DRAFT MINUTES
American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Information
Executive Committee Meeting
Orlando, Florida on Saturday, April 6, 2002 at the Embassy Suites
~1 – 4 pm
Chair Andrew Berks called the Executive Committee meeting to order at 1:08 pm. Agendas were available during the meeting. Those present for all or part of the meeting were as follows:
Executive Committee Voting Members
Dr. Andrew H. Berks, Chair
Mr. Chuck Huber, Chair Elect
Ms. Andrea Twiss-Brooks, Past Chair
Ms. Susan K. Cardinal, Secretary
Ms. Marge Matthews, Treasurer
Dr. Gary Wiggins, Councilor
Ms. Bonnie Lawlor, Councilor
Ms. Joanne Witiak, Alternate Councilor and Awards Chair
Dr. Robert W. Snyder, Program Chair
Ms. Ann Bolek, Membership Chair
Committee Chairs and Visitors
Ms. Kitty Porter, Education Chair
Mr. Graham C. Douglas, Publications Chair and Business Manager
Dr. Kerryn A. Brandt, Bulletin Assistant and new web manager
Ms. Grace Baysinger, Former Executive Committee Chair
Ms. Pamela Scott
Dr. Guenter Grethe, Secretary General, BTEC
I. Introductions (Andy Berks):
· All present at the meeting introduced themselves.
· Adjustments to the meeting agenda content and order were made ad hoc mainly to accommodate peoples’ schedules.
II. Approval of minutes from Fall 2001 Executive Committee Meeting
A motion was made to delay the approval of the Executive Committee meeting minutes for Fall 2001 (Chicago), and seconded. The vote was unanimous. The Fall 2001 minutes will be approved via e-mail.
III. Michael O’Hara
The Chemical Information Division (CINF) of ACS recognizes Michael O’Hara, Alternate Councilor for all the contributions he has made to the Division and expresses gratitude. The Chair, Andy Berks, will be sending a note to his family. Also, Publications Chair and Business Manager, Graham Douglas, stated that the Chemical Information Bulletin (CIB) will have a memorial article to recognize Michael O’Hara’s contributions to CINF.
IV. Division Business
a) Do we want to increase 2003 Dues? (Andy Berks)
Currently: $10 for members, $15 for affiliates, $15 for national affiliates, $2 for students (+$10 surcharge for international mailing).
Reasons for it: We haven’t raised dues in a while. Last raised in 1994? Incremental raises are more comfortable than large sudden raises. Postage is increasing. We have added many services including web site and will be upgrading web site this year. We want a financial cushion against bad times. Increase in allotment from ACS will not happen for a while. Affiliate rate is a great bargain!
Reasons against it: People want extra benefits and concrete reasons for why dues are raised. People don’t like to pay more. It may be a barrier for new members. Financial health of CINF is good per Treasurer, Marge Matthews. To raise student dues, we need to change bylaws (in progress).
Conclusions: We unanimously voted not to raise dues this year but will revisit the question in Spring 2003. What member benefits can we associate with the dues increase? Councilor Bonnie Lawlor will verify when dues were last raised and find out how we compare to other divisions.
b) Alternate Councilor Appointed (Andy Berks)
Past Chair, Andrea Twiss-Brooks will be the new Alternate Councilor for this year. She was nominated by Alternate Councilor, Joanne Witiak and seconded by Membership Chair, Ann Bolek. The Executive Committee unanimously agreed.
c) Shall we combine Public Business Meeting with the Executive Committee Meeting in the fall? (Andy Berks)
Currently: The Executive meeting is held on Saturday afternoon. The Public Business meeting is held on Monday afternoon.
Reasons for it: Why have two meetings?
Reasons against it: Executive meeting is closed with invitations. The Business meeting could be held immediately afterwards, but because of the timing of it, pre-conference, we may not get many attendees. In fact, the Business meeting should be after conference starts and is for all CINF members. We could schedule for a different time:
· Monday after CAS/ ACS Pubs meeting: people would be leaving to attend Harry’s party.
· Sunday night reception: would everyone be there?
· Tuesday luncheon: people have to pay for this.
Conclusions: Chair Andy Berks removed item from consideration.
d) Formation of Bylaws & Procedures Committee (Andy Berks)
Some items in the bylaws are not accurate. For example:
· Past chair no longer does the Salary Survey.
