Meeting Minutes

Maine State Library Studio

Attending were Shelly Davis, Nancy Crowell, Kevin Davis, Nikki Maounis, Betsy Pohl, Judy Frost, Steve Norman, James Jackson Sanborn (remote), Gail Roy (remote), and Alisia Revitt (remote).

Call to Order—Following a teleconferencing glitch and a brief infomercial from Linda Lord concerning the Maine income tax library check-off, the meeting was called to order at 10:20 a.m. by Shelly Davis (Chair).

Acceptance of the Minutes of the November 14, 2012 Meeting—Motion by Steve, second by Betsy to approve the minutes as written. Motion carried.

Nancy Crowell was welcomed as a new Board member.

Gail reported that all Minerva libraries have paid their annual bills.

Old Business

Library Anywhere implementation—James reported that the bill has been submitted for payment. Plans are under way for implementation, with a target of March. Albie will handle implementation for Minerva. He has done it before for URSUS. The initial cost will be $7,800; $2,500 next year; and $2,595 the year after that. Two or three Minerva libraries (including Walker Memorial) already subscribe to Library Anywhere. They will need to be informed of what is happening. One point: What we are getting as a consortial group does not have all of the stand-alone functionalities. We are getting mostly the mobile OPAC and some links to local websites.

Memorandum of Participation/Website—Cindy White has reported that not nearly all libraries (about one-half so far) have returned their signed MOPs. More reminders will be sent. Shelly noted that the website needs to be looked at and cleaned up. James said a redesigned website is in the works. It is being moved away from the State’s website and will be easier to update and manage. The new website will use WordPress. Alisia recommended that making all of the needed corrections and changes could be part of the process of moving to the new website. Shelly asked for volunteers to help and advise with the changeover. Betsy, Judy, and Steve volunteered. Venice will contact them before long.

New Business

OPAC—James reported that despite III promises that the OPAC update would not change anything, changes did happen. For instance, the inaccurate holds information showed up again in the OPAC for about 13 hours. James explained the difference between strict scoping (which Minerva uses now) and lax scoping (which is used by URSUS). Lax scoping displays differently but will give accurate holds information. In lax scoping, though, items outside of the scope show up so patrons need to interpret the extra holdings information that appears. Still, James thinks that this information is more useful. Maine InfoNet staff is testing to see if lax scoping works satisfactorily for Minerva. Betsy asked a question about a change in the OPAC display after the upgrade. James tried an example and found that there was in fact an issue with the “cover image.” Albie will look into it.

Meeting minutes on website—Minutes posted on the website will often say “See report,” but the report is not on the website. Maybe this can be fixed as part of the website switchover. Discussion ensued about how such documents should be posted. Should they be html-ized or pdf’s? Html is easily searched. Kevin suggested posting minutes as html, then the agenda and all other meeting documents as one linked pdf document, which would be searchable by Google. Alisia noted that people (circulation staff, for instance) really need to be able to find Minerva policies easily. She will post documents the way that Kevin suggested, starting with today’s meeting. James envisions Minerva committees being able to post their documents to the website. James hopes that the Minerva Secretary will be able to post meeting packets directly instead of submitting them to Alisia to post.

Budget and dues for FY14—Gail opened discussion of next year’s budget. James noted the size of the carryover, which he thinks is sufficient for the time being. Discussion followed of a potential migration to Sierra and related finances. Further building the contingency fund probably is not required now. Nikki wondered if we ought to budget annually for additional delivery bags. Motion by Nancy, second by Betsy to add $3,000 as a budget line for bags and to keep the annual Minerva cost the same ($4,000). Shelly offered the friendly amendment to reduce the contingency in the budget proportionately. Motion carried unanimously. James suggests a posting to MeLibs to ask non-Minerva libraries to send bags back to a Minerva library. More data on the numbers of bags out there would be useful. The point was made that bags do wear out.

Motion by Nikki, second by Gail that additional bags in an amount not to exceed $3,000 be purchased now from contingency. Motion carried.

Motion by Steve, second by Nikki that the proposed budget as amended earlier be approved. Motion carried unanimously.

Election—Betsy will not run again since her local building project is heating up. Steve would be willing to continue. Shelly will send out a call for interested candidates.

BookLetters/BookSizzle—Shelly volunteered to gather more information on costs and other details.

Reports

Maine InfoNet—James said that a meeting at ALA Midwinter to envision the next incarnation of Maine InfoNet/III is scheduled. Permission has been received from the State for InfoNet to keep doing for the next three years what it has been doing without going annually through the RFP process.

Maine InfoNet Representative—There has been no Maine InfoNet meeting since the Users Council meeting. The meeting at Midwinter will be of major interest.

Minerva Technical—Alisia noted that MaineCat will be dormant in some ways while Portland Public is offline. Things are quiet otherwise, technically. Nancy has learned that Walker has the same statistical anomaly as Scarborough. The records for the two libraries were loaded at the same time. She wonders if that is at the root of the issue.