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Summary of Directors Council Meeting, November 17, 2011

Maine Shared Collections Strategy Directors Council Meeting
November 17, 2011
1-2:40, Colby College, Miller Library Conference Room

Attending: Sherrie Bergman, Valerie Glenn, Clem Guthro, James Jackson Sanborn, Linda Lord, Barbara McDade, David Nutty, Deb Rollins, Joyce Rumery, Gene Wiemers

Valerie provided the following updates for the group:

  • Collection Analysis: A group subscription to WorldCat Collection Analysis has been ordered; the cost will be ~$2145 per partner, and this will be considered part of your matching funds. All institutions will have access, and can use this to help with analysis for the grant, as well as analysis of items not being considered in the grant analysis.
  • Reclamation: A systems librarian was hired in early September and has been working with the technical services contacts at each institution to assist with the OCLC reclamation. All order forms have been submitted, and they are currently working on exporting records to send to OCLC. Everything seems on track to have most of the reclamation done by late December.
  • Outreach/Promotion: Clem, Deb, and Valerie gave a presentation on the grant project at the recent MLA meeting in Portland. We have identified several conferences where we’re planning to submit presentation proposals; most of these are academic in nature, so Valerie asked those attending to send her additional opportunities, particularly if they are aimed at state/public library audiences. [Note: there was a suggestion to contact Lyrasis re: outreach; another suggestion given outside of the meeting time was to use Webjunction as a place to host webinars/training sessions.]
  • Print-on-Demand: Given that we have decided not to purchase the Espresso Book Machine, Valerie is investigating alternatives for the printing services, content, and ways for users to access the content. We have had the UMaine Printing Services Unit product a copy of a title we downloaded from Google Books; the cost for that item (softcover, ~200 pages black and white) was $22.30.
  • Governance: Valerie has begun to look at the governance models and Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) for existing shared print archiving projects such as WEST and the ASERL Journal Storage project.
  • The project’s Advisory Board will be visiting Orono in May (around the 21st). More information about their visit will follow.

Recap of the Charleston Conference:

Valerie and Clem attended a shared print archiving preconference at the Charleston Conference (traditionally an acquisitions/collection development conference in Charleston, SC) in early November. Highlights from that meeting:

  • The one area of the country not covered by a regional print archiving project is New England. Some discussion about this ensued, with several participants theorizing that one reason may be the lack of a regional consortium (ie, no more NELINET).
  • Most print archiving projects are still working on journals, and are almost exclusively the domain of academic libraries.  This led to a brief discussion on why libraries have been reluctant to include monographs in these projects – including the complexity of monographs vs. journals, access to electronic copies, discovery, etc.
  • There is an emerging standard for how to record retention decisions in the MARC record, thanks to the work of OCLC and WEST.
  • When it is time to sign a memorandum of understanding for these kinds of projects, it is best to have it signed by a higher official than the library director, so as to make it an institutional agreement/investment, rather than simply a library agreement/investment. Also: the MOU should be short – think of it as a constitution, which is updated infrequently. Other policies, etc., should be noted elsewhere.

Travel reimbursement:
Due to a revision of the grant’s budget, partner travel will be reimbursed out of grant funds and is not considered part of the partner match. Each partner will provide a detailed accounting of their grant-related travel and will invoice the University of Maine. Valerie has created an overview document that has been shared with the directors. She will create a sample invoice to alleviate confusion re: how much information should be recorded and submitted.

HathiTrust membership:
Valerie distributed two documents: one, an overview of what HathiTrust is (authored by HathiTrust staff), and the second a membership fact sheet she created based on conversations with HathiTrust staff and the documents on their website.  There was some discussion about cost, and what content was accessible by becoming a partner. Examples were shown as to how HathiTrust (and other public domain content) could be accessed through discovery tools such as Summon, or an institution’s catalog.

Additional discussion touched on Shibboleth, and membership in InCommon, which is required for user authentication. The academic libraries are in a better position to implement this than are the state and public libraries; this is a concern, and we may want to explore the creation of a technical group to work on the implementation. There was also an inquiry as to whether or not the UMaine System could join, with access for those universities. This will need to be referred to HathiTrust.

The project team was urged to continue to investigate other digital initiatives such as Google Books, the Digital Public Library of America, etc.

Future meetings:
The next meeting will be held sometime in February; Valerie will send a Doodle poll to schedule, and will include a snow day.