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• Strategic planning moves to next phase
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As discussed at the fall faculty retreat, strategic planning is now moving onto its next phase with the submission of the implementation reports. In order to facilitate action planning based on initiatives in those reports, and to establish a process to consider new initiatives to advance the plan, next steps will include:

• An expanded Strategic Plan Steering Committee charged to develop, update, and communicate progress on the annual action plan
• Quarterly updates on each action item managed by the Steering Committee, but in some cases informed through the current membership of the implementation teams
• The implementation teams will develop a series of forums or online methods for brainstorming annual action items, to begin in spring 2017

Initially, the Strategic Plan Steering Committee was to be expanded to include representatives from the Library Faculty Organization and the Dean’s Staff Advisory Council. In response to feedback gathered at the faculty retreat,  a staff representative from the Diversity Committee was added to ensure more staff involvement and better alignment with the Libraries’ work on diversity and inclusion.

Strategic Plan Steering Committee
• Chris Avery
• Kimlyn Patishnock
• Karen Estlund
• Anne Langley
• Joe Salem
• Diane Zabel (Chair, Strategic Plan Working Group for Advancing University Research)
• Matt Ciszek (Chair, Strategic Plan Working Group for Discovery, Access, and Preservation)
• Jennifer Gilley (Chair, Strategic Plan Working Group for Teaching and Learning)
• Sheila Sager (Dean’s Staff Advisory Council Representative, January 2016 -December 2016)
• Lana Munip (Diversity Committee Staff Representative, January 2016 -December 2016)
• Rob Olendorf (Library Faculty Organization Representative, January 2016 -June 2017)

As a next step, we will schedule a meeting for the steering committee in January at which time the initial action plan will be finalized and a communication plan will be established. The first action plan will be distributed after that meeting in early February. In the meantime, please feel send any questions or comments to ul-stratplan@lists.psu.edu. — Joe Salem, associate dean for Learning Undergraduate Services and Commonwealth Campuses

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.