Minutes, SSRIC Meeting of October 25, 2002 at Sonoma State
Scribe: Nan Chico (Hayward)
Present: Sonoma, Hayward, Bakersfield, San Francisco, Maritime Academy, Pomona, SLO, Sacramento, Fresno, Northridge, San Jose
1. The previous minutes were amended to show the Spring Meeting and Conference dates as April 25 & 26, 2003; then approved.
2. We introduced ourselves to our guest, Michelle LaMar from the Center for Distributed Learning (CDL), who attended for a couple of hours.
3. Additional agenda item: update on the student research conference.
4. Ed Nelson (Fresno) reported on Field Institute issues:
a) We need to heavily advertise the fellowship and internship. Ed will add the CSU Faculty Development listserv to the other folks he sends announcements to (Researchers on each campus, Deans). Ed sent around the list of campus research faculty so we could update names, and he will email them to all ORs as well. Tony will post the announcements to the SSDBA/SSRIC website.
b) We discussed the stipend to interns ($7 per hour) as possibly being too little to attract students; there was a discussion about possibly asking Field to increase that amount, but we will hold off asking them to do that. Meanwhile, we should stress other benefits, such as great experience and the opportunity for academic credit. Chris Bettinger (SFSU) will find out if a similar internship at SF State can be made to overlap with the Field Internship (possibly the intern could stay in student housing).
c) Another suggestion was to lower the number of hours (40 per week) that the intern works, but giving them the same total $$ (Field would not be out extra money, but would have the intern for fewer hours). We decided to hold off on asking Field about this for now.
d) All ORs should publicize the Field fellowship and internship through whatever additional avenues they can, including sending the info to other appropriate listservs.
e) Dick Shaffer (SLO) and Ed Nelson will contact Field (Mark DiCamillo) to discuss the funding issues around the Field Poll Data.
f) Our Field Committee members are Ed, John Korey (Pomona), and Elliot Barkan (San Bernadino), with Jon Ebeling (Chico) taking care of the ICPSR Summer Institute applicants. We are grateful to our retiring and/or FERPing members, Jon and Ellie, for working on the Committee for so many years.
5. Report on ICPSR
{At this point we took an acronym break, whereby old members explained what all the initials refer to.}
a) Summer Program; Jon will continue to administer the Summer program.
b) Six CSU campuses have signed up for ICPSR Direct; all remaining campuses need to get IP addresses to Tony; authentication is an issue for ISP addresses. Mike Reibel (Pomona) reported on a workshop he gave just before Fall quarter started on showing faculty how to connect to and use ICPSR Direct.
c) The Subcommittee on Instructional Materials and Information (SIMI) will meet in January; they are working on teaching resources (John Korey and Nan Chico are members). See http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ORG/Other_Resources/SIMI/simi.html for more details. If ORs have favorite URLs for statistics, research, data, or similar topics, please send them to either of us.
6. Update on Student Research Conference to be held on April 25 in San Francisco. Chris handed out a two-sided flyer with great ideas for publicizing the conference. START NOW!! Some interesting places for dinner were mentioned. Suggestions for speakers were forthcoming (tell Chris if you can think of additional possibilities). Rooms for student presentations have been reserved, and some locals have promised to bring their classes.
7. CDL Update (Michelle LaMar)
a) The CDL (http://www.cdl.edu/) now has a staff of 10; MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org/) is now under the auspices of the Chancellor’s Office (CO). An upcoming project is to create a website/portal for CSU Teaching Materials. Michelle does the techie stuff, and could work with us if SSRIC decides to collaborate with CDL. We discussed ways of increasing the visibility of our teaching resources, but came to no conclusions.
b) For newcomers and our guest we then discussed the history of funding of the databases, the creation and changes over time of the SSDBA and its relationship to ICPSR, the relationship of SSDBA to SSRIC, and possibilities for a relationship between SSRIC and/or SSDBA with the CDL, and/or COLD.
8. Gordon Smith, Associate Director for Library Policy and Planning at the CO, Director of Systemwide Initiatives, gave us some information about Pharos (I’ve included some URLs for those who want more info):
http://www.calstate.edu/UIAS/campusesusingpharos.shtml
http://www.calstate.edu/UIAS/UIAS.shtml
Task Force Listservs: http://www.calstate.edu/UIAS/Teams.shtml
The idea of the Pharos/Portal is to create web-based unified access to whatever each of the CSU libraries provides; automate inter-library loans; have one big catalog. From the viewpoint of faculty and students, there would be ONE place to access that’s simple to use and does not require coming to the campus library. See Pomona for the best model so far: http://www.csupomona.edu/~library/html/other_lib_col.html
The CDL is doing things with Learning Objects, etc., and it could link to, or be part of, the same Pharos/Portal; so could the SSRIC Teaching Resources, and maybe somehow the databases. The point, again, is to have one interface that links to everything.
We asked Gordon for input into our funding of the databases dilemma and what we should do, beyond what we have always done, to strengthen our case. He suggested we focus on user data (number of hits). We explained how that is not a particularly good measure. He then said that we have to emphasize how what we are doing (SSDBA stuff) will integrate with what the library is trying to do.
We then went to lunch on campus, thanks Don!
After lunch we continued our discussion of 7.b. above, in preparation for the 2:15 conference call with Lou Zweier (CDL Director).
We asked Lou to suggest how we should react to the memo and how the CDL and SSRIC fit together. His take was that future funding is not guaranteed, and we (SSRIC) need to position ourselves to get more/other funding. He said that he was charged by Gerry to do a web site center, through a Portal, that would provide wide visible access to system resources. CDL and SSRIC should work together so that our TRD materials are integrated with other library resources and are therefore more useful and accessible. He also said we need to get feedback from users about the services we do provide (we discussed that for awhile, reiterating for him the problem of the one SSDBA download that could serve huge numbers of students over several years).
