Maine Shared Collections Cooperative Executive Committee
March 5, 2015
9:00 am – 10:00 am
Attendees: Matthew Revitt, Joyce Rumery, Clem Guthro (chair), Barbara McDade, David Nutty
Absentees: Jamie Ritter
1. Review language re. membership fees in MOU
The Law and Legislative Reference Library want to join the Maine Shared Collections Cooperative (MSCC) and self-nominate titles for retention, but feel unable to sign the MSCC Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) because of its references to membership fees. MSCC has no membership fees currently, but libraries that go through the collection analysis process pay a one-off fee to cover the costs of Sara Amato’s time compiling the spreadsheets for collection analysis.
The text in the MOU specifically referring to fees is:
• 1.7 “Supporting Members: Supporting members will pay membership fees in exchange for ensured access to retained materials.” This wouldn’t apply to the Law and Legislative Reference Library because they would be an Archive Holder not a Supporting Member.
• 2.5 “Membership Fees: The Executive Committee is authorized to set membership fees.”
• 7.1: “Financial Support to the MSCC. Members agree to provide financial support to MSCC through payments to the Administrative Host as specified in an annual budget and cost-sharing formula developed by the MSCC Executive Committee and approved by the MSCC membership.”
Matthew commented that other directors had been concerned about fees, but it’s the first time he’s been asked to remove it before their library will sign it. Matthew asked the Board whether they still want to have the option in the MOU for setting membership fees.
The MSCC Board were pleased to hear that the Law and Legislative Reference Library want to join Maine Shared Collections and didn’t want to prevent this from happening. However, the Board felt that although there are no current plans to introduce fees they still want to retain the ability to introduce them. However, the membership voice would be heard first as the MOU clearly states the annual budget and cost-sharing formula would need to be approved by the MSCC membership. Therefore if fees were ever introduced the Law and Legislation Library could make their objections known and as a last resort withdraw from the Maine Shared Collections agreement under section 9 of the MOU which states that:
“If a participating library opts to withdraw from this agreement, it must provide written notice to the Executive Committee a minimum of one year prior to withdrawing. If a Collection Holder is no longer able to retain the materials, the library may offer the materials to another library for retention.
A waiver of the one-year term may be granted by the Executive Committee in certain instances, such as a disaster, financial exigency, or institutional mandate.”
The Board agreed to leave the sections in the MOU concerning fees as they currently stand, thus retaining the option to introduce membership fees in the future. Matthew will inform John Barden Director of the Law and Legislative Reference Library of the Board’s decision (include Joyce in his message).
2. Project updates
a. IMLS completion date and report submission
Matthew submitted the Maine Shared Collection Strategy’s (MSCS) interim performance report to the Institute of Museum of Library Service (IMLS) at the end of December 2014. Matthew is close to having a final draft of the final IMLS report ready to share with the Project Team for comment. Matthew will also share the final report with those involved in MSCS before he submits it at the end of March (when MSCS officially ends).
The grant funds from IMLS have now been exhausted.
b. POD back online & HathiTrust record move to URSUS
Print-On-Demand
The MaineCat Print-On-Demand service came back online in December. Matthew, Sara, the University of Maine Printing and Mailing Service and Bookstore worked hard on making the service as user-friendly as possible, but Matthew felt it was going to be difficult to compete with commercial vendors like Amazon who can offer the books for a lot cheaper than the Printing and Mailing Service. So far there has only been one request. Joyce commented that the service is there for those people who need it.
HathiTrust record move to URSUS
Sara Amato’s last work on the grant side of Maine Shared Collections was to setup the HathiTrust records for their load into URSUS. Maine InfoNet has now taken over from Sara and Alisia Revitt from Maine InfoNet plans to have the load completed by the end of the current semester. Deb Rollins (University of Maine) will check whether the URSUS Collection Group would prefer the load to happen in the summer, so URSUS is not overwhelmed with 1.4 million new records.
