Sage Council Minutes
January 15, 2019
Attendees: Ryan McGinnis (chair), Dea Nowell, Perry Stokes, Denine Rautenstrauch, Erin Wells, Mark Rose, Rachael Fox, Kathy Street, Beth Ross, Ann Zuelke, Cheryl Hancock, Marsha Richmond, Delia Fields
Approval of November 2018 minutes – since minutes were posted shortly before the meeting vote on approval of November minutes will be by email.
Discussion of July meeting minutes – Dea indicated that the July minutes had not been approved. Beth will check on them. [Note from recorder – November minutes indicated that email votes would be taken on July & September minutes, Mark Rose’s nomination for vice-chair, and for Marsha Richmond at KCC to fill the open academic seat. The voting took place after the November meeting and all were approved by a quorum of Sage council members.]
Committee Reports
Cataloging Committee – Committee chair was not present. Beth will ask John to prepare a summary for future meetings since he is not a council member. The committee discussed part 2 of the read-along training and scheduled a time. The next cataloging committee meeting will be the second Monday in February – February 11.
Circulation Committee – did not meet
Budget Committee – the committee has not met. Perry presented a preview of a draft budget he has been working on. He will call a meeting for the last week of the month once a date/time is determined by polling interested parties. The financial report was presented. We have received half of the LSTA grant. The membership fee budget amount will need to be adjusted since two libraries went down in membership level and that represents a shortfall in revenue. Overall our cash position is fine. Major expenses are notated on the document. Beth indicated that we went over our hours on deposit with Equinox and that we needed to purchase an additional 15 hours to cover the overage and leave 9 hours for future issues. These hours are good for 365 days from purchase and may allow us to decrease the allocation toward this budget area next year. Most of the funds on deposit for southern Oregon libraries have been paid back out to the libraries involved. These are funds which have been on deposit since these libraries joined Sage.
Courier Committee – did not meet
Strategic Planning Committee – did not meet
New Business
Evergreen software – Beth explained the process she is going through to incorporate new software coding and functionality into our custom pages. We will start seeing changes. Beth is doing most of the work during off hours so that it has less impact for testing. She will send out an email when changes are made and ask for feedback. Ryan asked about the stabilization of the field order in the z39.50 search. It was relayed that these fields are in a consistent order in the web client but not the desktop staff client.
Perry reported that they have not been seeing speed issues lately and asked if it had been resolved. Beth believes so and said that she feels the change that was incorporated in system settings has made a difference. Perry reported that scoping is off. Beth indicated that there were a lot of empty records that had no ownership and they did a cleanup.
New item lists are only showing 2016 items. Link in the tab on the navigation bar. Beth asked if we knew how long it has been that way. Perry asked if we had analytics on the use of those links. Beth said that she discovered when she was working on statistics that analytics had been turned off and she turned them back on. So, there will be some data for the last six months.
Dea asked that the agenda and meeting notices be sent to the entire consortium.
Budget Draft Review (Perry)–
Cash on hand for next year is expected to be around 205,000. Membership fees are expected to go up to cover additional expenses and cover the loss in income for two libraries that changed membership levels. Courier grant income is expected to be around 58,000. The budget committee can discuss whether we want to implement a cost of living increase for Beth. The big challenge is that it is a new biennium for Pers and the amount is going up significantly (22%). Health insurance is not increasing much. Perry kept all the other line items pretty much the same for now. Beth mentioned that the authority control vendor is going out of business and that charge may change with a new vendor.
Perry has some ideas for strategic planning that he will present at the budget committee meeting, so it will be a combination of budget and strategic planning. If we are projecting a budget of 221,000 then there would need to be a 10% increase in Sage member fees. Beth anticipates that will be a hardship for some libraries. We may have to make cuts in the budget or dip into reserves. Beth will look to see if there are categories that can be adjusted. In the past we have contributed to the conference under development funding and we may need to reconsider that. Perry has been looking at different strategies for assessing membership costs and ways we can get there since any change will impact some libraries more than others. Perry will add these scenarios to the budget draft spreadsheet and send out a link. Question of how our rates compare to an individual ILS for the libraries. Erin volunteered to contact Clackamas County to see what and how they are paying.
Meeting adjourned at 10:42 Pacific Time