Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 17:17:41 -0700 From: Brad Westbrook To: Deborah A Murphy Cc: "Bradley D. Westbrook" Subject: Re: LAUC Assembly report: User Council Liaison Dear Deborah, I am afraid what I have to report is not much and is not interesting. In my third and last year as LAUC systemwide liaison to the CDL User Council, I monitored messages sent out from Ellen Meltzer and attended the annual User Council Meeting, which took place on 8 April of this year. I also attended usability training workshop, which is related to the User Council Responsibility, but I did so more in my capacity as a member of the OAC Working Group and the UCSD special collections library. I was a vocal contributor to the April 8 meeting, and I also used the opportunity to consult with CDL staff to update my understanding of ongoing CDL projects and initiatives, beyond those reported on at the meeting. I also discussed with Ellen Meltzer, convener of the User Council, my concern, which I reported to the LAUC president last year, that the LAUC liaison role to the User Council is probably unnecessary. To restate my message last year, my reasoning for this assertion is that each campus is represented by a liaison and that liaison assumes the role of serving as liaison between the User Council and his or her campus colleagues. Having the LAUC liaison repeat that function systemwide seems an unnecessary redundancy. Indeed, there is even more redundancy in some cases, as was noted in the April 8 meeting, because certain projects or task forces, also have campus liaisons who pass on the same User Council messages to their campus colleagues. Ellen agreed with my concerns about apparent overlap between the responsibilities of the LAUC liaison and the campus liaison, but she had some strong ideas about how the LAUC liaison might more pointedly serve the needs of LAUC per se in a manner that did not repeat the work of the campus liaisons. Before appointing the next LAUC liaison to User Council, I would urge you to consult with Ellen about how the role might be fashioned to serve the User Council and LAUC in a more meaningful way than I think I have over the last two years. I hope LAUC will give some due consideration to the nature of this liaison responsibility and either define it in a meaningful way or, if it can not do that, abolish it. Most sincerely yours, Brad W. Bradley D. Westbrook Manuscripts Librarian / University Archivist Mandeville Special Collections Library 0175S University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093-0175 Tel: 858-534-6766 Fax: 858-534-5950 Email: bdwestbrook@ucsd.edu