I-Share User's Group Meeting: March 1, 2012

Members Present: Megan Bernal, Howard Carter, Mary Case, Belinda Cheek, Cindy Fuller, Tom Goetz, Nancy Laverdiere, Carlos Melian, Ted Schwitzner

Members Absent: none

CARLI Staff present: Lorna Engels, Kris Hammerstrand, Cathy Salika, Susan Singleton

The January 18, 2012 meeting minutes were approved with minor formatting corrections.

CARLI Staff updates

S. Singleton reported on the following items:

• The Board has approved the applications of 4 libraries seeking membership in I-Share. The 4 new members are
  • Morton College
  • Richland Community College
  • Southeastern Illinois College
  • Southwestern Illinois College

Susan and Kris will be making preliminary visits to each site in March and April.

• The CARLI Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) project has been launched. During the first 15 days, 53 books were requested at a cost of approximately $2700. These requests came from patrons at 24 different member libraries. The process of setting up this program has been a very good learning experience for the CARLI staff, and they hope to be able to use what they have learned to better assist member libraries who wish to launch their own PDA program.
• The state legislature has passed legislation that will ease the state purchasing rules for some state agencies, and it appears that library materials purchases have been included in this legislation. CARLI staff are awaiting details for the implementation of this legislation, but this appears to be very good news for the consortium as well as for member libraries that must follow state purchasing rules. Changes in this area would be beneficial for a hoped for e-book PDA project as well.
• Five CARLI staff members met with 4 e-book vendors at the ALA Midwinter meeting. The 4 venders were EBL, EBSCO, Ingram and YBP. Staff found these meetings to be very helpful, especially in regard to potential consortial e-book PDA projects. Staff are optimistic that they will be able to present a proposal to the Board about an e-book PDA project at some point.
• CARLI staff reiterated their involvement in member library discovery tool purchases. CARLI staff help facilitate these projects by making access to data available, as appropriate. However, the project itself is between the member library and the vendor, not between CARLI and the vendor.
• The ILDS delivery service recently had a delivery vehicle stolen. The vehicle did have some member library materials in it. The manifest system established by CARLI was successful in identifying which libraries had materials in the vehicle. Those libraries have been contacted, and they will be reimbursed for any lost materials.

K. Hammerstrand reported on the following items:

• Registration for the Discovery Forum to be held in Oak Brook on March 15 has been closed, as the room capacity has been reached. CARLI staff are putting names on a wait list at this time. Registrants will be contacted and encouraged to notify staff if they will no longer be able to attend.
• It was again emphasized that the Discovery Forum is being offered only as an information gathering service for member libraries. CARLI has no plans to purchase a discovery system for the consortium. It was also noted that CARLI puts a good deal of time and effort into open source systems, such as VUFind and Xc, so that member libraries who cannot afford commercial systems on their own have free, open sources options available to them.
• CARLI staff encouraged the IUG members who will be presenting at ELUNA to consider a statement in the early part of their program indicating that they are speaking as member libraries and not officially representing the consortium. It was noted by all that the program is not intended to “sell” our, or any, consortium. The members making the presentation are hoping to ease the move to cloud based environments for some libraries.

Liaison reports from IUG functional teams

• Acquisitions and Serials: A joint forum with I-CAT is being planned for May 4 at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Topics will revolve around the theme of “The Life Cycle of an e-book.” There will also be an open house at Eastern Illinois University on May 17. More information will follow on this.
• Cataloging: Their work has also been focused on the joint forum being planned for May 4.
• Instruction: A forum is being planned for June 8 at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. The theme of this forum will be “"Library Instruction for a Diverse Student Population.” Various portions of the day will focus on multicultural students and/or international students.
• OPAC: OPAC team has met regularly via conference call. They have recently assisted Paige Weston with changes to series displays in VUFind. The group also read and responded to a draft article written by a few librarians and Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. In particular, the article expressed an interest in seeing the facets that currently display on the right side of the VUFind result screen moved to the left side of the screen. Although some feel this would be a desirable change, this is not something that can be done in VUFind. Hopefully this issue will be able to be addressed in Xc..
• Resource Sharing: The big news for this group is that their long-time CARLI staff liaison, Mel Farrell, will be retiring as of July 1, 2012. The group is also busy planning a forum for April 25 at Illinois Wesleyan in Normal. The theme of the forum is “Resource Sharing 101,” and much of the program will focus on best practices. It was suggested by some of the IUG members that reminding member libraries how to find and deal with items that have been “in transit” for a long time would be a beneficial addition to this forum.

