Library Council Meeting Minutes

February 28, 2018

1. Introductions and Announcements

2. Brief Report on the Libraries’ Budget meeting with the Provost (Ann Elsner & Deborah Jakubs)

3. New Opportunities in Exhibits (Meg Brown, Exhibition Coordinator for the DUL)

4. Beyond the Show and Tell: Engaging Students with Archives (Katie Henningsen, Head of Research Services, Rubenstein Library)

5. Initial Discussion of Targeted Agenda for 2018-19 (Jimmy Roberts & Deborah Jakubs)

Deborah Jakubs, Jimmy Roberts, Katie Henningsen, Meg Brown, Ann Elsner, Tom Hadzor, Tim McGeary, Bob Byrd, Naomi Nelson, Vicoria Szabo, Jennifer Ahern-Dodson, Dracine Hodges, Tom Witelski, Patrick Charbonneau, Bruce Caldwell, Winston Atkins, William Johnson, Dominika Baran, Yuanfan Yang, Sean Bissell, Brian Murray, Guo-Juin Hong, Mine Cetinya-Rundel, Katryna Robinson (taking minutes)

2. Brief Report on the Libraries’ Budget meeting with the Provost (Ann Elsner & Deborah Jakubs)

This summary outlines the operational issues and budget assumptions for the coming fiscal year. The Libraries submitted a budget balanced to our allocation.

Total Allocation: $ 34,758,287Includes:50% University Records Manager 32,36350% Library Security 67,500Increase to Collections Materials (3.4%) 509,490Priorities:

• Complete the local preparation for an updated and innovative open source library services platform in order to test and launch the software solution in 2020.

• Ensure the safety of our first year students, patrons and staff by providing adequate physical and digital security for East Campus to complement the security standards and staffing in place on West Campus.

• Support professional development and engagement for staff to acquire the skills and take advantage of networking opportunities that enable them to meet the increasingly complex information needs of Duke’s faculty, researchers and students.

• Proceed with design documents and secure funding commitments to renovate and modernize Lilly Library in order to improve the experience of first-year students as well as expand services to the academic departments located on East Campus.

Requests:

• An increase to the Library Enterprise Systems (LES) base allocation for the library services platform upgrade

• $132,000 to our base allocation for physical security

• $ 30,000 for COPE Funding (assumes an additional $24,000 from SOM/SON)

Highlighted Operational Issues:

• State of IT Equipment and AV in Meeting Spaces: The DUL supports 257 staff and dozens of service desk computers that need to be refreshed every four years for effective and efficient operations. Due to financial constraints, more than 35% of the staff and public computers are five to six years old.

• Bingham Center Service Demands Outpaces Funding: The seven endowments of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (within the Rubenstein Library) do not yield sufficient income to sustain the current operational costs.

• Research Data Archiving Costs Rising: The Senior Research Data Consultants are setting up meetings this spring with grant managers on campus to encourage them to incorporate research data archiving costs in their proposal budgets. The Libraries’ operational budgets are not funded to sustain this long-term archive.

• Salaries and Compensation: We remain last among Ivy+ Libraries in average professional salaries, with Duke’s average salary 13% below the average of that group. We are using a portion of the merit pool and making other reductions in the operating budget in order to include compensation adjustments beyond the merit.

Heads up Issues:

• Support for the Most Popular Meeting Spaces on Campus: Because of their central location on campus, Perkins, Bostock, and Rubenstein Libraries host well over 1,000 events, meetings, conferences, and presentations throughout the year. Our public meeting spaces are in constant demand (at least 2,284 room requests since we started tracking room use data in September 2016).

Although DUL accounts for only about 10% of the use, we are funding 100% of our portion of the position from reserves. We will be requesting a $48,250 increase to the base allocation for FY2020 to walk a staff position onto the operating budget.

• Library Service Center Module 4 Needed by FY2021: The third module at the Library Service Center (LSC) is projected to reach capacity by the end of FY2021.

Based on our experience with modules two and three, we expect the cost to be approximately $6M. The design work would need financial support to begin circa late summer FY2020.

3. New Opportunities in Exhibits (Meg Brown, Exhibition Coordinator for the DUL)

Meg Brown shared slides regarding new opportunities in exhibits at Rubenstein Library. If slides are wanted, please email meg.brown@duke.edu.

