Minutes of Diversity Committee Meeting, January 30, 2003
Room 309, Hodges Library 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Members present: Miller, R. Smith, Blocker, Mack, Myers, Manoff, Royse, Stephens
Tamara announced that she will stop working with the Diversity committee at the end of February. She will finish her TLA and ACRL projects and the article on climate assessment.
Maribeth reported from the web group. They would still like to have any feedback we want to send about the new webpage design. The html file of the Minority Residency program is up and linked. She will check with Jill to see if it is OK to link to the employment page. Tamara suggested that the committee establish a schedule to systemically make changes to the page.
Goals group: will send draft of goals to group, ask for feedback with a deadline, then post them.
Our Annual report is already up elsewhere on the share page. Once goals are ready and linked, Maribeth will put the annual report with them.
Thura thanked Dianne, Martha Rudolph, and Tamara for putting up the display for the event. She also reported that the library is involved in the following events: a film and lecture “The Language You Cry In” at the UC, and a panel discussion involving our library exchange colleagues from Uganda that David Atkins has been working closely with. Molly will look into getting books to include in the current Africa Semester display. She will contact Stefanie Ohnesorg about this.
We all need to consider reading the book “The Color of Water” and thinking about ways to incorporate the freshman class reading it with our goals. Thura will work with Rita Smith to find out what ways the students will be using it in their classes. One idea is to provide library services to support resources students will need, and/or to do a display about the book for the beginning of fall semester. Thura will check to see if the case is available.
Molly will look into getting books to include in the current Africa Semester display. She will contact Stefanie Ohnesorg about this.
[These two comments are listed as other ideas, but I wasn’t sure if they pertained to the “Color of Water” or Africa Semester—to provide a screen saver students can download, and to have Books on Tape in other languages besides English playing at some times during our display.]
Retreat: Thura will let us know when she finds a good date and time. Dianne reminded us that we need to co-ordinate future events with the Ex Libris training. Thura will ask Bill Britten for a schedule of training dates.
SLA spring recognition program—should we have one this spring or wait until the fall? This came up because there are students who will not be eligible in the fall, would be in the spring, but then leave or graduate before they are recognized. Some suggestions were: to wait until next spring and continue to have it as a spring event, have a small ceremony this spring to honor students who were ‘missed’ or who are graduating, and maybe piggyback it on to another event like the awards breakfast or spring picnic or all-staff meeting. We have to consider and vote on this later, but whatever we do, we need to work carefully with Personnel and supervisors of students to be sure that no one gets missed.
UTC letter—we received a letter from Sheila Delacroix, the head of the library at UTC. She was concerned that in our definitions of diversity we did not include the word ‘race.’ We decided to add it and also add the term ethnicity. Thura will ask Jill to answer Ms. Delacroix’s letter.