Week in Review
February 5, 2014
In spite of our sporadic work schedule recently, there are a few areas of interest to cover.
Drs. Bob Valentine and Marcie Hinton are using the University Libraries (and our mobile-friendly and Access Now services) as a project for both an advertising campaign and a marketing campaign class this semester. Toward that end, a group has been meeting with the students to provide them some direction on how a marketing and ad campaign can be structured and what goals we want it to accomplish. The classes will present a final product at the end of the semester, which we will adapt and implement over the summer and fall.
This summer, as has been mentioned several times, will be our summer for renovating the third floor of Waterfield. We have a general idea of how the study-quiet floor will be organized, and are starting meetings with Facilities and with our furniture vendors to settle on details. This project is being paid for by some end-of-year money I set aside last fiscal year, as well as carry-forward that had been held by the President's Office from 2011. Because carry-forward is drying up as a mechanism to fund larger projects, I want to make sure we spend the 2011 remainder, as it is not likely to be accessible to us moving forward.
The university is hosting a delegation of faculty and administrators from our new sister institution in Qingdao, China. One of the delegation members, Kevin, is a deputy librarian, and he visited with me last week to ask questions about our operations. He will be making a few other visits to other areas of the library during his stay - please provide him a warm welcome.
Faculty performance evaluations will be taking place this month, followed by staff performance evaluations (once HR starts the process). This is a time-consuming process, but is useful time for reflection and conversations.
Over the last few and next few days, I will be attending a great many meetings to help prep the campus for our SACS on-site review. The team will be on campus the last week of February, with the bulk of their work taking place on Tuesday the 25th and Wednesday the 26th. The QEP is one of the primary points of the on-site visit, so I will most likely be completely unavailable those two days as we (hopefully) guide our QEP process to a successful acceptance/conclusion by our reviewers.
Finally, many of you have heard about the next steps in the presidential search process, but in case you have not I will quickly outline them. The search committee meets this Friday to finalize recommendations for on-campus interviews. At the conclusion of that meeting, the search committee is finished with their work - the remainder of the process will be handled by the Board and Tom Hoffacker. It is not clear to what extent the interviews will include campus-wide involvement, forums, or meetings with different constituencies. It is anticipated that the Board will announce our new president at the March Board meeting.
Enjoy the rest of your week, and stay warm.
Adam