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CARLI Board of Directors Minutes
Meeting 8

December 16, 2005

Summary of Actions Taken

Members Present: Scott Drone-Silvers (Lake Land College) -by phone, Linda Morrissett (DePaul University), Mary Munroe (Northern Illinois University), Lynn Murphy (Illinois Board of Higher Education), Dave Stewart (University of Illinois), Ellen Sutton (College of DuPage); Jay Starratt (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Carla Tracy (Augustana College), Kathy Walsh (National Louis University) – by phone at 1:20 p.m., Eric Welch (Highland Community College) - by phone

Members Absent: David Carlson (Southern Illinois University Carbondale); Anne Craig (Illinois State Library); Sylvia Jenkins (Moraine Valley Community College), Paula Kaufman (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Anna Maria Watkin (Parkland College)

Guests Present: Kathy Bloomberg (Illinois State Library), Barbara Galik (Bradley University)

CARLI Staff Present: Elizabeth Clarage, Tom Dorst, Kristine Hammerstrand, Bernie Sloan (by phone), Connie Walsh

Mary Munroe called the meeting to order at 10:30.

On behalf of the Board of Directors, Mary Munroe made a presentation to Dave Stewart in appreciation of his service to the Illinois academic library community and his efforts to foster the creation of CARLI.

Minutes of meeting 7

Jay Starratt moved and Carla Tracy seconded the approval of the minutes of Meeting 7, November 18, 2005. Motion passed.

Additions/changes to the agenda
The Public Relations Committee report was moved up in the agenda to accommodate, the chair of the committee, Barbara Galik’s, participation in the discussion.

I-Share assessments will be added to new business.

Committee Reports

Executive Committee
The Executive Committee met by conference call and developed the agenda for the Board meeting.

Public Relations Committee
A report of the Public Relations Committee’s December 9, 2005 meeting was submitted to the Board. The meeting was a brainstorming session on the IACRL Pre-conference.
Barbara Galik summarized the report and listed the goals of the Pre-conference as an opportunity to introduce Susan Singleton and provide interactive forums for the membership to give input. Susan Singleton will be the keynote speaker. The Board emphasized that the focus should be on CARLI programs and services. These sessions should include information on CARLI’s existing services and potential new initiatives. The Pre-conference would also provide an opportunity to present the proposed membership structure and receive feedback. Mary Munroe noted that Susan Singleton would like to be involved in the planning for the Pre-conference.

ILA/IACRL will handle the registration for the Pre-conference. Barbara Galik will confirm that ILA/IACRL will provide name tags for the participants. The committee stated that a commemorative gift will be given to all participants.

Collections Working Group
A written report was submitted by the working group; however, several attachments were accidentally not forwarded. These will be sent to Board members. The draft CARLI response to Project COUNTER will be sent to the Board for approval. The Board determined that David Stewart should sign the letter.

A workshop on the OCLC Collections Analysis product was held yesterday in Chicago. There were 25 participants. There will be another OCLC Collection Analysis workshop in the Chicago metro area. A workshop will also be held at Illinois State University on January 26. After the workshop, the group will determine if another session is needed downstate perhaps further south.

The CARLI Bibliographers’ meeting is being planned. The date of February 9, 2006 was selected due to a conflict on February 10 with a scheduled IUAG meeting. Board members expressed their opinion that there would be little overlap between the two groups and that February 10th would be the better date to hold the meeting. The group will investigate having the meeting on the 10th.

The first draft of the Digital Collections Collection Policy Statement is completed and will be forwarded to Board members for comment. Comments should be sent to Elizabeth Clarage by January 9, 2006. A final draft will be proposed to the board at its January meeting.

E-Resources Working Group
A written report was submitted by the working group. The group has a scheduled monthly conference call. The group reviewed the fall selection cycle. The fall 2005 selection period included some databases that transitioned from ICCMP to CARLI. The working group talked about the upcoming spring 2006 selection cycle and recommended that it open to participating institutions earlier than it has previously. The staff will work to have the spring selection cycle available in March 2006.

