VIVA Outreach Committee Meeting,
Minutes, September 12, 2000
Present: Ralph Alberico (chair), Jack Bales, Pat Butler, and Patricia Hardesty.
Ralph called the meeting to order and thanked all of the members of the Outreach Committee for their hard work last year. After noting that the Committee's accomplishments were listed in his annual report, he asked members what goals and projects they thought the Committee should focus on this coming year.
We went over the Committee's accomplishments in Ralph's annual report to get some ideas on what projects needed additional time and effort. The brochure is completed and published, and Ralph said he would check with Kathy Perry to see if additional copies need to be printed. We will continue to write press releases for new VIVA products, post VIVA Spotlights on the Committee Web page, and will compile publicity and promotional material. Patricia volunteered to check databases for articles on VIVA, and Ralph, who has a standard permission letter, will secure permission to put them on our Web page. The VIVA testimonials have not been put on our Committee page, and we may solicit more comments this year. The Legislative Contacts need to be added to the page. We expressed a few reservations about some of our terminology. Is "Promotional Materials" a bit too tepid and bland? Should more "action" words be used? The Committee will address this issue through email.
The Committee members, in discussing their page, thought that the press releases, publicity and promotional material, and testimonials were all very good but felt that they are buried in the VIVA Web page. Press releases, for example, need to be visible, and few people take the time to look for them on our Committee page. The "Publicity and Promotional Materials" link is composed of several types of works, and Ralph suggested that they be divided into headings such as Articles, Presentations, and Testimonials. Pat wondered if there could be an alphabetical list or index of all the resources in the VIVA site that would help in navigation. Ralph asked if we should volunteer to contribute to a redesign of the Web page, but thought that this might be too much to do, what with our other projects. A more realistic idea, and one that we could work on this year, was finding ways to promote our Web page within the VIVA page and using the Web more efficiently to communicate the Outreach Committee's message.
In further discussions of Committee projects, Jack noted that librarians have expressed interest in vendor and library-designed tutorials for databases. He suggested that the Committee could perhaps collect these on its Web page, along with sites for citing and evaluating Web resources.
Ralph said that this thought had occurred to him, but he reminded us that one of our charges is "working with faculty at VIVA schools or with faculty organizations in the state to assure that they are knowledgeable about VIVA products and the ways they can be used in teaching and research." Tutorials, he thought, are primarily used by librarians, not faculty. Pat added that the members of the Resources for Users Committee has already done some work in the area of tutorials, and she wondered if we would be stepping on their toes, especially as "training" is not one of our charges. Patricia suggested that evaluating sites was not particularly important, since VIVA's resources were proprietary databases, not independent Web sites.
Ralph noted that at James Madison University the librarians have discovered that tutorials make little difference in what is learned in research. What counts, he said, is 1) good experience in using the resources and 2) excellent assignments. Thus, perhaps we need to get the faculty and instructional community involved rather than the librarians, especially since that is one of our charges.
After much discussion, the Committee suggested hosting a forum, which would bring together the instructional librarians in the state to discuss ideas on how to work with faculty to integrate VIVA resources in the curriculum. The Committee will study this further at its next meeting.
Submitted by Jack Bales, Mary Washington College, VIVA Outreach Committee member