Matthew confirmed for Clem that the HathiTrust records are still currently in Solar.
c. MSCC collection analysis service
Since September, Matthew and Sara have been working with Maine libraries on analyzing their print monograph collections. The collection analysis service consists of Sara extracting bibliographic and item data from local library information systems and comparing that data with holdings in OCLC WorldCat and MaineCat (because better indicator of rare in Maine). Sara compiles this data into spreadsheets which can be used to identify both weeding (overlap with MSCC commitments) and retention candidates (rare in OCLC). Click here for full details of service.
One of the unexpected consequences of the collection analysis work has been identifying large numbers of records which need cleaning which means that there are examples of false unique hits, but one can identify these when reviewing the spreadsheets. Matthew has been using issues with the quality of metadata as a way to sell Maine Shared Collections at the consortium level because the cleaning of data locally will benefit all.
To cover the costs of Sara producing the spreadsheets, the libraries are charged a one-time fee of $350 if their collection size is under 50,000 print monograph holdings (which most are). The fee for those libraries with more than 50,000 holdings is $420. Once Sara’s spreadsheets are ready Matthew meets with the libraries to go over the results including identifying retention candidates.
So far, Matthew has worked with 14 libraries ranging from small public libraries to University of Maine system libraries. The overlap with Maine Shared Collections has been high, particularly at the University of Maine Farmington (62%), and Presque Isle (66%), which has offered libraries significant withdrawal opportunities. The volume of titles that libraries own where there are nine or fewer holdings in OCLC has been sufficiently low (ranging from 0-2%) that Matthew and the libraries have been able to carry out title-by-title reviews. Some of the titles in this rare category are actually withdrawal candidates such as superseded textbooks and manuals.
To date, Matthew has been concentrating on working with libraries in Minerva and URSUS because using Innovative products makes the data comparisons a lot easier. However, Matthew ran a pilot project with Northeast Harbor Library who use a Koha ILS. While the quality of the records and missing data meant matching was difficult, Sara was able to do it and showed it’s possible for other Koha libraries to go through the collection analysis process.
d. New MSCC member libraries – additional commitments made & agreed representation on Collection & Operations Committee
Of the 14 libraries Matthew has worked with, six have formally joined MSCC: University of Maine Presque Isle, University of Maine Farmington, Witherle Memorial Library in Castine, Edythe L. Community Library, Eastern Maine Community College, and Northeast Harbor Library. The remaining eight libraries are still reviewing their list of retention candidates and will hopefully join soon.
Additional commitments made
New MSCC libraries have made commitments to 212 titles which Matthew commented might seem low, but their collection sizes are a lot smaller than the grant partners who made significant commitments to titles, so other libraries don’t have to. Matthew is concentrating the retention efforts on titles of local interest; most of these titles were published post-2003 and so were out of scope for MSCS.
Maine InfoNet is going to train Matthew to manually add retention statements into URSUS and Minerva. Matthew commented that he hopes the new version of Inn-Reach will allow Maine Shared Collections to disclose the new commitments in MaineCat because the work around of having the commitments flow from OCLC to MaineCat only works for those libraries that disclose holdings in OCLC. Sharon Fitzgerald (UMaine) has added commitments in OCLC for UMaine Farmington and Eastern Maine Community College and will do the same for any other new Maine Shared Collections libraries that are OCLC members.
Recruiting new members
Other University of Maine system libraries have expressed interest in joining Maine Shared Collections and Matthew hopes to recruit more libraries from Minerva. Steve Norman the chair of Minerva sent a message on the Minerva listserv endorsing MSCC, so hopefully more will join. Matthew commented that he will need to continue to promote MSCC at library meetings, on social media, and at conferences.
Agreed representation on Collection & Operations Committee
New University of Maine system members will be represented on the MSCC Collection & Operations Committee by Deb Rollins and the public libraries representation is split geographically using the existing library district divisions so Bangor Public will represent northern, the Maine State Library central, and Portland Public southern.
