Consortium of MnPALS Libraries

DRAFT MINUTES

Present: Todd Digby, Donna Davis, Cynthia Jorstad, Paul Dahl, Emily O’Connor, Orrin Ausen, Becky Bell, Kathleen Ashe, Robert Horton, Linda Richter, Sandra Fuhr, Brittney Goodman, Dan Mollner, Robbie LaFleur, Sonia Eilertson, Michael Kirby, Jan Carey (conference phone).

1:00 – Introductions/welcome – We went around the room and did introductions since some new members were present.

Amend/adopt agenda --Bob Horton moved, Dan Mollner seconded – Agenda was adopted.

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities report – Todd Digby

A link to web presentations for candidates for the Director of the PALS System Office was sent out via e-mail. First candidate was last Friday, second candidate is tomorrow – presentation is at 10 am tomorrow (4/27/07). Please provide feedback to the search committee.

LibData – There will be another round of training, around May 17.

MnSCU Librarians Day – registration currently stands between 55-60 people.

Approve minutes from February meeting

Minutes were approved.

Approve minutes from Annual meeting

Minutes were approved.

Elections

Chair-elect – Orrin Ausen has volunteered to serve as chair-elect.

We accepted this by acclamation.

Secretary – Brittney Goodman

We accepted this by acclamation.

One or two representatives to the User Council

The governance structure calls for two. Orrin Ausen and Sandra Fuhr agreed to serve in this role.

Set meeting dates for the Executive Committee and the Annual Meeting

The group discussed whether participation for rural/remote and one-person libraries would be better if we had our meetings on Monday rather than Thursdays?

Fall meeting – Monday, September 10

Fall meeting – Thursday, November 1

Spring meeting – Thursday, February 7

Spring meeting – Thursday, May 1

Annual meeting – Thursday, March 20

Dates were approved (Mollner moved, Dahl seconded. Approved.)

PALS Director’s Report – Linda Richter

Web site – Please give any feedback on the revised web site to Linda Richter.

Ex Libris Maintenance agreement– PALS has drafted a new maintenance agreement for Ex Libris, with particular changes related to what we expect from support and response time. Our warranty ends July 14^th. The Attorney General for Minnesota is currently looking over the language.

Do we want to see the contract before it’s sent to Ex Libris? Sandra Fuhr reported that at User Council sentiment this morning was strong that we should have membership review and participation in those negotiations with Ex Libris. It will be sent to the Chair and Chair-Elect of User Council and Executive. Will all of us get to see what comes back from the Attorney General? We will ask the AG. We may be interested in that.

Budget

We looked at a budget projection handout provided by Linda Richter. Todd Digby will be going to MnSCU in the fall to talk about budget. These projections are to help him and us as we look to the future. The 2006 numbers are real numbers. All the rest are projected. It projects how fast we spend down the reserve we currently have. We are in deficit spending now. We are working on building up our other areas of income. In the long-term PALS must reconcile all the work to be done with balancing the budget.

The Other Income category includes support for RightNow for the office of the Chancellor. In 2006 there was some additional income from libraries that left who were charged fees for deletion, etc. Other income also includes from Proxy server, global changes, Marcive.

Linda will bring something more detailed for September.

Aleph update - Becky Bell

Bell provided an open SI’s (reported problems to Ex Libris) list and a closed SI’s list that will be posted on the homepage tomorrow (4/27). If you have questions, send them in through the PALS support center.

ELUNA conference is scheduled for the first week in June. There are some people going from Minnesota but there is room for more. It is in Spearfish, SD. Web site – www.eluna.org

We discussed the Version 18 upgrade survey. 43 percent of libraries said to skip version 18 and go directly to a later version of the software. But there are more institutions that want to move to version 18 if you total the other three answers. The highest score for “the priorities for our library community related to Aleph are” was to “minimize the effort on the part of library staff.” Second highest is “improved functionality.” The purpose of the survey was to get a sense from the Consortium about their priorities.

