Sage Council-September 18 2007

Sage Library System Council

Minutes of the meeting held on the 18th of September 2007

Introductions were made to the new librarian at Lake Co., Amy Hutchinson.
Attendance: Karen Clay, Beth Longwell, Louise Weeks, Jo Cowling, Perry Stokes; via video: Marsha Richmond, Amy Hutchinson; via phone: Marie Baldo, Dea Nowell.

Council Chair Marsha Richmond called meeting to order at 9:35 A.M. PDT

1. Agenda Review -no additions

2. Committee Reports
a. Catalog Committee -Review of book standards completed, but not quite on web yet due to software difficulties. Hope to be resolved soon. Discussed system wide item types. Need to increase the number of material types in the system to include graphics among other things. Will discuss more thoroughly with Council later in this meeting. Next cataloging meeting is November 13th.
b. Circulation Committee -Did not meet.

3. Membership Report – site visits, possible new members-Site visits are being made and Beth will continue to visit each library in the system. Usually deal with specific issues as asked by individual library or as problem arises. WalNet group, which includes Walla Walla PL, Walla Walla Community College, and a few of the outlying area libraries near Walla Walla, has asked for a cost estimate to come into Sage. Beth will have to figure the budget in order to get the cost figures. Questions arose concerning courier. Discussed the possibility of using our courier, but it is funded by a grant through LSTA and might not work. Other possibilities are to use the Summit courier going through EOU which would take more time, or use Click-N-Ship. If they are able to use our courier, possibly just charge the minimum as if an ILL-Circ library.

4. Courier Report-Beth indicated that Baker-Ontario route is again without a courier. They have a temporary fix in that Jean is taking books once a week on Fridays just to get caught up. She is checking out Coca-Cola and other businesses that deliver in that area. She also indicted that it would be nice to have service three times a week instead of only two, but making this happen would depend on cost.

5. Addition of LNet link to Sage catalog page-Marie said that Caleb would like to see us have the Lnet link, Oregon’s statewide digital reference service, on our Sage web page. A reference box could be put on our main catalog page and also on the advance search page. All agreed to have Beth insert.

6. System-wide item types-Our I-type file is restricted to 255 item types. We’re running out of space very quickly. We would have to ask libraries to cut back on their I-types, when we actually need to be adding more. With system-wide I-types, we would all share, rather than have individual, library specific I-types. All records have locations that make them unique to each library. By sharing, we can fine tune and have more detailed item types. Beth will make the changes. We will see an increase in material types available.

7. Election of new chair-Beth nominated Karen of EOU and Jo seconded. No other nominations were made. Motion passed unanimously.

8. Other questions-Perry asked about searching patron records through phone or address. Is this a possibility? Beth stated that the fields are not indexed, so they are not searchable. Not sure of the cost to have Innovative index. We might ask to have the field become an indexed field and then do the indexing ourselves. It would depend on how large a project Innovative thinks it is. Beth will look into the cost to change only the address field into an indexed field.

Amy and Marie asked about pending visits.

Meeting adjourned at 9:55 A.M. PDT.

Next meeting will be on November 20th, 2007. There was discussion about this being Thanksgiving week, but that didn’t seem to be a problem.