CARLI staff were asked if there are any specific plans for the next Voyager upgrade. Two main activities will affect the timing of the next upgrade. First, the move of servers from Chicago to Urbana has been a huge undertaking for systems staff. Second, bringing new member libraries online will greatly affect this timing. Finally, the next upgrade (most likely to Voyager 8) will be a major upgrade and will require much time for planning and implementation. Therefore, there will not be an upgrade during summer of 2012. The next window of opportunity will most likely be summer of 2013.

IUG Webinar

Carlos distributed a draft schedule of topics to cover during the Webinar. In general, it was agreed that the focus of this forum needs to be an IUG update, and not an overall CARLI update. What is IUG, how are we serving the I-Share membership, encouraging the membership to share with IUG issues that they would like us to discuss, etc. should be the focus of the event. After discussion, several changes to the draft agenda were made. Carlos agreed to make the changes and distribute a new draft via email for further comment. It was agreed that the following IUG members would work on draft content for agenda items:

• Greetings and Introduction – Tom
• I-Share Systems and Future Options – Carlos and Ted
• I-Share/Voyager Information – Nancy and Ted
• IUG and I-Share Team Activities – Howard and Belinda

Draft content needs to be completed and distributed by March 31^st. The group will hold a “practice run” of the Webinar on April 5^th at 10:00 am. The live Webinar will be held on April 13^th from 10:00-11:30am. Lorna will work on registration and an announcement for the I-Share community.

Several members of the group indicated that a Liaison Forum should be considered for next year. Given 4 new member libraries joining soon, it was felt that this would be an important time to make sure all liaisons are aware of their responsibilities and resources available to them.

ELUNA presentation

Three IUG members will be making the presentation at Eluna: Ted, Carlos and Tom. Discussion revolved around general issues they might wish to consider as they plan the presentation. One suggestion was that staff from the 4 new member libraries might have some perspective to share on this topic. What considerations have they gone through as they proposed to join a consortium, what concerns have they had about loss of autonomy, etc. It was agreed that the 3 presenters could take over planning at this point and contact the full group if further input is needed.

A question has come from the Instruction team regarding their charge. They have been offering programs that have been instruction related and well received, but many recent events have not been I-Share specific. Is this a problem? Some questions/discussion that arose included:

• Should this be a CARLI group, rather than an IUG team?
• Is this only an issue right now because of the stability of our I-Share systems for the past few years? What happens if this becomes a CARLI group and then I-Share changes systems? Would IUG still be able to call on this group to assist with instruction issues related to a “new” I-Share?
• How is the scope of this team different from the scope of the CARLI Public Services Working Group?

This issue is not unique just to the Instruction team. For instance, cataloging has had similar issues at varying times. However, it was noted that the percentage of Instruction work that is non-I-Share is probably higher (up to 75%) at this time. Further discussion of this issues is needed at some level. At this time, it was agreed that Cindy and Mary would explore this issue with the Board during the upcoming strategic planning process. Further discussion will follow, as appropriate and directed by the Board.

A question was raised about UB lending of media resources. How many libraries will lend media via UB, and how many will not? Do the libraries that lend via UB lend all types of media materials? What holds so many libraries back from sharing their media resources via UB? Does IUG want to “promote” media lending by encouraging libraries to re-examine their policies? It was agreed that further study and discussion of this topic is needed. Cathy Salika will send out some data to IUG members to consider as we begin this discussion.

Respectfully submitted,
Belinda Cheek