The mission of the exhibition program is to share the scholarship, ideas, and culture of the Duke University community in an open forum and to collaborate with faculty and students to develop innovative public scholarship.

The exhibits program is committed to diversity and inclusion by reflecting:

Diversity within the Duke community Diversity of discipline Diversity of types of curators and viewpoints Diversity of communities

Here is a map of the different gallery spaces located in DUL:

In FY2017, 19 faculty members and university staff, 21 library staff, 78 students, and 8 classes participated in curation of exhibitions.

How many exhibitions are there?

• Chappell and Photography: 3 exhibits/yr• Biddle, Stone and HOM: 2 exhibits/yr • Student wall and Campus Club wall can change out monthly, average about 3-9

exhibits per year • Pop up exhibits to meet short term needs (events, classes, VIP etc.)• 3 loan items from Mr. Rubenstein/year

In FY2017:

30 exhibitions 13 major, 4 minor, 3 small case, and 9 student/campus club wall exhibits) exhibited 395 library items (manuscript, bound volume, or artifact) and created an

additional 185 facsimiles or reproductions of collection items

What does the exhibition program offer?

Curation Resources • Teach students exhibition principles • Mentor faculty and university staff on how to curate an exhibition in a library

context• Design support for creating graphics for signage• Design/support for media and IT

Physical Resources• Video screen, kiosk• Wall graphics • Touchables • Nimble small exhibitions

What does it take to run the program?• Exhibition librarian and exhibit preparator to work with curators and coordinate all

aspects of the exhibition• Conservation and preservation staff support to complete treatment of items, consult

on proper installation methods and conditions, and monitor the environmental conditions

• IT support to design website infrastructure, design kiosks and videos in spaces, as well as support technology hardware

• Design services and copyediting • Research support and reproduction services• Specialized vendors to hang framed items

What does it cost to run the program?

Staffing: $250K* Signage: $6,650Printed materials: $1,100Receptions: $2KPhotography Gallery installation: $14KSupplies, monitoring, maintenance: $16KTotal: $289.75K Security: $37.5K*(exhibits, conservation, preservation, communications, IT)

Potential Growth• Online exhibitions• Kiosk interactive digital projects: high resolution video? More interactive kiosk

activity?• Link Media Wall • Increased promotion for exhibitions • Could we be more supportive of universal design? • Exploring creating immersive experiences

4. Beyond the Show and Tell: Engaging Students with Archives (Katie Henningsen, Head of Research Services, Rubenstein Library)

The mission of the Rubenstein Library is not only to build collections of distinctive materials but to make sure that this material is USED by our students. Rubenstein Library curators, librarians, and archivists facilitate meaningful student interactions with our holdings by integrating archival and special collections material into the classroom. All the “stuff” of special collections—manuscript, rare books, photographs, ephemera, realia, artists’ books, and scrapbooks—offers a wealth of possibilities for new approaches to teaching and learning.

Experiential learning opportunities with special collections material provide students with the chance to evaluate and interpret primary source evidence, hone their research and critical thinking skills, and develop an appreciation for the intrinsic value of primary source material.

Rubenstein Library staff partner with faculty to extend and deepen course and program engagement with special collections materials held by the university. These collaborations include Archives Alive, Spring Breakthrough, Duke History Revisited, Story+, pSearch, the Duke Doctoral Summer Academy, and Bass Connections courses.

Overview of the growth and numbers of students in the RL

Over the past 5 years, the Rubenstein Library has seen greatly increased research and classroom use.

• Half of the researchers in our reading room are Duke students;

We are partnering with offices and initiatives around campus to experiment with new programs. We are grateful for support from the Provost’s Office to add a 3 year position, which allows us to develop these new programs as well as continue to provide support to our existing programs, users, and instruction services.

Since we are in budget season, we are evaluating what we need to support each program. For example, with Archives Alive, we know that we need a ¾ time person. We are benchmarking to determine the level of support we need to insure each program’s success.

• This past year, the Rubenstein held 194 class sessions and reached a total of 1,728 students (that’s 1 in 4 undergraduates using our collections, coming from 39 departments across campus).

More classes equal more students in our reading room, resulting in more items in use, which leads to increased demand on our student employees to pull and reshelve material for all of these users.

• Since 2014, we have experienced a 15% increase in users and a 27% increase in the number of items used.

