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MnPALS ConsortiumMembersVision StatementMission StatementGovernance and PoliciesDeans/Directors/CoordinatorsExecutive CommitteeUser GroupsUser CouncilTask ForcesFundingCalendar |
Executive Committee Meeting - September 2007Consortium of MnPALS Libraries Hennepin Technical College, Eden Prairie Campus http://www.hennepintech.edu/about/epcdir.htm Room H-195 Sandra Fuhr, Chair Brittney Goodman, Secretary DRAFT MINUTESPresent: Sandra Fuhr; Brittney Goodman, Todd Digby, Becky Ringwelski - for Bill DeJohn, Michael Kirby, Robbie LaFleur, Dan Mollner, Donna Davis, Paul Dahl, Julie Benolken, Cynthia Jorstad, Vi Bergquist, Sonja Eilertson, Orrin Ausen, Stephen Elfstrand, Bob Horton.The meeting began at 1 pm. Two motions of "thank you" for Becky Bell and for Linda Richter were approved as follows: Whereas Linda Richter accepted the leadership responsibilities of the MnSCU/PALS organization at a particularly difficult juncture in its history. **** Whereas Becky Bell ably supported the MnSCU/PALS libraries through not one but two Vendor Evaluation Team processes over many years. Dan Mollner, Michael Kirby seconded. Motions approved unanimously. Introductions Todd Digby introduced the new Director of MnPALS, Stephen Elfstrand. Amend/adopt agenda Todd has to leave early for another meeting so he will be moved up in the agenda. Approve April 26, 2007 Executive Committee meeting minutes Paul Dahl - moved; Vi Bergquist - second. Minutes approved. Director’s Report (Stephen Elfstrand) Elfstrand introduced himself. He is meeting with each of his staff individually and has had briefings on the hardware situation, upgrades, interlibrary loan issues, open source discovery tool, and finances. MnPALS Update Elfstrand is working on the relationship with Ex Libris. He has been to Southwest State, Mankato, MINITEX, and will be making other campus visits over the next year or two. He also wants to get support staff out to do site visits. He is interested in looking at how PALS can go beyond the ILS - Primo-like discovery tool, open source, and more. Our new server is up and stable. We will recondition the old one, and then will have twice the processing and three times the memory than the old server. We hope to be able to install Version 18 on the new server. There is a document about upgrade plans, and that will be discussed under User Council report. MN Dept of Administration/Management & Analysis Division Report - Todd Digby Mark Scipioni was brought in as a consultant from Minnesota Dept. of Administration. He has interviewed all of the staff at PALS, and constituents. It was a very open process and wasn’t guided by the system. Scipioni selected who he talked to. He looked at staffing and concerns of the consortium. Last week Scipioni he talked to the PALS staff as a group. He was able to draw out certain themes: PALS’ current structure isn’t serving the variety of libraries we have, from small to large libraries, training in a way where one size doesn’t fit all. In 2-3 weeks he will give us a written report. The report will be openly shared. It will be used as a guiding document and get feedback on his recommendations. PALS Centralization survey report - Michael Kirby #9 and #10 were the two items User Council decided were the highest priority. #9 - Customize XSL forms #10 - Upgrade forms customization from version to version Response rate to the survey was low. We might see a form of this survey come back with different questions. Dan Mollner moved to accept the recommendation for making items 9 and 10 a priority. Robbie LaFleur seconded. Motion passed. User Council Report - Michael Kirby Listservs - User Council moved that having a MnSCU PALS and an Aleph migration list serv was redundant. Could we combine a lot of those MnSCU PALS lists into one? User Council made a motion to consolidate Aleph e-mail lists and that motion passed. There was a motion for PALS to follow the draft plan "Version 18/Integrated ILL/ARC2 Draft Project Plan". Motion passed. This includes migrating in December/January 07/08. Be in production by January 13. Final conversion will be in late December. It was agreed by User Council that January and June are the best times to make changes to the ILS. Cataloging and Circulation training will be online one hour updates. Interlibrary loan will be closer to an all-day training. User Council recommended to implement booking as soon as possible after the version to Version 18. In User Council, they discussed the need to have better PALS communication about migration changes -- User Council discussed that member libraries need some more advanced warning - like a 2 week advanced warning that this change will occur. Ideas included a spreadsheet and differentiating between announcements of changes that will change the public view versus things that are behind the scenes. Also, it would be helpful summarize some of those items in the body of e-mail. Cynthia Jorstad moved to consolidate e-mail lists. Vi Bergquist seconded. Motion approved. The Executive Committee then discussed the possibility of implementing a PALS emergency list for highest priority messages. We also want to get people aware of conventions for subject headings to help with e-mail filtering. The Version 18 draft project plan document was introduced and discussed. Robert Horton moved. Robbie LaFleur seconded. Motion carries. Most significant change in Aleph version 18 is that ILL moves into the GUI client (can be used as a web client or an integrated/GUI client). Should be faster. Some functionality improvements. Becky Ringwelski reported that MINITEX has had some response time issues with Version 18. But the U of M Twin Cities response time is faster, less files. U of M Morris and U of M Crookston are faster