Sage Council Minutes
September 23, 2008 9 am Pacific Time
Attendance: Karen Clay, Beth Longwell, Kim Tally and Louise Weeks; via video: Ken Reading & Kat Davis, Perry Stokes and Amy Hutchinson; via conference call: Marsha Richmond and Darlyne Johnson.
Council Chair Karen Clay called meeting to order at 9:10 am PDT.
- Agenda Review —Add a report on Grant County libraries
- Approval of Minutes – Minutes were not available.
- Committee reports—(bl)
Beth has not had time to encourage use of the wiki for committee communications. It was recommended that a chair be designated for each committee to facilitate this process and that the committee meet as a group every 6 months. The courier committee (Ken, Karen, Marie, Beth) needs to meet as soon as possible.
- LSTA Grants—
- (bl) A letter was sent to LSTA requesting additional funds be allocated toward our ongoing courier grant for 2008/09 and 2009/10. A 30% increase was requested due to the sharp rise in transportation costs as well as courier use.
- (ps) The LSTA Open Source Software Test Grant was approved and ranked as #2. The proposal will go before the State Library Board on October 17, 2008. We received the Wildhorse Grant in the amount of $4,000 for server hardware. Perry will request an additional $4,000 for the server from the Collins Foundation, a grant which goes out next week. We should hear from them in December.
Concern was expressed concerning the timeline for testing. We have a short evaluation test period because the implementation grant to LSTA is due in April. We need to be ready to start testing by January 1st. We have the money in hand from the Wildhorse Grant. We could possibly purchase the server right away. Kat made a motion to authorize up to $5,000 in Sage reserve funds, if needed, to purchase hardware for the open source testing. Perry 2nd the motion. Motion passed unanimously.
Beth will consult with EOU IT staff, review the hardware specifications from the software vendors, and get price quotes for the server.
Karen will call a meeting of the Open Source Committee right away to begin the software evaluation process. The committee consists of Ken, Shannon, Perry, Heidi, Amy, Beth and Karen. Currently the software packages being considered are Evergreen and Koha.
- Book feeds—(bl) Beth found out that this task was more challenging than she first thought. The RSS downloading was easy. Creating the list was more involved. She asks for help with the look of it for the web re-design on Catalog page. Perry and Heidi would help with the page re-design, but with the potential migration how much time do we put into this? A quick re-design? Resize the buttons? Adding the “ten more things recently checked out” would be more time consuming. Adding the “ten most requested items” would be easier. This is a viable idea and makes the catalog more interesting. It was recommended to consider just how much Beth can do. It was then suggested that Beth do something simple. We will move forward with a daily change rather than an hourly change. Beth will put something up on the test server for review by the libraries.
- ILL Labels—(bl) Beth is placing an order with Demco. Baker Co. and Nyssa also use these labels. The ones we have are too sticky and leave a residue. She posted this information to the Wiki on the Courier support page.
- Sage Chair nominations—(kc) It was suggested to keep the existing chair during this transition period. Ken nominated Karen. The consensus was to keep the current chair and to do an email vote for the other open positions.
- Upcoming year representative council positions—(kc) Still haven’t finalized the representatives. Associate level 1, 2, and 3 libraries have received the email. Considering school was out for the summer, Karen chose to wait until school resumed for the school/ILL-Circ libraries. She will finish sending out the ILL-Circ libraries the notice.
- Grant County—(bl) Beth met with the Grant County Library Board and Advisory Council. They are becoming a circulating library. The board is ready to go! She outlined a two- or three-year plan to get them circulating. She informed them of grant options. Grant County had a lot of records in SuperCat (10,000) plus what is in the system. State Library statistics indicate they have 30,000 books. Beth proposed to bring them in at the Associate Level 1 then later re-evaluate once they are circulating. She was unsure of the accuracy of records, as everything is done by hand. Beth provided additional cataloging training and recommended dropping SuperCat altogether.
Spray, Mitchell, and Ione records have been brought up to date in Sage. We will see a jump in the number of holdings.
Meeting adjourned at 10:10 am PDT
Next meeting will be on November18, 2008
Louise Weeks, Recorder