Hunter Library Insider - for Staff and Faculty of the library

Newsletter: July 2006 News

YEAR II GRANT AWARD

Congratulations to all who worked on the development of a successful plan for the second year of our LSTA Heritage Partners grant.  The Hunter Library has been awarded $126,000 in funds to carry out our plan and more fully develop the project database and website.  During Year II, we are adding the Southern Highland Craft Guild as a Contributing Partner and will be working with Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual and the Museum of the Cherokee Indian as Cooperating Partners in preparation for their coming on board as fully invested Heritage Partners during Year III.  Our Year I partners will continue their work, which hopefully will flow more easily now that we have significant bugs worked out in terms of our procedures.

ADVISORY

Our first Year II Advisory Meeting will be held on Tuesday, September 26th.  We will again follow the format of last year, with Advisors meeting at 10 a.m. and Partners meeting with the Hunter Library “home team” in the afternoon beginning after lunch.  Please put this date on your calendar and plan to attend.  We will again be providing lunch.  I will be having students contact you to get an accurate count of how many will attend.

TRAINING

Within a month of the September meeting—sometime in October—we will hold our annual training session.  Again, this will be an all-day session.  The training is hands-on.  We go through all the steps to digitize and input data on items that will be part of the database and story.  I will confer with you to make sure we select a day that works for all participants before we schedule this all-important session.  While our Year I partners already know how to complete the steps to scan and input data, I invite Year I partners to bring other staff on board.  You may want to bring an intern or volunteer to the training session to help you during the upcoming year.  Bringing an additional person from your staff may also help integrate your collection and digitization procedures into the overall skill set of your organization.

DIRECTORS DINNER

Last week Bil Stahl, Chancellor John Bardo, Provost Kyle Carter, and I greeted guests at a dinner and presentation on campus.  We hosted directors and representatives from our Heritage Partner organizations to an evening social in the University Center.  Our goal for the evening was to present the project more fully to both your administration and ours.  Bil presented a short program that outlined the project’s history and progress as well as goals for the upcoming year.  While we have enjoyed the support of our administration here at WCU, this was an opportunity to explain the project to them in greater detail.  We also wanted your directors to fully appreciate the work that you are doing and provide you with the support you need to carry out the project over the next two years.  Now that some of your directors are more familiar with the project, do let me know if they would like to be added to this list to receive the monthly newsletter.

TEACHER LIAISON

This year one of the project’s main goals will be to focus on the grant’s required K-12 component.  Mary Jean Herzog, a member of the WCU education faculty—and someone well versed in issues of rural education—has come on board as the project’s teacher liaison.  Mary Jean and I have already met a number of times to strategize and I welcome your input into how we can effectively create a teacher-friendly on-line resource.

PRESS RELEASE

Another Year II focus will be promotion of the project’s site as well as the grant award.  WCU’s Public Relations division is distributing a press release on the project.  Leila Tvedt, Public Relations director, has woven together significant facts concerning our award and our upcoming year of activity.  I am attaching a copy of the press release to this email.  Look for it in your local paper.  We are actively working on the fall rollout, which will be the official “launch” of our site onto the World Wide Web.  While no one single event will herald our launch, we are centering our activities around the already popular Mountain Heritage Day at the end of September.

POSTERS/POSTCARDS

With funds from Year I, we produced a postcard and large-format poster.  As soon as we get student help in place, we will begin amassing a mailing list and begin to distribute these posters and cards to area colleges, libraries, high schools, and cultural organizations.  I took some to the Asheville Civic Center and Deb Schillo distributed them at the book sales booth during the four-day run of the Craft Fair of the Southern Highlands.  Do think about how many posters/postcards you would like and plan to pick them up at the September meeting.  We can give you as many of these as you would like, to distribute through your own channels and mailings.  We want to distribute all of them this fall as we have funds in the current budget year to produce another print flyer in the spring.

BUDGET

I spent a significant amount of time this past month on behind-the-scenes activities, working out details of finishing up bookkeeping with regard to last year’s budget and the setting up of Year II accounts.  I know that some of you are in dire need of cds and that is the first thing we are about to order.  This year we will order a spool of cds for everyone so that we won’t have to keep replenishing your supplies.  I have also been reviewing graduate student applications, interviewing student applicants, and preparing to advertise and interview undergrad positions as well.  We have planned a site visit to the SHCG with the entire Library Systems Unit to more fully evaluate their technical needs prior to ordering equipment for their site.

CONSULTANT

You may remember that we’ve hired mStoner, a national web design firm, to evaluate our site as well.  We received a preliminary report from them and will be presenting that to you at the fall meeting.  We will continue to work with mStoner over the next year in terms of critique and usability testing. 

PROJECT TEAMS

New additions to our project team for Year II are the SHCG as a Heritage Partner, WCU Education professor Mary Jean Herzog as Teacher Liaison, and History professor Scott Philyaw, who is also director of the Mountain Heritage Center.  They bring important expertise to our team.  Recently, I met with HL Reference Unit Head Becky Kornegay to discuss the role of the library’s Reference Unit in the project and will be making a presentation to them at their upcoming meeting.  Our Reference faculty are experts in the delivery of information to students and the public and we need their input in the development of appropriate content delivery mechanisms.  Our goal here is not so much to add additional members for the sake of greater numbers, but to bring multiple perspectives to bear on our project.

DATABASE REVIEW

Our Home Team will be reviewing the project database before we go “live” with the site.  We’ll have a meeting here next week to examine data and content in detail.  I want to ask each of you to take some time in the next couple of weeks to look carefully at the database as well.  We want to make sure that each partner is inputting data in a way that contributes to a seamless and coherent story.  Please bring your suggestions and concerns to our session on the 26th.  I look forward to seeing you all again.

Anna