too. Conversion went smoothly. What will be new for Version 19? Reserves will come into the client. Currently course reserves sits out in a web product and aren’t integrated. Minnesota State Colleges and Universities update - Todd Digby Todd is looking "beyond the ILS" -putting forward two initiatives. He is requesting $40,000 from MnSCU System office to help offset staffing and equipment costs from looking at discovery tool. Tied to that is $25,000 to help switch out the proxy server to the EasyProxy server. Total -- $65,000. He will know by September 25th whether this money comes through. He sees part of his role is to lobby for more money for PALS office. He will ask for at least 4 percent of an increase for PALS for next fiscal year (July 08), but will likely ask for more because we will be doing more. Todd is now involved with a Facilities initiative within MnSCU and is also the MnSCU lead on a work group looking at textbook issues. Break - 2:20 pm Personnel Issues and board of review - Paul Dahl Paul Dahl expressed concern over the lack of input/participation in the staffing decisions of the consortium, by the libraries in the consortium itself. Todd Digby expressed that retrospectively the lack of input from consortium was a timing issue, and that it was not handled as well as it should have been. Should we have an executive subgroup to pull in for staffing/administrative/personnel issues? A Staffing Advisory Board? Is this a policy issue or a communication issue? The contention was more about this being such a surprise. Keep us from being surprised. There were several motions, friendly amendments, and discussions about creating and implementing such an advisory group. The final motion, from Paul Dahl, was: Have the steering committee be involved as an advisory board to any staffing issues relating to services provided by the PALS office. Dan Mollner seconded. Motion failed. The group decided that the Executive Committee is already available for consultation as an advisory board to any staffing issues relating to services provided by the PALS office. Stephen Elfstrand said that he will keep the committee and consortium informed. There was consensus that Paul’s concerns were valid, but implementing another level of committee or oversight was not viewed as the solution at this time. Strategic Planning Taskforce Reports & Governance Structure Changes Marketing Task Force reports - Donna Davis Donna presented a document. The Task Force is working their way through the Marketing Workbook for Nonprofit Organizations. They feel a marketing plan is needed but they don’t feel qualified to draft it. This is an illustration of a problem of "where we are" with the whole strategic plan. How do we do the next piece - choose priorities? After migrating to version 18 - hopefully a time of stability - then we can likely have a window of opportunity to look at the discovery tool, etc., beyond the ILS, and build something to market. One small step might to be to enthusiastically endorse additional funds to help in investigation of more funds to investigate further services beyond the ILS. The group discussed the possibility of brainstorming discussions of "beyond the ILS" and "discovery tool" at User Groups. Stephen talked about the growing desire for open source for ILS in the region. Primo from Aleph is based on open source. Do we want to pay Ex Libris for this or to spend some time and money refine a noncommercial open source option. Ex Libris is looking at a successor to Voyageur and Aleph. There is a lot of expertise in this consortium. If we pooled that, we could come up with some good other services that we could offer. We need to give our new executive director time to get settled, get to know us, let the process work, let things begin. We would welcome discussion of a lot of these ideas in November. MINITEX Update - Becky Ringwelski Friday, November 2nd - MnLink User Group meeting -- keynote speaker is Joshua Ferrara - from Liveline - talking about support for Evergreen. He will probably have the whole morning to demo some open source products. In afternoon a demo of Primo. Information from MINITEX will go out about this. (This is the day after User Council and Executive Committee). University of Minnesota has an AFSCME strike going on right now. It has mostly impacted document delivery and delivery services. About 21 of the document delivery staff are out on strike. Everyone is pitching in and doing work they don’t normally do. Currently there are no backlogs. U of M Crookston, Morris, and Twin Cities are up on Aleph Version 18 and the GUI Interlibrary Loan. Other: Stephen Elfstrand demoed the discovery tool that Al Rykhus at PALS has been working with (based on PRIMO open source). He will also demo this at User Group. By consensus we agreed that Stephen will pursue the development/exploration of open source. Meeting adjourned at 3:55 pm. Reminder - upcoming Executive Committee meetings:
Respectfully submitted, Brittney Goodman Secretary AGENDA
1:00 1) Introductions, sign-in sheet 2) Amend/Adopt Agenda 3) Approve minutes from April meeting http://www.mnpals.org/sections/MnPALS_Governance_EC_Apr07.html 4) Director’s Report (Stephan Elfstrand) · MnPALS update · MN Department of Administration / Management & Analysis Division Report · PALS Centralization survey update 5) User Council Report (Kathleen Ashe) 6) Personnel Issues & board of review (Paul Dahl) 7) Strategic Planning taskforce reports · Marketing, others? · What are the next steps? 8) Governance structure changes http://www.mnpals.org/sections/Consortium_Gov_Structure_Mar07Dr.html 9) Minnesota State Colleges and Universities update (Todd Digby) 10) MINITEX (William DeJohn) 4:00 11) Other/Adjourn Next Meetings |
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