The community colleges will get their own representative on the Board, but Matthew will wait for more of them to join MSCC before he checks who they want to represent them. So far Cynthia Young from Eastern Maine Community College has shown an interest in being the representative. Once Matthew has a firm candidate he will ask the Executive Committee to approve the appointment.
e. Documenting retention decisions – holdings added to PAPR, Koha & OCLC Shared Print Symbol display
PAPR
Maine Shared Collection retention commitments for serials and journals will soon be in the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Print Archive Preservation Registry (PAPR). Matthew organized a meeting a couple of weeks ago with the MSCS Technical Services representatives and Amy Wood from CRL to go over some examples of data cleaning of the retention statements that CRL carried out. Amy has since provided spreadsheets of titles that had issues with how the holdings and commitments are recorded which need to be resolved before they can be added to PAPR. Amy was extremely pleased that she had the chance to speak to the MSCS representatives. CRL carried out a lot of cleaning work which those in attendance were grateful for. MSCC can use the spreadsheets Amy provided to tidy up some of the commitments in OCLC as well, which Matthew is speaking to Sara about. Matthew commented that there may be future work of this kind will require the grant partners (not whole of MSCC) to fund.
Koha
Northeast Harbor Library became the first Maine Shared Collections library to add commitments to a Koha ILS.
OCLC Shared Print Symbol
After Matthew noticed issues with shared print holdings not being visible in OCLC WorldCat when accessing it from his home computer, OCLC confirmed that if the holding library is not a subscriber to FirstSearch and WorldCat is being accessed from an IP address which is not associated with a FirstSearch subscription, the Shared Print holding will not show in WorldCat.
f. Collection & Operations Committee meeting discussions – recap of retention responsibilities
Recap of retention responsibilities
The MSCC Collection & Operations Committee held its inaugural meeting in January. The meeting was used as a chance to recap library’s retention responsibilities to ensure they understand that commitment can only be removed if they meet the criteria in the Policy on Retention Commitment Changes. Attendees also reviewed the steps to be taken when transferring retention commitments to another MSCC library.
Large reference sets
In terms of future work, the Collection & Operations Committee discussed the retention of large reference sets. There are going to be discussions within the different consortial groups about managing the sets with the Collection & Operations Committee coming back to report on these discussions at their summer meeting.
The Committee also discussed the need to plan for the next round of collection analysis in 4 years’ time and what happens at the end of the 15-year retention period.
At this time there weren’t other subjects the Executive Committee wanted the Collections and Operations Committee to consider. Matthew confirmed the Collection & Operations Committee’s next meeting will be sometime in June or July and that they will meet twice annually.
g. MSCC involvement in EAST
EAST
Matthew has spoken to Susan Stearns (Boston Library Consortium) about Maine Shared Collections involvement in the Eastern Academic Scholars Trust (EAST) and they are keen to use MSCC retention commitments as a factor in their collection analysis with Sustainable Collection Services (SCS), but will have to ensure the members are okay with the terms and conditions of the retention commitments (e.g. retention period) in the MOU. Matthew also spoke to Susan about him continuing to be involved in EAST committees.
Clem confirmed for Matthew that Colby intend to be a member of EAST. David commented that it would be nice if MSCS could join together as a supporting member. Matthew agreed, but EAST will need to take into account that MSCC now contains more members than the original grant partners.
Susan was at the Regional Resource Sharing Symposium that Matthew presented at last week and she spoke about how EAST are still working on securing grant funding to support their work. Clem commented that until this funding is secured EAST won’t be able to start the vital collection analysis work
3. Future direction of Executive Committee
Clem commented that as EAST develops the Executive Committee will need to consider Maine Shared Collections involvement in the initiative. Clem went on that Matthew’s involvement in EAST committees will allow the Executive Committee to stay abreast of developments.
Matthew commented that another shared print initiative the Executive Committee will need to consider MSCC’s involvement in is the HathiTrust Shared Print Monograph Program (HTSPMP). Clem and Matthew are members of the HathiTrust Shared Print Task Force and the Task Force’s report will be released within six months.
The Executive Committee confirmed for Matthew that they are happy continuing to vote on approving new membership applications via email, but to avoid confusion Joyce asked Matthew to use different threads for each new library.
4. Next meeting date
The Executive Committee agreed that two meetings a year would suffice.