The group noted that it prefers using the CARLI Collections and Content Group (CCG) listserv as the mechanism to provide CARLI institutions a forum to discuss electronic resources. General announcements about electronic resource offers and selection periods will still be sent to the main CARLI Announce listserv to ensure that all institutions receive these announcements as announce includes members from all CARLI institutions.

The committee made a motion to modify its charge. Motion was approved.

Scott Drone Silvers asked for clarification on the announcement for the interest survey for the spring selection cycle. Tom Dorst answered that if an institution did not select to see pricing for a database during the spring selection cycle, that pricing can still be provided if the institution contacts CARLI staff to indicate that they are now interested in a database. Institutions can contact the CARLI staff on this issue at any time – including during the selection period.

Delivery Task Force
Jay Starratt reported that there was not a quorum at their first meeting. The group has discussed what other consortia are currently doing for delivery. The task force hopes to provide possible scenarios and solutions and to have a report complete in January 2006.

Digital Library Implementation Task Force
Fourteen CARLI staff participated in training from DiMeMa on CONTENTdm earlier in December. Another session will be provided by DiMeMa. These training sessions were included in the contract for the purchase of the product.

The Saskia images should be available sometime in spring 2006. The technical work of providing access to the Saskia images is proceeding. CARLI will most likely load the metadata for the Saskia images in VRA (Visual Resource Association) 3.0 standard. VRA version 4.0 is in draft form but will not be finalized by the date that the images and metadata will be provided to the consortium. The images and metadata from Saskia will be batch loaded by CARLI staff. Access will be made available to known CARLI IP domains and to off campus users that can be authenticated by various means including local proxy servers.

Carla Tracy questioned the staff if they thought more bandwidth would be needed locally on campus to view the images. Kris Hammerstrand answered that Brandon Gant, CARLI’s network and server manager, believes that network bandwidth will not be a problem for libraries served by the Illinois Century Network. Elizabeth Clarage noted that DiMeMa is developing a mechanism to use the images offline for PowerPoint presentations.

Eric Welch talked about resources that were discussed at a MICTA meeting he attended. MICTA is an organization that relates to procurement of educational technology services. Consortial buying through MICTA includes course management software. Another product discussed was Harvest Road. This product allows institutions to share digital learning objects. Some of these products are specifically targeted to community colleges.

Finance Committee
Written reports were submitted to the Board. The University of Illinois has included the moneys from the former ICCMP budget in its draft appropriation bill. The IBHE should present a proposed budget on February 7, 2006. The Governor gives his state budget address on February 15. The Illinois State General Assembly is scheduled to adjourn by April 7. CARLI prepared a fact sheet for the Governor’s budget office and the General Assembly.

The second report included in the packets is a summary report on the national and Illinois economies. Both show some positive signs of recovery. There are some concerns on consumer spending due to higher gasoline prices. Consumer sentiment is a good portion of the flash index for the state economy. General fund transactions are keeping up but some expenditures are growing more than expected.

CARLI incorporates this economic information into its five year budget plans. Dave Stewart encouraged the Board to continue to do so in the future as well as maintaining reserves to cover budget reductions. CARLI is currently in very sound financial shape. Connie Walsh will do a midyear review in the next few weeks.

Future Vision Task Force
No report. The group has completed its work. The Board thanks the members of this group for its work and discharges the task force.

Working groups resulting from this task force are in the process of being formed.

IUAG
A written report was submitted to the Board. The group met last week. Their subcommittee, the WebVoyage Usability Study Task Force, has completed conducting its recent usability studies on the Voyager public catalog, WebVoyage. IUAG believes that CARLI would benefit from more usability studies. Mary Munroe suggested an assessment group rather than user studies group.

An acquisitions and serials forum was held on November 29. Training has continued into December to instruct libraries how to use the Camtasia product for user instruction materials..

A public services forum will be held on February 24. There will be two other forums in the spring.

Membership Committee
Susan Singleton requested that the group postpone its meeting so that she could participate. The next meeting of the committee will be January 25, 2006.

Personnel Committee
No report.

User Group Committee
A written report was submitted to the Board. The User Group Committee met on December 14. They will meet again in January. As charged by the Board, the group will be making a recommendation in January on the future of user groups within CARLI.

