Minutes
LAUC-B Fall Assembly
November 30, 1995
8:30-10:00 a.m., Morrison Library
By Patricia Vanderberg I. Call to Order. II. CAPA Report. Ivan Arguelles, Chair of CAPA reported that in 1995 51 cases were up for review: 41 cases for the Library and 10 cases for the affiliated libraries. CAPA recommended on 49 of these cases. Two cases remain outstanding from last year. CAPA reviewed 26 merit increases for Library cases and 6 for afflilated libraries. One merit increase was in fact for an accelerated review which resulted in a promotion. CAPA reviewed 10 promotion cases: 6 cases for the Library and 4 for the affiliated libraries. CAPA recommended promotion in 7 of these cases. CAPA reviewed 4 special review cases, all for the Library. To date two cases have not yet been reviewed by CAPA, and one case, though a recommendation was sent on, has not had a final decision. The University Librarian and the Vice-Chancellor, to date, have agreed with CAPA's recommendations in all cases that have been finalized. Last year CAPA participated in only 3 interviews, 2 affiliated positions, both for Law, and 1 temporary part time position for the Business Library. III. Research and Professional Development Committee Debbie Jan, Chair of the Research and Professional Development Committee announced two workshops sponsored by the committee: December 6, 1995 Peer Review for Review Initiators December 13, 1995 Changing Criteria for Promotion IV. LAUC-B Executive Committee Chair Report K. Vanden Heuvel, Chair of the LAUC-B Executive Committee summarized committee activities. CAPA is streamlining the peer review process and limiting the self-evaluation to two pages in length and recommending that its organization follow the requirements of the APM more closely. K. Vanden Heuvel is drafting a letter to the Chancellor concerning the status of librarians on the Berkeley campus. LAUC-B is co-sponsoring a conference on copyright with the Townsend Center and others scheduled for spring 1996. All of the proposed revisions of the bylaws passed in the recent election. The Cultural Diversity Committee is establishing a website on affirmative action issues. V. Minutes of Spring Assembly Minutes of the Spring Assembly were approved as submitted. VI. Address by Professor Robert Wilensky, Chair of Computer Science Department and Principal Investigator for the NSF/NASA/ARPA Digital Libraries Project: " The UC Berkeley Digital Library Project" The UC Berkeley Digital Library is a four million dollar three year research project sponsored by NSF/NASA/ARPA to build a work centered digital testbed library on the California environment. Participants include researchers from UC departments of Computer Science, School of Information Management and Systems, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Civil Engineering, etc. Corporate participants include Xerox Parc, Rico California Research and IBM. The Digital Library testbed is a collection of environmental information designed to meet a wide variety of technical needs by users in state agencies, public and private corporations, regulatory bodies, and educational institutions. The data consists of computer science technical reports, numeric data, environmental impact reports, tables, pictures, maps, three dimensional models, aerial and ground photography, and video information. Professor Wilensky introduced a model for the digital library of the future and contrasted it with a model for a traditional library. The digital library will be a large depository for the provision, storage, organization, and indexing of information, and attendant services. It will not be in one physical location, but will reside in multiple copies in several repositories. Authoring documents will be closer to the user, with the system's ability to integrate and support annotations, working in groups and other functions. Three specific UC Berkeley research components of the UC Berkeley Digital Library Project were discussed. The work centered scenario group is examining the needs for report writing and sharing data to meet multiple needs of users for information in various formats. The user needs group is developing methods to analyze user needs, so as to extend functionality of documents and improve access to information. The strategic systems planning group is developing data base management tools for data access and service delivery. Professor Wilensky demonstrated various methods for access to multivarient documents, which are documents constructed as multiple layers of information that might include text, photographic, numeric or other information. He showed examples of access via an access matrix, tile bar, and scanning colors and shapes. Accomplishments of the UC Berkeley Digital Library project include advances in the areas of natural language processing for automatic categorization and lexical disambiguation, of computer vision for object recognition, and subelement indexing to improve precision and recall. The goals of the project are to further expand the functionality and access to multivarient documents which would enable table sorting, distribution of annotations and enhanced geographic access. The overall plan is to develop a large scale database with multiple formats of information designed to meet multiple needs and that could be distributed across many computer systems.