TexShare Education Working Group Minutes
October 10, 2004 Meeting

Present: Lisa Loranc, James Karney, Farzaneh Razzaghi, Jerry Hoke, Joan Alcott, Pam Spooner, Ping Liu, Ann Mason, Janna Lawrence (recorder). Ted Wanner was not able to attend

Corrections to the minutes of the last meeting: Under New Business, the name of the company should be spelled “Elluminate.”

Joan moved and Pam seconded to accept the minutes, with the correction.

Old business:

Statement of purpose:
The TexShare Advisory Board would like a brief statement of what we want to accomplish in the next two years. Lisa distributed a draft statement.

Discussion revolved around the need to reflect a healthy balance between classroom-based and virtual workshops. If it’s important, people will come to face-to-face training; virtual is a nice back-up. Since everyone is now paying for TexShare databases, training is more important.

Suggested changes:

• Meets “as necessary,” not twice a year.
• Reports to the TexShare Advisory Board at their quarterly meetings
• Change to next two years, not five

The final version as discussed by the group:

The Education Working Group currently has 12 members representing public, academic, and medical libraries throughout the state. The group operates primarily in an advisory capacity and reports to the TexShare Advisory Board. The group meets as needed to evaluate the previous year’s educational programs and to make suggestions about the next year’s schedule. In addition, the group regularly disseminates a survey to provide TexShare users with direct input into the decision-making process for educational matters.

Critical issues for the Education Working Group over the next two years are as follows:

Take advantage of developing technologies to deliver training virtually while continuing to offer face-to-face instruction to accommodate learning styles and time and distance factors;

Expand the range of educational opportunities available to member libraries by better cooperation between TexShare participant libraries. Enlarge the pool of potential presenters through cooperative activities with library schools and other resources;

Develop a clearinghouse of educational materials available from participating libraries;

Develop educational programs for aspects of TexShare beyond the electronic resources;

And provide continuous needs assessment to the staff of TSLAC.

Other old business:

Ann discussed the problems with making libraries understand that their patrons need TexShare cards, even if they don’t charge a non-resident fee. Many libraries forget that their patrons might want to go to other libraries, too. This could be a class; a class was presented at TLA that covered the benefits of TexShare. It was also mentioned that if TexTreasures is revived, grant-writing workshops would be needed. The Library of Texas needs programs, too.

It was mentioned that James and Lisa will be leaving group in 2005. (Recorder’s note: According to the roster, Pam’s term also expires in 2005.) Technically, 3 or 4 people should leave every year, but everyone else leaves 2006, so Ann will work to rebalance the group. The group also had to be balanced by library type (public, academic, medical), size (large and small), and geographic area (currently we have no one from the Dallas-Fort Worth area on the Education Working Group). Ann said it was fine for us to suggest members, but to understand that they may not be selected if they don’t fill a need according type, size, or area.

Although Ted was not able to attend the meeting, because he was at a Reference training session, he sent the following information via Ann:

First, TexShare Reference continues to be a huge success. Most of the classes are full with a large waiting list. Seats are only still available in Canyon, Tyler, Irving, El Paso, and Abilene. We have selected the 15 cities for a second wave of TexShare Reference sessions in Spring 2005. These will be announced as soon as negotiations with specific training sites have finished. The 15 sites were selected based on the 5 biggest waiting lists in the current series, plus 10 areas that were missed in the first round, such as San Angelo, Beaumont, Victoria, Wichita Falls, Commerce, and Fort Stockton, among others.

Second, Kevin Marsh will be presenting three videoconferences on Library of Texas in October, on Oct. 5, 12, and 22. These programs will be linked to videoconference sites at the regional systems. The events have been announced by email to public libraries in each participating system (AALS and TPLS on 10/5; HALS, NETLS/NTRLS, and WTLS on 10/12; BCLS and TTPLS on 10/22). These basic orientations are mainly being offered to assist system staff, but public librarians were also invited (with system consent) because public library patrons are expected to be the dominant users for Library of Texas. The programs were also not expanded beyond public libraries due to concerns from the systems about the small size of their videoconference rooms.

Third, the proposal to have library school students teach TexShare to public librarians has met with great success. At UT-Austin, an electronic information class is already designing web page guides for TexShare databases in the humanities and social sciences, and one student has volunteered to design a TexShare training package as a Capstone Project in the Spring. Other classes are currently targeted to present this training in Spring or Fall 2005. Ted is also currently working with an electronic reference professor at UNT on possibilities for Fall 2005. The dean and faculty at TWU were extremely excited by this project, but they have requested that someone from the Education Working Group who works in the DFW area be their liaison instead of the TSLAC person in Austin (action item).

The group suggested that, since we have no members in the DFW area to serve as a liaison to TWU, perhaps someone from the Electronic Information Working Group could do this. Ann will ask Russlene about this. It was also suggested that Ted should contact Ana Cleveland at UNT.

New business:

Refreshments:
Ann has been contributing the food, since the State Library isn’t allowed to purchase refreshments. (The State Library is able to supply coffee and tea, however.) We decided we should all contribute two dollars, and Ann will buy future refreshments from this fund.

Education Resources:

There was discussion of the education resources we have been collecting. Lisa pointed out that we really only need to contact the ones who had a listing in the ‘contact for handouts’ column, although we can contact the others if we like. Although we really want handouts that help use TexShare resources, subject-based pathfinders that include TexShare resources are fine, too, as long as they are at least 70% TexShare.

Materials should be emailed to Ann, or sent on a disk if necessary. We should review the handouts for content and accuracy before we pass them on to Ann for posting. We’ll also need a disclaimer on the website; this could be a project for our next meeting. Ann will also know more about the website by then, too.

Future meetings:

Our next face-to-face meeting is tentatively scheduled for April 5, 1:00 p.m., during TLA in Austin. We will need to elect a new chair at this meeting. We may also have a conference call in about three months to discuss the education resources clearinghouse.

The meeting was adjourned at 12:15 p.m.