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Summary of Directors Council Meeting, August 24, 2011

Maine Shared Collections Strategy Directors Council Meeting
August 24, 2011
10-12, Colby College, Miller Library Conference Room

In attendance:
Sherrie Bergman, Valerie Glenn, Clem Guthro, James Jackson-Sanborn, Linda Lord, Barbara McDade, David Nutty, Steve Podgajny, Deb Rollins, Joyce Rumery, Gene Wiemers

Valerie provided a project update for the group.

Highlights:

  • We have received quotes from several web development vendors and will be submitting those quotes, along with a justification for our choice, this week.
  • The decision has been made not to purchase an Espresso Book Machine, although a print on demand option will still be implemented as part of the grant project. We are currently pursuing a partnership with the University of Maine’s Printing Services Unit. [Note: this will have budget implications, as the cost for the EBM was a partner match.]
  • We are currently determining our expectations for a Collection Analysis System; once this is finalized, we will determine if we need to build our own system, subscribe to an existing service such as OCLC’s WorldCat Collection Analysis, or some combination of the two.

Key topics of discussion:

Collection Analysis System

A list of questions/reports we want to be able to run in any system was presented for review. There were no additions to the list, with everyone agreeing that it was fairly comprehensive. The project team was reminded to think about the things that could be reviewed sooner (ie, identify items owned by all partner libraries, identify those items unique to the state) rather than later (reviewing detailed circulation data).

Question: is it possible to go with an existing product and use grant funds to develop an add-on to that product?  (investigate a development partnership?)

OCLC Reclamation

All present agreed that an OCLC reclamation/reconciliation project was necessary to proceed with an analysis of the partner collections.  The project team will draft a “minimum records required for analysis” list to share with the Directors’ Council prior to a meeting with the technical services representatives from partner institutions.  This list will allow grant partners to better determine which records they want to include in a reclamation project – ie, only the minimum material types required for the collection analysis, or materials such as media or government documents, which are not included in the grant project.

Concerns: amount of time that staff in partner libraries will have to devote to a reclamation project and all that it entails.  Would it be possible to use grant funding for local cataloger assistance?

Question: How will e-resources be handled?

Question:  USM has an OCLC symbol no longer in use; how will this be handled?

Partial answer: The Orbis-Cascade Alliance’s Catalog Working Group has posted significant documentation from their 2008 reclamation project.  Details are available at http://www.orbiscascade.org/index/wg-catalog-reclamation

There was some discussion surrounding the data that would be compared in an analysis.  Four of the partner libraries share an ILS (URSUS) with several libraries not involved in the grant.  Should those libraries also go through a reclamation?  Should their data be included in the analysis, even if they do not go through an analysis?

Additional notes:

Budget:
The project team was urged to consider the cost of an individual membership to HathiTrust, not just a consortial membership, when considering other expenditures for the partner match.  Related: conditions for membership need to be examined – will all partners be able to meet them?  How much extra workload/cost would this be?

Question: Is mileage included in partner match?  Does it need to be documented? Valerie will investigate what partner matches need to be documented and send to the group.

Comment:  Partners need advance notice regarding when they will be asked to contribute funds now that the decision has been made to not purchase the EBM. Will also need more information about what the money will purchase.

Cooperative Collection Development:
Multiple partners indicated that even though the grant is aimed at the legacy collections, they are hoping that the grant will provide a way to move forward with cooperative collection development; ie, a partner will identify a collection strength and commit to maintaining that strength in the future, so that other partners can collect in their stronger areas.

Future meetings:
The tentative schedule for Directors Council meetings will be: November, February, May, August.  Valerie will send a poll to schedule the November meeting asap.