LFA Exec - Minutes - January 31, 2020

LIBRARY FACULTY ASSEMBLY (LFA) EXECUTIVE BOARD MEETING NOTES

January 31, 2020

Present:

  • Betsaida Reyes – Chair
  • Brian Rosenblum - Vice-chair/Chair Elect
  • Erin Wolfe - Secretary
  • Fran Devlin - Representative (Librarian rank)
  • Sarah Goodwin Thiel - Representative (Associate Librarian rank)
  • Carmen Orth-Alfie - Member at Large

Agenda:

  1. Approval of minutes of previous LFA Exec meeting (12/03/2019)
  2. Report on meeting with Dean Smith (12/18/2019 and 1/22/2020)
  3. Report from Ad Hoc committee on Governance website and SharePoint site.
  4. Anything to/from LFA Committee liaison reports
  5. New business

Opening

Minutes from previous LFA Exec meeting (12/03/2019) were approved with no amendments.

Report on meetings with Dean Smith (12/18/2019 and 1/22/2020) (Betsaida, Brian) 1/22/2020

Participants for the DeEtta Jones Library Leadership workshop program have been selected and notified. This is a co-sponsored event between three universities (Iowa, Nebraska, KU) to be held in March at the Oread. 13 people from the Libraries were selected (of 40 seats total).

Development of new Ithaka project on cancellations in underway. Lee Curry and Angie Rathmel will be working on it. Funding sources are still being determined.

OMF has been discussing morale. Dean feels it’s caused (at least in part) by turnover (Libraries is averaging 8 people per year, higher than this last year). Included discussion of Libraries’ 12 action items and supervisor issues.

LFA discussions: Discussion that about potential relationships (causes and effects) between staff/faculty departures and morale.

Report from Ad Hoc committee on Governance website and SharePoint site. (Betsaida, on behalf of Sara Morris)

  • No current information about current committees on website or Sharepoint
  • If info is on the public website, Archives can crawl it and automatically harvest.
  • Suggestion to remove content from Sharepoint and focus on the website.
    • Exception: LCPT due to confidentiality
  • Governance sites did not used to be public, but they are now. Does this affect anything?
  • Sara and Letha are doing a full inventory to see what documentation is present and missing
  • Need to systematize roles/responsibility of updating the website. Possibly LFA/LFSA Secretary, possibly student.

Anything to/from LFA Committee liaison reports

No committee updates

Report on Research and Learning (R&L) meeting on recent gender equity pay raise (Sarah, Carmen) Several concerns and discussion related to gender equity, including:

  • Recent gender equity pay raise by the Provost and apparent lack of communication. Was the Libraries aware of this in advance? Why were they not involved? Note: ARES (analytics/data aggregation group) does not include Libraries faculty along with all other faculty.
  • Discussion about S&B committee’s work last fiscal year. Carmen will finalize S&B equity report during February with the intention to share it library-wide.
  • Libraries admin previous stance has been that the Lib has no inequity issues. What is the basis for this? What methodologies has Libraries administration used to look at gender equity? E.g. Why did the Provost recognize inequity issues, but the Library admin did not?
  • Concerns about lack of transparency in salary decisions/disparities.
  • This is an LFSA issues, not just LFA issue. Do we need to have another joint meeting?
  • Scott Hanrath is planning to bring this issue to Cabinet

Action items

  • Look at dates for LFA spring meeting (Betsaida)