Penn State University Libraries - Focus on Assessment - Jul 26, 2010

CQI teams improve efficiency of library services

This article is the last in a series highlighting the work of the Continuous Quality Improvement
Teams within the University Libraries.

Schreyer Honors Theses Service
This team defined a process and created an online submission service for students enrolled in the
Schreyer Honors College to submit their theses for approval. The Schreyer Honors College
reviews and approves the submissions; afterwards, the Libraries catalogs them and publishes
them online. The online service became a requirement in spring 2010.

Unicode Working Group
The Libraries’ catalog was unable to display information about our collections in languages
using non-Latin characters, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. The group was charged with
managing the process of converting the catalog database to Unicode, the international standard
for encoding characters for use by computers; the conversion was successfully completed over
the winter break (December 2009-January 2010).

University Libraries Competencies Design Team
The goals of this team were to review the Libraries' competency structure and provide oversight
for the development of job profiles for the transition to the Competencies program. The team
recently completed draft job profiles to move all Spec Libraries Job Family jobs into the
Competencies program.

A full listing of the teams and their members can be found at
http://www.psu.edu/president/pia/qif/2010/teams.html. Thank you to all of these teams for their
hard work! — Sydney Bennington