Meeting Minutes

Woodward Library, UBC; McKechnie Room; 3-4:30 PM

Attending: Celia Brinkerhoff (Douglas), Gordon Coleman (ELN), Katherine Miller (UBC), Todd Rowlatt (VCC)

Minutes recorded by Katherine Miller

Composition of the ALPS LINK Committee

We have lost a few members due to graduation, other commitments, and retirement! Thank you to all of the committee members for your contributions over the last year: Cynthia McLellan (SLAIS), Dawna Turcotte (Northern Lights) and Liza Hutchison (Langara College). A special mention needs to be made for Liza Hutchison's contribution to ALPS LINK. Liza is an original founding member of the committee, a passionate supporter of the work who hosted our meetings for the last 4 years. All the best for your retirement Liza!

The current committee is: Celia Brinkerhoff (Douglas College), Gordon Coleman (ELN), Katherine Miller (UBC), Katherine Parker, Todd Rowlatt (VCC)

Action: Todd will request that the current SLAIS Representative on the ALPS Executive send a message to the SLAIS students looking for one or more SLAIS student reps who are able to join the committee over the next year.

New ALPS LINK Portal

Gordon has been working with Scott Leslie's team to create a new ALPS LINK portal. See draft at: http://www.mnt.ca/solr/alps/ 

Some of the benefits include: a) a more attractive display without the "iFrame", b) the ability to generate statistics on the most popular objects, c) the ability to pull ALPS LINK info into any other page such as a library's staff page. Committee members made a few requests and suggestions which Gordon will follow-up with Scott. The hope is to soft-launch the new portal over the summer and announce it in September.

Cross-Searching

Gordon discussed some projects he hopes to be able to do over the summer, time permitting. One is harvesting metadata from the ANTS project so that it can be searched from within the LINK portal. Another is to load the metadata from the excellent collection of librarian learning objects at the  PRIMO site. Gordon will discuss further with Scott and also contact ACRL re: screen-scraping their site. Again this would be announced in September; it would more than double the size of LINK, and greatly enhance its usefulness by providing a single search portal to several very good collections of LO.

Site of the Month

Celia suggested that like the Primo Site of the Month, we consider doing our own ALPS LINK Site of the Month. Primo has a short interview with the creator of the learning object. We might want to try this too.

Katherine Parker suggested that we might want to try a Twitter feed as another way of promoting existing learning objects.

Todd identified that there may be "timely learning objects" that are needed. i.e. APA Citation Style guide. We could ask for donations of timely learning objects.

We can also post them in the BCLA Browser. Here are the dates for submitting to the Browser: http://bclabrowser.ca/index.php/browser/about/submissions#authorGuidelines .

We will start this project in the fall.

Todd came up with the idea for the Oothm (object of the month). Which led to discussions of Great Oothms...  and humphalumps and snuffleupaguses.

Action: Celia will start working on the idea of site of the month. Katherine Parker will assist.

Fall Campaign: Laud a Librarian

We will host the Laud a Librarian Contest 2010. Last year we had an Olympics theme - the Gold Medal Contest. We'd like to have a theme for this year's contest too. Todd suggested something about "Hard Times" since so many of us are facing cutbacks. The group liked the idea and wanted to let it "ferment" a bit, for further discussion at our next meeting.

Todd asked if we should have the 3 categories for this year's contest - like we did last year. The group decided to simplify the contest with just one category. As in the past you can deposit your own work or nominate your colleagues work.

ALPS LINK Champions

Goal is to continue to work with our local champions and ask them to help spread the word about the contest and the site of the month.

ALPS LINK Wiki

Celia pointed out that as there have been some changes over the last year, we will need to make some edits to the wiki.

Action: Gordon offered to go through and make changes. Gordon will also add links on the page to lists of prize winners from previous years, a sort of "hall of fame".

Next Meeting

Todd offered to host at VCC. Katherine has sent out a meeting wizard to find the best date for the group. DONE.

DATE/TIME CONFIRMED: Wed Sept 8th 3-5 PM @ VCC Broadway Campus - Room TBD