To support the work of faculty and students in our collections, we currently provide:

• librarians who contribute to course and assignment planning, and who often serve as the instructors or co-instructors within these programs;• in-depth research consultations with students throughout the semester;• guidance on rights management and digital tools;• dedicated workspace for several student programs; and,• Promotion of the final products of a course or program.

Class sessions

Our largest area of undergraduate support is class sessions in the Rubenstein. We hold about 200 class sessions each year. These sessions are always hands-on, experiential learning opportunities; we build in time for students to explore the material in small groups and engage in a class discussion. Typically in the class discussion we explore how the material can be used in research, ways to contextualize primary sources, and the importance of creator, date, audience, and tone when analyzing documents. Our staff work closely with faculty to understand the goals of the instructor and the outcomes desired to craft a session that meets the needs of the faculty member and students. Our librarians then provide research consultations for students as they undertake research in our collections.

Archives Alive

Archives Alive courses are offered through the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. Trudi Abel, one of our research services archivists, works closely with faculty to build and teach semester long courses around material in the RL, infusing original material into each class session and assignment. The classes take place in the Rubenstein, meeting in our classroom or in our reading room for a mixture of discussion, hands on work with the material, and individual or small group research. These courses allow students to develop significant projects over the course of a semester.

During the 2016-2017 academic year, Gabrielle Stewart, class of 2018, took an Archives Alive course, during which she used John Holborn’s commonplace book (Jantz MSS #67); this text became Gabi’s springboard into a deeper understanding of a strand of eighteenth-century Christian thought and its influence on nineteenth-century Unitarianism. The following semester Gabi undertook an independent study project transcribing the Latin passages of another Jantz manuscript. Working with Professor Clare Woods to explore the textuality and the genre of the manuscript, they uncovered a new Latin abbreviation for a German town in Saxony. Gabi used her research in the RL as well as a recommendation from Trudi for her successful application and election to the American Rhodes Scholar Class of 2018. Gabi will spend a year at Oxford University for graduate study in papyrology.

Duke History Revisited

The Duke History Revisited program was envisioned as an opportunity for students to engage in serious research on their own University’s history. Following a school year in which questions about race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship were brought into public conversation, it seemed imperative that we provide an avenue for research into how Duke became the institution it is today. For the staff of the University Archives, it was also an opportunity to re-examine collections and look for areas in which we failed to document issues or populations at Duke. The research and projects created by students would be a way to populate the Archives with additional content, and to address some of the absences found.

Since 2016, 15 students have undertaken independent research on understudied aspects of Duke’s history. Through this program, students gained primary source research experience that prepared them to do more complex academic work in the future. One student wrote,

“Thank you so very, very much for offering this program and making it so extraordinarily impactful. I feel that I've gotten so much more out of it than I anticipated, and I'm so grateful to everyone who was involved in running and shaping it. This experience prepared me to do my thesis work, present research, work in an intellectual team, and think critically about my own research as well as the purpose of the archives, all while learning about the university I call home but knew very little about.”

Spring Breakthrough

This is our second year participating in Spring Breakthrough. Last year’s course “Hamilton”: Music, History and Politics, taught by Associate Provost Noah Pickus, used

letters from Alexander Hamilton and his family to create new songs and spoken word pieces. Katie showed a clip from last year that demonstrates what students can do with our material.

The video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaiMJVC4FNI&feature=youtu.be

This year, two of our Research Services Librarians, Kate Collins and Trudi Abel, have teamed up with Chef Chris Holloway for “Chopped: the Historical Edition.”

Students will spend their mornings in the Rubenstein Library exploring the culture, politics, and economics of food. This will include researching historical cooking techniques, recipes, and ingredients we no longer use or, in some cases, no longer have access to. In the afternoons students will go over to the Chef’s Kitchen in the Brodhead Center to experiment with modern day equivalents and test out recipes they found in the Rubenstein’s collections.

Development Areas

Story+

Story+ is a 6-week summer research experience for undergraduates and combines research with an emphasis on storytelling for public audiences. In Story+, students are organized into small project teams and supervised on a day-to-day basis by graduate student mentors.

This summer there are 7 Story+ projects utilizing material in the Rubenstein Library. Two of these are exploring Duke’s history. The “Stone by Stone” team will recover the stories of the stone cutters, stone masons, carvers, roofers, stained-glass installers, and other workers who built Duke chapel in the early 1920s. “The Allen Building Takeover @ 50” will develop an exhibition for the 50th anniversary of the student protest that forever changed the university. Other projects this summer draw on our Human Rights Archives, the History of Medicine collections, and the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection.

