CARLI Board Minutes: June 12, 2020

Members attending: Fred Barnhart (Northern Illinois University), Spencer Brayton (Waubonsee Community College), Anne Craig (CARLI), Rebecca Donald (Trinity International University), Jeff Douglas (Knox College), Cindy Fuller (Millikin University), Karen Janke (Erickson Institute), Jacob Jeremiah (Oakton Community College), Tammy Kuhn-Schnell (Lincoln Land Community College), Taran Ley (Southern Illinois University School of Medicine), Greg McCormick (Illinois State Library), Pattie Piotrowski (University of Illinois at Springfield), John Pollitz (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) Frances Whaley (Kishwaukee College)

Guests: Rob Morrison (National Louis University), Matt Ostercamp (North Park University), Sharon Silverman (City Colleges of Chicago), Sarah Zehr (University of Illinois System)

Staff attending: Margaret Chambers, Elizabeth Clarage, Diane Day, Gordon Fellows, Kristine Hammerstrand, Jenny Taylor

Absent: John Small (North Central College)

Decisions

• Minutes of the March 6 and May 4, 2020, Board meetings were approved prior to the meeting.
• The Board thanked outgoing members Jeff Douglas (Knox College), Cindy Fuller (Millikin University), and John Small (North Central College) for their service to the Board. The June 12 meeting was their final Board meeting.
• Rebecca Donald (Trinity International University) was selected as the 2020–2021 Vice-chair/Chair-elect. 
• Appointments to Board Committees is complete. Board committee members are:
  • Finance: Karen Janke, Fred Barnhart, Jacob Jeremiah
  • Personnel: Matt Ostercamp, John Pollitz, Frances Whaley
  • Program Planning: Rebecca Donald, Pattie Piotrowski, and Spencer Brayton
• The Board approved the proposal to stop fines accrued during COVID-19 closures. CARLI staff will extend due dates in Alma for every I-Share library for all items with a due date between January 1, 2020, and September 30, 2020. These items will be assigned a new due date of October 1, 2020. 
• The Board approved a recommendation from CARLI staff to put forward two proposals for public comment. Comments will be reviewed and considered at the September 2020 Board meeting. The proposals are:
  • The Board moves to end for all I-Share Members all fining for overdue materials by January 1, 2021, and similarly encourage non-I-Share CARLI Governing Members to end fining for overdue materials.
  • The Board moves to eliminate for all I-Share Members all processing fees for overdue and lost materials by January 1, 2021, and similarly encourage non-I-Share CARLI Governing Members to eliminate all processing fees for overdue and lost materials. 
• The Board approved the revisions to the E-Resources Licensing Principles.
• The meeting was adjourned at 12:35 p.m.

