Executive Committee Report:
Spring 2008 User Groups

Highlights

Executive Committee has had a great deal of discussion over the past several months concerning member’s needs, our direction, and future of the consortium, but this time under some guidance of the Strategic Plan developed in December 2006.

The emphasis of the Executive Committee this past year has been to continue to monitor and evaluate the action plans and strategies identified by the Strategic Plan performed by five (5) task forces:

Discovery Tool - Implement a Discovery Tool
Effective Member Participation - Design a more productive & appealing user group format to renew energy among attendees; identify topics to be explored by task-focused groups; develop skills identification tools to do effective collaborative mentoring among members through a Forum & Wiki
Centralize Technical issues to PALS office - Implement effective use of resources. Survey results: Customize XSL forms and upgrade XSL forms customization from version to version
Statement of Benefit of Membership - Marketing & Assessment
IT-MnPALS Planning Integration - Strategic positioning of MnPALS to improve relationship with MnSCU IT

This is the second year we’ve held electronic voting for Exec. Cmte. members. I want to thank those people that served on the nominating cmte. Dan Mollner, cmte. chair, David Barton, Julie Benolken, Michael Kirby, Donna Davis, Robert Horton, & Maureen Guentzel. We have a list of nominees to ratify at our May 1st meeting. The Executive committee is always looking for more participation from the membership. Please consider volunteering. It’s the only way we can make the consortium even better through individual talents, ideas, and leadership.

Approved the 2007-2008 fees and dues proposed by the PALS office.
Our new PALS Executive Director, Stephen Elfstrand, began in August
Many active task forces - Access, Indexing, Authorities, Reports
Research & Development of SOLR - beta release Discovery Tool - Al Rykhus
Fall & Spring User Group meetings; 1st Cataloging UG and Reference UG work days - huge success
MnPALS Exec. Director held a Private Colleges DDC Summit to listen to their needs and discuss the consortium’s future
Old Aleph Migration mailing lists deactivated and New MnPALS mailing lists - MnPALS Announce, MnPALS Discuss implemented
Considerable discussion of open source initiatives such as discovery & display, ILS, link resolver,

2007/2008 Passed Motions/Recommendations History

April 26, 2007

Emphasis of the PALS staff (until September 2007) should be to improve the functionality of Aleph version 17. Later in the year, as we get a better idea of costs/benefits, we could make a better recommendation about moving to version 18 as a step to the inevitable move to version 19. Not prepare training for version 18, but figure out data conversion/tables.

September 10, 2007

Accept recommendation of PALS Centralization Survey report to make item nine (9), customization of XSL forms and item ten (10) upgrade XSL forms customization from version to version.

November 1, 2007

None

February 7, 2008

Drop any consideration of going with ARC2 as a reporting tool.
MnPALS staff will focus available resources to consortium-wide activities and innovative services such as version 18 features, open source initiatives, and improvements to user interfaces. MnPALS will not move towards the implementation of Aleph version 19 unless Executive Committee directs.
Accept PALS training fees changes of group training for multiple libraries; includes workshops, retraining and refresher classes. Minimum of five (5) attendees. Charges of $100 per person for one (1) day, $150 for two (2) days. Web training available upon request for some sessions; charge to be determined.