MOBAC Reference Committee Meeting Agenda

Tuesday January 24,  2:00 P.M.

Watsonville Public Library

Parking Information: http://cityofwatsonville.org/public-library/about-the-library/library-parking

To participate via Zoom:

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://zoom.us/j/504291661

Call to Order: 2:15

Present:  Heather Geddes (Watsonville) Chair:  Kris Amaral (MCFL); Stacy Mueller (Cabrillo), Cynthia Ainsworth (Hartnell); Ann Jacobson (via Zoom, Co-chair)

Recorder: Heather and Ann

Proxies:  Kris Amaral for Sarah Dahlen

Approval of Last Meeting's Minutes:  Heather will send out for approval by email, because not enough people here from the last meeting to approve.

Public Comments:  None

Welcome New Members (if any present)

Welcome to Stacy and Cynthia.  Heather gave them new member info packets and after the meeting will show them how to access and edit the Wiki.

Heather is leaving Watsonville at the end of February to be Community Librarian in Morgan Hill. We will miss her!

Old Business:

Spring Workshop
     Team to organize it

     Topic

     Date/location 

Plans for Spring Workshop. Past ideas were mental health training or local history resources. Mental health isn’t going to work.  Ann and Heather looked at Info People, we may be able to contract out.  We have $450 left in our budget. Topics on Info people: intro to content marketing (Kris just took it and it was good), building ebook collections, using social media for Reader’s Advisory, and more. Either physical or virtual. Virtual not as good for networking.

Other ideas: Fake News/news credibility, serving patrons best.

Might lend itself to a tangible product.

Heather will contact Info People to see whether someone might be available for content marketing.

Stacy will look into Fake News resources to present to group at next meeting about what we might do, resources that are available. Good topic for our next meeting!

Premature to schedule or identify location.

Need committee members to take lead on organizing workshops if we are going to be able to continue offering them.

Friday mornings still seem like best option for most libraries.

Chair(s) for next year (year starts in August)

With Heather leaving, her last meeting will be either February or March.  It is important that we identify an incoming Chair for next year.  That person can start working with Ann now to learn the ropes, and will be able to step in to lead meeting(s) if Ann is unable to attend.

Meeting location needed for Feb. 28 and June 27 meetings.

Heather looking at Watsonville for February, Kris looking at MCFL (Marina or Castroville) for June.  Stacy checking to see if Cabrillo's Castroville campus might be an option in general and for one of those months.

Cynthia will learn about Hartnell space reservation process. We are already scheduled to meet there in March.

New business:

Reports:

Administrative Council

Ann attended Dec. meeting at MIIS. Brought up the challenges we've been having with member attendance and participation.  Some discussion ensued:

Based on Ann's report about attendance, there was some conversation about our committee.  Maybe we need to rethink the purpose of the committee?  Discussed possible reasons for our decreased attendance, including traffic making travel less desirable, changing roles of people (there are often no longer clear “heads of reference”, people are on multiple MOBAC committees and it gets to be too much.

Donna Truong retiring from PLP in June.

PLP taking on some MOBAC website administration.

Tech Committee

None

ILL Committee

None

SPLAMBA

None

After committee reports, we (Ref Committee) began talking about our committee and whether we need to revisit the purpose and structure.  Ann agreed to put together a draft survey of all committee members of record, asking them for input on roadblocks to their participating, meeting structure, topics, frequency, etc. She will share the draft with all who are at today's meeting. 

We discussed the possibility of focusing on making our meetings more "content rich" for people who come, and decreasing the number of (or discontinuing) putting on workshops.  So the meetings could be more educational and less committee business.

Discussion Topic: This is a new agenda item for our meetings, we are testing out a changing monthly discussion topic to see if it is beneficial to our members.  This month's topic is "The impact of technology questions from patrons on reference services", What types of questions are you seeing, what training/skills do your staff need, how is this impacting your reference desk?

There was a very lively discussion on this topic!

Reference Shares:

Ann:  NPS has a trial for BKpedia, full-text ebooks from Berrett-Koehler.  Very interesting for business people, others interested in organizational change, leadership, communication, self-improvement, etc.

Kris: MCFL making extensive use of Lynda.com

News from libraries (off the record)

Next meeting— Probably Watsonville, Heather will confirm by email.  Ann will probably chair.  Feb. 28, 2017