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*{Darwin College Library Committee}

 Minutes of the meeting held Tue 24 June 2003 at 6pm, in the Seminar Room. \\ 


 Present:
 David MacKay  (djcm1) [Fellow Librarian],          
 Espen Koht (ehk20) [Computer Officer],              
 Christian Goeschel (cag41) [Student Librarian],         
 Ariane Kossack (ak280)  [Student Librarian],         
 Mike Sitch  (dcsa-coms@dar) [for DCSA rep],
 Anne Ferguson--Smith (afsmith@mole.bio),
 Elisabeth Leedham-Green (el17).


 Apologies:
 Vasiliki Tsakali   (vt218),
 Deborah Pino (dsp26),
 Jim Endersby (jje21), 
 John Craig (jsc1004),
 Andrew Bell (agb38).      


o Minutes of the meeting held in January 2003 were confirmed.

o Committee membership. There is no Council representative in the committee at present.

o 2003 Book check.
 Will take place Monday 7 July for 5 days.
 Espen will help set up the system.


o	The  flat screen and  computer terminal dedicated to viewing the UL catalogue
 are in place  alongside the checkout terminal.

o
 The New Newton catalogue is disappointingly poor and slow.  It was agreed that
 we would monitor closely the improvements provided by the University.
 As a last resort Espen said he could create a much faster in-house database server to
 serve the Darwin catalogue.

o	Book purchases are going smoothly. We are not sure whether this is the last year of CUP's
 donation to us. We already have Darwin's letters (contrary to ideas expressed
 in the previous minutes).
 
o Magazine subscriptions.
 Mike Sitch circulated a draft survey for students concerning
 subscriptions held in the Reading Room. The committee suggested
 a few amendments to the survey and looked forward to hearing the results.
 
o  Tidiness of the reading room.
	Some of the untidiness comes from the Library's
 donations of cast-off books in the reading room.
 Espen has spoken to the Bursar and suggested that we confirm that we have
 no ties to any of the books there, so that the Bursar could arrange for
 them to be removed if and when the room gets a face-lift.

o Donations.  The student librarians will use `whatsup' and signs to encourage
 students to make book donations now by dropping them in the returns bin.

 Dr.\ Milo Keynes sent a generous offer to donate several books
 with a Darwin family interest. DJCM will write to accept six books
 identified by E.L-G.

 A large collection of coins, both British and foreign, has been sitting
 in a library cupboard, and is of unknown provenance. It was agreed to
 take the coins to the Sainsbury's coin-sorter to separate the foreign
 coins out, and dispose of them in a convenient manner, for example, donate them
 to Oxfam or Unicef, or send them to the Fitzwilliam museum.

o	Fines for overdue books.  The
	college council  has approved the policy  proposed in
 the previous minutes for a trial period.
 About 10 books are at present severely overdue.
 It was agreed that appropriate letters should be sent to
 the borrowers making clear that the books should be returned by the stockcheck
 deadline, July 4th, and that a fine will be imposed if the book is not back within a month.

 In future years such letters should perhaps be sent out in early May, for best effect.

o Vesalius. Elizabeth Leedham-Green, Jim Endersby,
 and David MacKay met an expert who sent advice  on the care of the Vesalius.
 The cabinet has been moved upstairs with the help of the Clerk of Works.
 Ariane volunteered to take over the monitoring of the Vesalius,
 and to follow up the expert's advice regarding regulation of humidity.
 Perspex supports will be found to  reduce the strain on the books' spines.
 We will look at the temperature readings to check whether the move upstairs
 has indeed improved matters.

o 			Children's section. Since the last meeting,  Deborah Pino
 has stocked the children's shelf, and the system records that 18
 items have been checked out by 8 users. The committee thanked Deborah for
 starting this excellent project.

o Finley Collection. There was no news concerning the relationship
 with the Classics Library and the question of whether
 any of the  missing volumes might have been borrowed  through Classics.
 Elizabeth L-G volunteered to find out more.
 It was agreed that the Clerk of Works be asked to install a key store
 for storing the Finley keys.

 One lock had been found broken in March 2003, and was repaired by the Clerk of Works.
 It is not clear whether any books were stolen.

o Student Librarians. Christian is likely to be working away from Cambridge
 for 1 year.  Ariane is happy to continue as Student Librarian for the next year,
 which should be her last.

o Automated Checkout system. Espen plans to improve the system so that
 users can identify themselves by scanning their university card's bar code
 instead of typing in their email identifier.

o  The window of the College Archive is letting in dirt from the roadworks.

o Date of next meeting: October, probably the first Tuesday of term, at 6pm.



{ http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/darlib/minutes.html }  DJCM 
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