3rd meeting at Yuba College was retirement and the question of how these positions would be replaced.
--Elena Heilman, solo librarian, from Yuba was expecting her second baby in August and would be taking a leave of absence for several months after the baby was born. She had her faculty librarian replacement James already trained and ready to take over, since he had already stepped in with her instructional duties while she served as Interim Dean last year.
-- Luo Zhu (Dean, Butte), Nancy Shephard (Dean of IT & Library, Siskyous), Sierra College, Patricia ?, Nevada County Campus in Grass Valley, and maybe Lisa Foley (Library Director, Lake Tahoe) had retirement dates this summer or early fall. (Lisa is still in negotiations regarding a retirement incentive for June 30th; if negotiations aren’t successful, she will be on extended medical leave due to side effects of a concussion.) The LTCC contact person for CCL is the only fulltime staff member left, Jonathan Schank schank@ltcc.edu whom Lisa brought several years ago to a Northern California workshop on open source ILS options).
--While Siskiyous is fortunate to have a fulltime librarian, Jude Baldwin, in place, she is not at the Director or Dean level. Lake Tahoe will no doubt cut costs by eliminating the Director position, then wait a year with occasional adjunct backfill, before hiring an instructional librarian. Downgrading the position of the college’s chief librarian clearly weakens our libraries overall. Is there anything the CCL Exec can do to reverse this trend?
Will Breitbach (Shasta), Dena Martin (Woodland), and John Taylor (Lassen) gave presentations on how to make Canvas more library-friendly to faculty and students alike. I was shocked and saddened to learn that Canvas had no built-in library menu icon. How could this have been neglected, I ask, with Pat James as Canvas lead? Will had taken the time to design a home-made library icon in Shasta’s Canvas product, but why should each and every college need to reinvent this wheel we take for granted in a CMS!?!?
Will from Shasta reports that the statewide OEI project is moving slowly, with just a few courses passing the hurdles so far. Darryl from FRC reported that he was able to increase his book budget significantly this year and stabilize library staffing finally.
Lassen College Director John Taylor reports that the opening of their library was stalled until fall 2016. The new facility will house its collection on the ground floor with a collection of roughly 25,000 titles in compact shelving.
Dena Martin gave a presentation on how she uses the new ACRL Framework to document learning outcomes and has actually succeeded in getting a couple of Woodland non-library faculty interested in using the Framework themselves!
The NE Region thanks the CCL for providing lunch and the encouragement to meet, despite long, long distances.