Kathleen Ashe reported that User Council felt there were too many unknowns to make a thoughtful recommendation on Version 18. There were concerns regarding staffing in office in terms of implementation.

We are doing some preparations for Version 18. PALS staff is being trained on upgrading our operating system. We are dealing with hardware issues with Version 17. It is looking likely we will have to purchase more memory. Version 17 is resource intensive. We don’t really have a place to put Version 18 to test it. We would like to get it installed on a test server this summer. We have no definite plans for going live.

A member commented that if we can’t get an idea of the costs/benefits of upgrading, it is hard to make an educated decision.

It was questioned whether there is a possibility of collaboration with U of M on some of this? However, their settings are different. There has been some collaboration with them regarding Interlibrary Loan.

The U of M is bug-testing Version 18. But our architecture is different – we are a multi-ADM.

The group discussed the value of redoing the survey at a later date and connecting the survey to library types.

Recommendation: The emphasis of the staff at PALS until September should be to improve the functionality of 17. Later in the year, as we get a better idea of costs/benefits, we could make a better recommendation about moving to 18 after we put it on a test server. The staff would look at 18 as a step to the inevitable move to version 19. Not prepare training for version 18, but figure out data conversion/tables.

(Motion passed.)

Concern from this morning’s User Council: How will things go forward with some staff changes/cuts?

Kathleen Ashe – User Council report

User Council agreed on the dates that were previously posted for meetings. We had some issues with the Hennepin Technical College, Brooklyn Park facility. There were issues with smell with the printing press. We will look at some other sites – Metropolitan State, MCTC, Rasmussen, etc.

Brittney Goodman commented that the conference call option hasn’t usually worked right. Should we look at a location that can facilitate that better?

We should forward concerns about staffing changes at PALS to Bobby Bothmann.

Acquisition and Serial user group – officially become one user group instead of two.

Governance structure – Recommendation from User council: That we hold a meeting of the consortial membership without PALS staff and management to set priorities regarding governance structure, user groups, executive committee. We need to be able to talk about the priorities of our consortium. We need to have an open/honest communication about what our expectations of the PALS staff is. Is Executive Committee and User Council simply serving an advisory role or do we have any authority?

To plan this meeting we may need task forces be set up to do some of this work and bring recommendations to this fall meeting. Date/time/place to be determined. It was commented that strategic planning for the membership differs from strategic planning for the office.

There was a motion to support the User Council recommendation that we have a consortium membership meeting in the fall without the PALS staff -- Orrin 1st, Dan Seconded. Approved.

Friendly amendment – to include a hybrid meeting where part of the time we are with the staff and part of the time we are without. Amended motion approved.

Break – 2:45-3

3:00 pm - continue discussion of Fall meeting

We decided that we will need a few people from this group, a few people from the User Council to begin planning this fall meeting: Volunteers were Robbie LaFleuer; Emily O’Connor; Donna Davis; and Sandra Fuhr – Sandra will recruit people from the User Council to join us.

For this fall meeting, we will consider replacing an existing meeting rather than adding an additional meeting.

Annual Meeting Follow-up

There were positive comments about the talk about the future during the annual meeting. Also, the annual meeting reached a pretty broad group, including some new voices and a lot of people who weren’t a part of the Executive Committee.

Governance Structure Document

User Group identified this document as one of the items to talk about at this fall consortium meeting we are planning. We held off on further revision of the document until we have a chance to discuss it as a consortium.

Strategic planning –

Vision Statement:

Drafted by Executive Committee Steering Committee. Was distributed to whole consortium in March for feedback, with the idea we could come today and approve it and make it official. Vision statement needs to be stated in a brief way.

Vision statement is what we “want to be.”

Possibly amend: “user-focused information services” (add word “information”)

Vision statement was tabled. Robert Horton moved, Cynthia Jorstad seconded. Approved to be tabled.

It was suggested that the statement be posted as a draft on the PALS web site to gather comments prior to the next discussion.

