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Summary of Project Team Meeting, June 2, 2011

Maine Shared Collections Strategy Project Team Meeting
June 2, 2011, Fogler Library Conference Room
9 am Eastern

Attending: Valerie Glenn, Clem Guthro, James Jackson-Sanborn, Barbara McDade, Deb Rollins

Topics for discussion: web presence, collection analysis system, advisory committee

Advisory Committee: need to notify them of the extension of the grant until May 2014. Would like to have first meeting in October; possibly to coincide with a Maine InfoNet summit on collections.

Web Presence: It was decided that the site would be hosted on the Maine InfoNet servers, and Drupal will be used as the content management system (CMS). The address will most likely be http://maineinfonet.net/mscs

We will need a workspace for the project team and committees; this may be handled with project management software. James is looking at SmartSheet, a web-based tool. Valerie will check it out and see if that would work for the MSCS project.

Design: we need to recruit a web designer. Valerie will talk to Gretchen G. to see if her company is available and has experience with Drupal. Need to think about structure – what documents/information needs to be on the site? Clem suggested checking out other similar projects and grant sites for ideas. Goal is to have the site design completed by August 1st.

Collection Analysis System (CAS):
Need to determine required elements, specifications for reporting, etc. Also need to determine if there is an alternative to build our own system. Things to think about: should we separate journals and monographs when analyzing? The focus of the grant is the legacy collection – should we have a cut-off date (ie, nothing after 2000?); How often will the software be updated with data (if at all?)

A meeting to discuss the CAS  was scheduled for June 15th at 9:30. Once we have a proposed structure, etc., we will need to meet with Collections folks. We’ll aim for the first meeting to be held at Colby in July. After this meeting, but before actually building the system, we should have a conference call with the Advisory Committee.

Aim for the first meeting with Directors sometime in November.

Note: A decision has been made to not purchase the Espresso Book machine, due to cost. We will need to figure out a Print-on-Demand (POD) alternative.

Other to-dos:

  • Need to look at google books ingest
  • Figure out financial/business model for POD. Use UMaine print shop?
  • Do we need to be members of the HathiTrust? Are there any consortial members?
  • Investigate options for management models. Will there be a distributed system, or will members contribute to one or two repositories?  Can we participate in larger, regional models (perhaps for journals)?  Is there an international option? (Clem mentioned a Canadian university that charges a fee to other institutions who wish to rely on their print journals instead of keeping a set in-house). Barbara mentioned a project in Atlantic Canada for public libraries. Check to see what other New England states are doing in this area.