Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Discussion of WERA status and expectations "The R.W. WERA 1008 is in the middle of life-span (Sept. 2011), next year will have to start on renewal "Impacts desired: Economic, dollar amount; changed behaviors of commodity or other group serving; show utilization of work product. Reports are used to impact Congress. Business Meeting oDraft Report to Sustaining Partners distributed and discussed oWRP symposium at Society for Range Management annual conference described as successful with the Memorandum of Understanding between WRP and SRM signed to facilitate collaboration oDavid Kruger invited WRP to hold next annual meeting Laramie, Wyoming in 2010: this was enthusiastically and unanimously approved oCarla Casler rotated to Past-Chair, Norm Harris rotated to Chair, Amy Shannon rotated to Vice-Chair for the Western Rangelands Partnership, Mark Thorne was welcomed as newly elected Secretary

High points of the past year included: *successful eXtension proposal for a Rangelands Stewardship and Health Community of Practice *Successful symposium at the Society for Range Management Annual Meeting *Memorandum of Understanding signed with the Society for Range Management to facilitate collaboration *Completed needs assessment online survey Challenges of the past year included: *technical issues with the website; rebuild with enhanced security after hacking event *continuing concerns about sustainable funding In process activities: *Development of a WRP business plan *Continued needs assessment through focus groups *Update of metadata in existing RW database *Content development of RW *Initial build of Rangelands Stewardship and Health-Community Of Practice Jeanne Pfander and Holly Hartman: Report on the Needs Assessment "Needs Assessment started last summer as per request from UA Libraries was internally funded by the University of Arizona Libraries o16 question online survey, 13 states participated; 1066 received invitation to participate; 177/196 completed (17%) oQuestions included respondents, demographics, preferred information gathering strategies, valued information sources and formats, topics of interest, tools for decision-making, etc. oDiscussion of results included analysis of how users expressed needs and behavior can be used to improve the Rangelands West product. oPreliminary results were used for eXtension proposal oFocus groups will be used to help define requirements for next version of Rangelands West. Business Plan Process and Results so far Students from the Eller School of Business at the University of Arizona provided a report with suggested business plan. WRP members will review and provide feedback. Timeframe for feedback: 2 weeks or so. Barb and Jeanne will coordinate review process and further development. Sheila Merrigan: Inputting Metadata/New Content to Rangelands West. *Need to be very specific about data for each record (topic tree and geography) subtopics show up in broader topic searches *AZ Team is renovating topics for items in the existing database; they have scheduled group metadata fixing sessions *Changing from individual log-in IDs to state log-in IDs (i.e. nevadagroup) *States that have entered records will assist with updating metadata The Arizona Team will set up Go To Meeting metadata repair sessions where everyone can work together on fixing the remaining records Barb Hutchinson: Full text documents and RW as an E-repository *AgNIC is harvesting content from institutional repositories *The Journal of Range Management and Rangelands will be moved to Drupal content management system. Goal: new version in June "Representatives from other journals who heard the talk at SRM are interested in the RW-JRM model (These folks include Rangeland Journal and South African Journal of Range and Forest Science). Barb will pursue. *A Letter of Intention for collaboration between WRP and FAO is being drafted. A possible goal of this partnership would be to develop something like a Global Rangeland Information System along the lines of the Global Forest Information System (http://GFIS.net) . Metadata could be shared between RW and AGRIS. Rangelands West Content Development Mark Thorne: Content Development and Review Procedures for Rangelands West *Described an organizational structure for content development/review *Discussed need to prioritize content areas, form content groups, enlist help of other potential contributors *Resources to facilitate process: Google Groups/Google Docs/others?; GoToMeeting, etc., others? Process needs to be fully integrated. We need to decide which technology platforms so we can work collaboratively. *Discussed need to bring people into the process (SRM has 30,000 members; if only 1-2% participated it would be a lot) *How to create control over the process? Proposal: Establish Topic Area Editorial Groups Assign groups for each of the 10 areas Have a librarian and range specialist as co-leaders for each group Topic groups will: *Be responsible for content development for their topic *Facilitate submissions, review, editing (as appropriate) *Schedule regular meetings *Decide on acceptance and/or rejection of content *Invite others to participate and submit content *Report to Content Development and Steering Committees or to Annual Meeting *Discussion: state site content metadata vs. RW content development for topic areas Julie Conley: Hot Topics *Intent was to provide overviews of controversial issues *Needs review; only 3 topics have been updated at all: Fire, NEPA, Grazing *New content is available on NEPA, but needs design *Julie will finish updating Fire section Follow up: Everyone in attendance signed up to either be a leader or a member of content development teams by broad category. Mark will follow-up with those not at the meeting. These groups will review the hot topics to determine which ones should be included in the broader content areas. They will also consider new content to populate those categories and create metadata records for them