Action Plans discussion/update:

Discovery tool action plan. “Energetic” work group struggled with deciding what their focus was. Went through possible components and started prioritizing. Decided to survey the membership. They are exploring new tools. They have another meeting scheduled in May. Todd Digby has a proposal for $40,000 to MnSCU initiative for exploring discovery tool. Also $25,000 for proxy server software replacements.

Making User Group meetings more meaningful.

We need to work on those UG days. Should we be more focused on grouping people by type of library? Small libraries tend to need to have knowledge of multiple modules. It’s more about how UG is organized. Should the content be more “sharing” and “how do you do things,” learn from others, not “business”?

Centralize technical issues to the central office - Linda Richter & Becky Bell - To move forward we’ll need a group formed from the consortium. This has to do with moving tasks from libraries to the central office. What would those tasks be? What would it save individual libraries? What would it mean for staffing at PALS? A lot of good groundwork for this one has already been done. Should that group be created out of User Council? How do we find that group? We would need input from the libraries doing the day to day work? It seems more important for someone who understands the technical services end to be involved. It should primarily be people who work more closely with technical issues.

Could it start out with a kick-off survey at the user group meeting, then follow-up? Becky’s already put together a list of items. Probably could turn that into a survey – get consortium to rank/prioritize those options, as first steps. It would inform the fall meeting we’re talking about.

PALS will do a survey. Best to go out now and give them a deadline before the Sept. 10^th meeting. Should go out to each institution. We should be able to have a consensus – It will go out to DDC and their responsibility to go out to their staff: One response per institution.

Statement of benefit of membership – Orrin Ausen and Donna Davis. Emphasized our focus on increased participation in programs/services of current members and also on funding. We can’t come to consensus as to what services/product we can market to the outside. Have met 3-4 times with another meeting scheduled for next week.

IT/MnPALS Planning – Todd has had conversations with Linda Baer and Gary Langer and is participating in MnSCU IT meetings. More to come.

Other

Linda Richter was asked to speak about possible reorganizations and staffing changes within the PALS office. They are looking at organizational structure and how we might best move into the future with limited funds. How we make PALS income and expenses come out? They will be talking to the whole staff about structure and where we need to go. She mentioned the PALS Study group in 2005 that came together to look at the PALS Office. This group recommended to not make any staff changes until we migrated.

When asked about the level of significant staff reductions anticipated, Richter indicated there are no plans for significant staff reductions.

There was concern expressed that if there is less staff to do more things, how does this impact our action plans and strategic plan?

Linda indicated that Todd is open to comments.

On a somber note, we adjourned at 4:05 pm.

Respectfully submitted,

Brittney Goodman

Secretary

Consortium of MnPALS Libraries

Executive Committee Meeting

Thursday, April 26, 2007, 1:00 – 4:00

Room H195, Hennepin Technical College, Eden Prairie Campus

Sandra Fuhr, Chair

Secretary to be elected

AGENDA

1:00 1) Introductions, sign-in sheet

2) Amend/Adopt Agenda

3) Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (Todd Digby)

4) Approve minutes from February meeting

5) Approve minutes from Annual meeting

1:20 6) Elections

a. Chair-elect (will serve as chair in 2008-2009)

b. Secretary (1-year term)

c. One or two representatives to the User Council

7) Set meeting dates for the Executive Committee and the Annual Meeting

1:40 8) Director’s Report (Linda Richter)

a. Web Site

b. Maintenance Agreement

c. Budget update

1:55 9) Aleph Update (Becky Bell)

2:20 10) User Council Report (Kathleen Ashe)

a. User Group meetings

b. Other

2:30 Break

2:45 11) Annual Meeting

a. Review of how it went, preliminary plans for next year

b. Follow-up

3:20 12) Governance structure document update

(Michael Kirby, Jan Carey)

3:30 13) Strategic planning

a. Vision Statement

b. Update on action plans, setting priorities

c. 7 core activities

d. Continuing communication

4:00 14) Other/Adjourn

Executive Committee Meeting - April 2007