Preservation Working Group
Mary Munroe will distribute the new charge and ask for feedback by early January.

Paula Kaufman has agreed to be the Board liaison.

Other Committees or Task Forces

Kathy Bloomberg raised the issue of CARLI continuing education through the state’s library schools. There was general concern from the Board on the number of groups being created. The Board decided that it should wait until Susan Singleton arrives to move forward on this issue.

Staff Reports
Dave Stewart:
Illinois library legislative day is March 1, 2006. There will be a rally at noon in front of the Capital. The day is designed to draw as many people as possible to Springfield including librarians and trustees. It is desirable for CARLI to produce a fact sheet on academic libraries and issues for academic libraries.

The PATRIOT Act has passed in the U.S. House. The Senate may modify. The hoped for modifications may not pass. There is a threat of a filibuster by Senator Feingold of Wisconsin. The current provisions of the PATRIOT Act expire on December 31, 2005. The Executive Branch and the Justice Department are pushing to have it renewed.

CALEA legislation to allow electronic eavesdropping on academic networks is a great concern for the academic community due to civil liberties issues as well as technical issues. It is an unfunded mandate. A fall back position to this legislation is to make the requirements to be not every switch at an institution but only at the institution’s main connection to the Internet.

The survey on library identification numbers was sent to I-Share members. After all reply, CARLI staff will work directly with libraries that have issues to craft approaches that best suit each library’s situation.

Kris Hammerstrand
Information was provided to the Board on the planned summer 2006 Voyager upgrade.
Included in the meeting packet is a grid explaining the options for which upgrade may be selected and the corresponding timetable. I-Share is currently running version 2001.2. The consortium needs to move beyond this version as it is a non-supported release. To upgrade beyond v. 2001.2, all MARC records in I-Share must be rewritten to the Unicode character set and reindexed. This is a large undertaking that must be done to support any later version of Voyager. The best estimate of the staff is that the entire process could take up to two weeks. During the upgrade, library staff will not be able to make changes to the databases such as adding, changing or deleting records. Circulation will be done through the Voyager offline circulation function. CARLI staff will provide static versions of the 65 local Voyager databases for public access, but the public catalog will not support requests or renewals. Because of the interrelationships between the 65 CARLI databases, all I-Share libraries must be upgraded in one timeframe The CARLI staff acknowledged that some schools will be seriously inconvenienced and hope to keep this to a minimum by scheduling the upgrade at a time when most of the I-Share libraries’ are between their spring and summer semester. The Memorial Day weekend provides a closed date for most libraries and is between many institutions’ spring and summer terms. The staff also has looked at the July 4 timeframe. Some Board members expressed opinions that this would be worse than Memorial Day due to fiscal year closings. The Board acknowledged that there is in fact no good time for this project.

Linda Morrissett raised concerns that the proposed timetable will be a large problem for institutions on a quarter system. The proposed timing will be a busy time for their institutions.

Kris Hammerstrand noted that because this upgrade is unique in that it requires that all MARC data be rewritten and reindexed as well as the software updated, there will not be another upgrade of this magnitude and duration in the foreseeable future. Most upgrades are typically weekend projects.

CARLI staff has also been informing libraries for several months about the need to replace Windows NT/98 operating systems on staff computers as all newer versions of the Voyager clients will not run on these operating systems. These machines should be upgraded to Windows 2000 or XP.

Old Business
ICOLC Endorsements
Jay Starratt made a motion to accept Bernie Sloan’s recommendations included in his summary document, “ICOLC Endorsements by CARLI Board.” The Board approved the motion.

New Business
I-Share Assessments for FY2008 need to be developed. Staff recommended that a representative group of I-Share libraries do this work and report to the Finance Committee. The Board agreed that the Finance Committee should appoint a subcommittee and submit its recommendations to the Finance Committee, and then to the Board.

Carla Tracy brought up the issue of what organizations should CARLI be a member, for example, SPARC. A general discussion ensued; however, no decisions were made.

The Board also discussed what other endeavors the consortium might speak to on behalf of its members, for example, the state Procurement board. No decisions were made.

The meeting was adjourned at 1:25 p.m.
Next meeting: January 27, 2006 at Parkland College, Champaign