• Dean’s Diversity Forum features guest speaker Marcus Whitehurst
• Salem selected as 2016-17 ARL Fellow
• Penn State News: Libraries’ homepage starting web migration process
• Development Newsletter Fall 2015
• LHR news: Resources for emergency situations
• The CAT database processing underway soon
• Upcoming Libraries website changes
• Don’t power down, log off during winter break
• LHR News
• Events
• Reminder: cookie event

Dr. Marcus Whitehurst, vice provost for Educational Equity, was the guest speaker at the Dean’s Diversity Forum last week. During his presentation, Whitehurst touched on a number of areas, including the changing demographics of public high school graduates in Pennsylvania, the Office for the Vice President of Educational Equity’s (OVPEE) pipeline approach that targets middle and high school students in specific Pennsylvania counties, and how diversity strategic planning is being integrated into Penn State’s new strategic plan through 2020. Whitehurst also highlighted programs available through the Equal Opportunity Planning Committee, which provides seed funding for diversity initiatives at all campuses. The presentation is available for viewing on Mediasite Live.

Dr. Marcus Whitehurst, vice provost for Educational Equity, was the featured speaker Dec. 10 at the Dean’s Diversity Forum in Foster Auditorium.

Joe Salem, University Libraries associate dean for Learning, Undergraduate Services and Commonwealth Campus Libraries

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has selected Joe Salem Jr., Penn State University Libraries associate dean for Learning, Undergraduate Services and Commonwealth Campus Libraries, among 28 individuals in North America — one of 22 from U.S. universities, including four Big Ten schools — to participate in its 2016–2017 Leadership Fellows 16-month program beginning in January.

It’s a great honor for the University Libraries for Joe Salem to be selected for this prestigious and highly competitive program,” Barbara I. Dewey, dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications, said. “The valuable exposure to an array of forward-thinking ideas, initiatives and perspectives about higher education from this program that Joe will bring will help inform the Libraries’ strategic pursuits in the years to come and will strengthen our position to best serve our students, faculty, staff and visiting researchers.”

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in the United States and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. Its executive leadership program facilitates the development of future senior-level leaders in large research libraries and archives. Created in response to a continued need to develop future leaders of ARL member institutions, the program is designed to build on self-assessment and reflection and to explore a personal or professional area of interest in the context of a group setting.

“I am very honored to have been selected and look forward to working with my colleagues in the cohort and within ARL. The mentoring, networking, and sharing of best practices within many diverse research library settings offered through Fellowship participation will help me to make stronger contributions to my role within the University Libraries,” Salem said. “I am most excited about the opportunity to bring new ideas back to Penn State and to share the innovative work that we are doing at the University Libraries with our colleagues across the country.”

During the course of the program, each fellow will construct a learning plan; engage in a customized, immersive experience to shadow a library director; participate in three weeklong institutes hosted by sponsoring ARL institutions; participate in online synchronous sessions; and attend semiannual Association Meetings.

This sixth offering of the program is being designed by Association staff in collaboration with the Leadership Fellows Advisory Group and the directors of the three sponsor libraries: University of Alberta, Colorado State University and Duke University. The program begins in January 2016 and runs through April 2017.

The 2016-17 Leadership Fellows represent a broad array of backgrounds, experiences, and institutions in North America, including six librarian faculty from five universities in Canada and one librarian faculty or administrator each representing Big Ten schools the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

For more information, visit the ARL Leadership Fellows program website.

Our latest Development Newsletter was published in November. Please click on the image below to download and read it (PDF version). A limited supply of copies remains in Public Relations and Marketing. If you would like a copy, please email us:

by John Attig, Cataloging & Metadata Services

During December, the Libraries will be sending our entire database (almost 6 million records) to be processed by our authority control vendor, Backstage Library Works. The goals of this processing are:

— To provide a fresh and up-to-date authority file; this should maximize the consistency of access to our data through The CAT and through LionSearch.

— To make the changes associated with the new cataloging rules, RDA, in as many records as possible (not just the most recent ones); almost all of these changes will only be visible on the “more information” tab in The CAT; the most noticeable changes will be:

• expansion of many abbreviations to their full forms — e.g. “333 pages” instead of “333 p.”
• inclusion of fields that identify the type of content and the type of carrier in every record; these elements replace the General Material Designations (GMDs) that were included in the titles of many records; existing GMDs are not being deleted, but are not being added to new records; the new content/carrier fields will be used instead.
• publication, distribution, manufacture, and copyright information is being split into separate fields, with appropriate labels

In addition to these changes, some new keyword and browse indexes are being added; the keyword indexes are available in both The CAT and WorkFlows, but the new browse indexes will only be available in WorkFlows. The most useful of these new indexes is a separate index for Genre/Form terms (which until now have been included in the Subject indexes).

Because the entire database — and the authority file — needs to be reloaded and indexed, it is necessary to switch The CAT to the TEST server for the entire Winter break. We expect that all the processing will be done sometime on December 28.

Once the database has been reloaded, a copy will be sent to ProQuest who will load it into Summon and rebuild all the indexes for LionSearch. This reindexing is estimated to take 2-3 weeks, and we anticipate that it will be completed on or near the beginning of classes in January. While the new indexes are being built, LionSearch will continue to be available using the old indexes.

Don’t forget to join the Diversity Committee for an around-the-world cookie sharing event from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm., on Monday, December 21, in Mann Assembly Room!

Cookie crowdsourcing!
Add your cookie to our Google map: The Cookie Map (press edit to add your cookie)

Instructions are here (Click here: Instructions for Adding Cookies), but it really is easy. (You should enable editing in the Word document for proper viewing on all devices.) Just pinpoint your country, fill in the pop-up with your name and cookie name, and save it. We already started populating the map with our offerings. Alternatively, send an email to Sherry Roth: (ssr11@psu.edu)

Thanks to Heather Ross for finding another map with recipes attached: https://food52.com/p/cookies-of-the-world

Please join us! You don’t need to bring any cookies, but please feel free to bring your lunch as this event will be held over the lunch break.