To facilitate the research of these students, train and support their graduate student mentors, and assist the project sponsors in identifying material and scoping future projects, our research services librarian, Kate Collins, is taking a central role in coordinating the projects, students, and resources available to insure that the 7 groups this summer have the support and resources they need to be successful.

Graduate Education and Engagement Duke Doctoral Summer Academy

For graduate student instruction, we are excited to participate in this first year of the Duke Summer Doctoral Academy, a two-week program of short courses designed to introduce doctoral students to skills, tools, and knowledge that augment their regular coursework

and help them prepare for dissertation research, innovative teaching, leadership, and public engagement.

Trudi is offering a course on, “Teaching with Archives,” pulling together faculty that have used our collections extensively in their classrooms. Trudi and the faculty members will introduce students to a variety of material, and demonstrate different teaching techniques and assignments that have proven successful in undergraduate instruction. Our goal is to continue to build faculty partners to work with our material and prepare these students to draw on the special collections resources at their future institutions, collaborating with archivists and librarians to infuse these materials into their courses.

Graduate Student Instruction Program

This summer, we are also offering a half day workshop to graduate students, titled the Efficient Archival Researcher: Getting the Most Out of Your Visit to the Archives. This workshop is designed to help graduate students become more familiar with conducting research in special collections and archives both at Duke and elsewhere.

Both of these build on what we are hearing from faculty and graduate students as areas of need.

RL Intern Opportunities

In addition, each year the Rubenstein Library has about 7 graduate student interns. The graduate students provide advanced research support for students and scholars in our reading room, they conduct research in the area or collection they are working with, provide advanced description for material and collections to increase scholarly access, and they also participate in undergraduate instruction. We provide a regular meeting for the interns to join administrators and curators to learn about the different parts of special collections work such as the legal and ethical considerations of collecting and providing access to material.

Anatomy Day

Anatomy Day is an incredibly popular, annual event for all first-year medical students at Duke. It's an opportunity for the students to compare what they're seeing in the gross anatomy lab with historical representations of human anatomy over the centuries, drawn from rare archival materials in the History of Medicine Collections.

Undergraduate instruction with the History of Medicine collections has been growing steadily in recent years and both the School of Medicine and School of Nursing have inquired about new opportunities to incorporate material from the Collections into their programs.

It is exciting to deepen the integration of the university’s special collections into the curriculum, and we see more on the horizon—including upcoming Bass Connections

courses, and the potential for archivally-based research and writing graduate seminars and what we are calling “archival expeditions”.

Archival Expeditions

We are currently exploring an idea Ed Balleisen brought to us for Fall 2018. As part of the Versatile Humanists project, the Rubenstein would host 2 graduate students for archival expeditions. Based on the Data Expedition model, graduate students would identify an appropriate course that would benefit from an archival module. The faculty member would act as the client and mentor, and the student would develop a module, using the Rubenstein’s collections for approval by the faculty member, who would incorporate this into their existing course. The Rubenstein would facilitate any proposed class sessions and research assignments using the collections.

To fully support this new initiative, the Rubenstein would provide:

• Archival research training, research support to select appropriate courses for which the RL holds material, and training in pedagogical methods for primary source instruction.• We would also provide research assistance throughout the semester.• And facilitation of the undergraduate class in the RL for the module developed.

Archival-based Research and Writing Graduate Seminars

Another idea that Ed has brought to the Library are Archival-based semester long graduate seminars. These would be built around a Rubenstein Library collection or collections as selected by a faculty member and librarian. The graduate students in each seminar would decide on the topic and research questions, break up the work, and produce a final scholarly product within a single semester. The seminar would feature democratic decision making as well as hone the soft skills needed to work collaboratively in a team. The library is currently exploring what these might look like and the resources needed.

Ideas from LC members on how we might further support undergraduate and graduate education and research

That covers the highlights of our activities and some of the very exciting programs on our horizon. I would love to hear from all of you. Do you have questions or ideas on how we might further support undergraduate and graduate education and research?

5. Initial Discussion of Targeted Agenda for 2018-19 (Jimmy Roberts & Deborah Jakubs)

Many suggestions were brought up for agenda items for the following academic year. Lilly remains a topic on everyone’s minds, along with collection budgets, open access, data repository, etc.

Meeting adjourned at 1:35 pm.