· Secretary does not call for nominations.
Andy Berks appointed a new Bylaws & Procedures committee. The goal of this group will be to increase accuracy of bylaws and move procedures into procedure manual.
The members are
Ms. Andrea Twiss-Brooks, (chair),
Ms. Grace Baysinger
Dr. Guenter Grethe
e) The Division appreciates all the work that Robert Stobaugh has done over the years. Various proposals were made to recognize his contributions.
f) Nominations (Andrea Twiss-Brooks)
Chair (2004): Bruce Slutsky, New Jersey Institute of Technology & Pamela Scott, Pfizer
Treasurer (2003-2005): Margaret Matthews, ISI & Helen Yun, Purdue Pharma LP
Councilor/Alternate Councilor* (2003-2005): Joanne Witiak, Rohm and Haas; Guenter Grethe, MDL; Andrea Twiss-Brooks, University of Chicago; Barbara Peterson, Andrew Berks, Merck; William Town, Chemweb.
*After this meeting, two people from this list will be selected to run for interim Alternate Councilor (2003).
g) Procedures Manual (Andy Berks)
Also, see Formation of Bylaws & Procedures Committee (IV, d). Joanne Witiak has already done significant revisions to the Awards section of the Procedure Manual and Kitty Porter has submitted changes to Andrea Twiss-Brooks for the Education section. The committee chairs will receive the revised document to look at. While they are revising their section they can review the changes in other sections.
Joanne Witiak proposed updating the Procedure Manual as soon as possible and not trying to coordinate with the slower Bylaws changes. Because we have total control of our Procedure Manual within very general ACS guidelines, we can make changes and post to the web site quickly.
h) NCIS 2003 (Guenter Grethe)
Guenter Grethe has prepared a questionnaire and will send it to executive committee as soon as possible for comments by the end of April. After approval, the questionnaire will be sent out over e-mail lists, such as Chminf-L. He will also send it out via CINF E-News. The survey can be mentioned in the e-mail that tells people the user name and password for CINF E-News. He wants to know about the potential size and best times & locations for having NCIS 2003. If results are promising, he volunteers to coordinate NCIS 2003. He will e-mail results to the executive committee who will quickly decide if it should be pursued so that there will be enough time to plan for next summer.
Barbara Hurwitz has been doing some preliminary work on NCIS 2003 and has had discussions with University of New England, in Maine. If the questionnaire indicates that people are interested in meeting in New England, Guenter will contact Barbara.
Andrea Twiss-Brooks has a report from last NCIS meeting. The report includes all information about expenses, who Jorge Manrique talked to, what rates were offered, who was involved and who attended. There were ~40 non-speaking attendees and there was a profit of $2122. The location may have been a deterrent for some people, but there were attendees from San Francisco. A committee needed to be formed to organize this type of conference as it is too much for one person. Also, it needs to be highly publicized. See Andrea Twiss-Brooks if anyone wants to learn what this type of conference costs.
i) Public Relations: Do we want to create a Public Relations Committee and/or appoint a Public Relations person and send to a workshop (May 31)? (Andy Berks)
Pros: Chemistry and the Law has a Publications Chair. We are encouraged to create this position. The Publications Committee, Awards Committee and Membership Committee could use some PR.
Cons: We used to have a Public Relations Chair, but we dropped the position because no one was interested in doing it and duties were split between Awards and Publications Committees. It is easier for each committee to do PR than to coordinate with a Public Relations Committee.
Conclusion: Joanne Witiak of the Awards Committee nominated Svetlana Korolev to attend the May 31 workshop. Svetlana will share what she learns with other committees.
J) Chminf-L (Gary Wiggins)
There are 1250 subscribers to Chminf-L. There are frequent instances of people accidentally replying to the list instead of to individuals. The reply function can be changed to automatically send messages to the originator of the message rather than the list. Gary feels that the majority of list participants want to send to the list. Many e-mail programs may be configured to prompt the sender “do you really want to send?” which may help cut down on this behavior. People need to keep in mind that this is a very public means of communication.
V. Committee, Functionary and Officer Reports
A) Education Committee (Kitty Porter, chair)
This year, there will be workshops at Boston, and SE Regional (fall). The committee is looking at possibilities for regional workshops for next year. The committee submits the following comments on CPT 2000 library survey:
1) CPT needs to define information seeking skills that students need at the undergraduate level These should be included within CPT Guidelines. The Education Committee offered to assist with this task.
2) If the desire is to have students gain the ability to retrieve chemical information from the core chemical literature, the guidelines should not be product driven. The tool doesn’t need to be designated. Any index that covers the core chemical literature should be considered such as General Science Abstracts from HW Wilson for example.
3) If Chemical Abstracts is considered to be essential, there should be an affordable version that is reasonably priced at $1000 or less for the small schools. The ACS Board of Governors must work with CAS to develop viable pricing structures and distribution of access points for schools that graduate 2 – 200 BS Chemistry majors a year. An example of this might the CA student edition priced as a per search database on FirstSearch.
Kitty will share these ideas with Bartow Culp and Rob McFarland, our CPT representatives.
B) Awards Committee (Joanne Witiak)
2002 Herman Skolnik Award goes to Peter Norton. The symposium and award presentation will be at the Boston meeting (Fall 2002). 2003 Skolnik Award nominations are due June 1st, 2002. Two nominations have been received so far. Three nominations are possible.
The Executive Committee unanimously voted to give the 2002 Meritorious Service Award to Arleen Somerville. Joanne will notify Arleen. This award will also be presented at the Boston meeting.
The Lucille Wert Scholarship winner is Hong Zhang, who was impressively qualified with BS in Chemistry from Pei King University, Graduate work at Boston University, currently in the MIS program at Indiana University.
This committee plans to improve timeliness of award publicity. As soon as the award has been given, the information will go in the next newsletter. Color photos will be taken either after each award has been accepted or at the awards presentation and placed in next Chemical Information Bulletin (CIB) if financially possible.
Note the error in the last CIB regarding the next ACS meeting dates. The correct dates are August 18th to 22nd. The committee recommends printing a correction. Too bad the membership cards no longer have the meeting dates on them.
Andy Berks, Chair approved the appointment of Bill Town to be the next Chair of the Awards Committee starting in 2003 for three years.
C) Biotechnology Secretariat (BTEC, Guenter Grethe)
There was no BTEC symposium at Orlando but there will be one be in Boston. Andy Berks is web master for BTEC. The program is on the web site. POLY and PMSE people will organize the Boston symposium. A change in BTEC Treasurer caused a delay in dues notification. Divisions need a formal letter requesting dues, not just e-mail. It is difficult to contact divisions early in the year because division officers change and the officer list for this year came out just before this meeting. The formal letter will be a good opportunity to inform divisions as well as request dues payment.
D) Publications (Kerryn Brandt, Graham Douglas)
1. Web site
The Publications Committee will continue to oversee the management of the division web site. Specifically, Kerryn Brandt was appointed new web coordinator. The site will be redesigned and moved from University of Chicago server to the ACS server. The Design Plan and Prototype will probably be proposed, reviewed, and acted on over the summer. It was suggested that the prototype be available for testing and comments before pulling the old site. After Executive Committee approval site redirects will be used. Important items to address in the new design will be:
· distributed authorship so that content can be added and edited by people who know it best.
· shared responsibility for update and management.
· architecture for easy, consistent update. Kerryn will design using Front Page for easy management. Hoping to improve structure and functionality.
· what the members want and what they like about the current site. A survey will be sent out via the CIB and CINF E-news.
· limitations imposed by ACS, including a 10 MB disk allotment but we are requesting more space. Andy believes that ACS will work with us with to do whatever we want.
CINF will have a stronger negotiation position if our site is on the ACS server as opposed to having it at an outside server. Alan Engel volunteered to let us use his server, but Andy Berks is concerned that this solution would not address the bottleneck of having one person be responsible for site management and update, as well as server reliability.
2. Salary Survey
The 2002 Salary survey is complete and will be published as is. Patricia Kirkwood is selling the survey for prepublication price at the meeting. Marge will distribute the survey as orders are received. After the meeting, Andrea will need to remove prepublication information from the web site. Pat prepared the survey by herself and Past Chair, Grace Baysinger did some reviewing. This publication took 2 years to produce. There was a delay in review process. The Publication Committee recommends a letter of commendation for Patricia Kirkwood from Carol Carr, Andy Berks, and Grace Baysinger.