Announcements

• The University of Illinois expects a flat budget for FY21, with extremely limited hiring. Some budget reductions may be possible mid-year as the revenue effects of COVID-19 become clear.
• University of Illinois System staff will begin returning to work in mid-August, assuming Illinois conditions continue to improve.
• Results of the 2020 Board election were announced. The newly elected members who will serve three-year terms (July 1, 2020–June 30, 2023) are: Jacob Jeremiah (Oakton Community College), Taran Ley (Southern Illinois University School of Medicine), and Matthew Ostercamp (North Park University). Directors appointed to one-year terms are: Fred Barnhart (Northern Illinois University), Sharon Silverman (City Colleges of Chicago), Rob Morrison (National Louis University).
• The Board meeting dates for 2020–2021 will be September 18, 2020; December 4, 2020; March 5, 2021; and June 11, 2021. 
• CARLI will hold a virtual Career Fair in partnership with the iSchool at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The event will be held October 7. 
• CARLI will hold a ticketed reception to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of resource sharing among Illinois academic libraries. The reception will be held on November 12, at the I-Hotel in Champaign. Victoria Turner, this year’s CARLI scholarship recipient, and Lydia Morrow-Ruetten (who fully funded this year’s scholarship) will both speak at the event.
• CARLI is continuing to work closely with I-Share libraries and Ex Libris on the Alma Primo VE Full Test and Implementation Phase. The project is on schedule and we still anticipate meeting our scheduled “go live” date of June 24, 2020. Work completed since the report to the Board in March 2020:
  • One more two-day Alma training session was held: at the Big Ten Conference Center in March. Two more sessions were planned for March and May but were cancelled due to COVID-19 closures. Overall, 347 people from 88 of the 91 I-Share institutions attended in-person Alma trainings. 
  • All but 6 I-Share libraries have staff that have completed Alma certification training (i.e., the training Ex Libris requires an institution to complete before they can adjust their Alma configuration settings.) CARLI staff will continue to perform configuration changes for these sites in Alma and Primo VE.
  • Libraries made any required changes to their Alma migration forms by the April 1 deadline and suspended work on their Alma test environment configuration settings before that access was suspended on May 1.
  • The Voyager “Tech Freeze” began May 1, after which date library staff were no longer able to add/change/or delete cataloging, acquisitions, or serials data in Voyager.
  • We had planned to keep Universal Borrowing operating until June 11, but it was turned off on March 16 due to the COVID-19 closures including the suspension of ILDS service.
  • Circulation activity can continue in Voyager until June 19 (i.e., through June 18) but most I-Share libraries remain closed due to COVID-19. A few I-Share libraries have supported some local requesting (remote request by their own patrons) during the closures.
  • CARLI staff created a new set of union catalog data to provide to Ex Libris for the Alma Network Zone migration. The new data eliminate any suppressed bibs and bibs without holdings and eliminated many bibs of lower quality.
  • CARLI staff copied all Voyager data (bibs, holdings, patrons, circ status) for all I-Share institutions and provided it to Ex Libris for loading into Alma. All but 25 I-Share institutions are also migrating some acquisitions and/or serials data to Alma. Ex Libris expects to complete loading these data into Alma during the week of June 15.
  • CARLI exported and provided SFX data from 39 institutions to Ex Libris for the migration and 40 institutions provided data from EBSCO, 360, or OCLC link resolvers for the migration.
  • CARLI staff have been continuing to work with institutions that want to use the process of synchronizing user information between campus student information systems and Alma. This process is referred to as “SIS” (student information systems).
  • CARLI staff have been working with library staff, the EBSCO OpenAthens project team and Ex Libris staff on getting authentication setup for the I-Share libraries. At this writing, 64 I-Share institutions have partially or completely set up OpenAthens, including 6 that will upload user data to OpenAthens as they did not have an institutional identity service to work with. Also, 24 institutions have set up authentication Alma integrations directly with their campus systems which include LDAP, CAS, Shibboleth, ADFS, and Azure. One site, ALP, is not implementing authentication as they do not allow any access to their e-resources outside of their physical building. These authentication implementations will allow users from these sites to be able to sign in to Alma and Primo VE using their standard institutional credentials, i.e., via “single signon”. This work has been complicated by institutions not typically having stored their campus signon credentials in Voyager, requiring many sites to need to either add data elements into Voyager patron records, or plan to do a user update to bring these data elements into Alma via the SIS process at the time we go live on Alma.
  • CARLI has continued to hold weekly open “office hours” calls to discuss Alma and Primo VE topics and take questions about the products and the migration process. These are held on Thursday afternoons at 2pm and recordings of the sessions are made available on the CARLI website. These calls have been very well attended, often attracting over 160 participants.
  • CARLI staff continue to have weekly planning calls with Ex Libris staff each Tuesday and we anticipate this continuing through the summer after go-live.
  • Ex Libris is on schedule to deliver our real production Alma environments for our review beginning on June 17. I-Share libraries will need to review and formally accept their Alma data migrations before they can go live on Alma. These reviews will occur in two rounds: bibliographic data must be reviewed and accepted by noon on Friday June 19, and fulfilment data must be reviewed and accepted by 5pm on Tuesday, June 23. I-Share libraries’ Alma Primo VE contacts and directors were sent an email about this process on June 9. Any I-Share library that would not have staff available to do this review work, were asked to inform CARLI of this by June 12. If an institution did not provide a formal acceptance (or report a major problem preventing acceptance) to CARLI by the deadlines above, the data was declared accepted to Ex Libris.
• With the COVID-19 closures and ILDS suspension of delivery service, we do not currently know when we will be able to turn on the Alma Automated Fulfillment Network (AFN, the Alma resource sharing equivalent of Voyager’s Universal Borrowing). We will send news about our AFN launch when we are able to schedule it.
• CARLI has received responses to the letter sent to EBSCO and Ex Libris. Each have requested movement/change from the other before moving forward. CARLI expects to revisit this issue with the initial working group (Paula Dempsey, UIC; Bill Mischo, UIUC; David Stern, Saint Xavier) in order to examine direction for the future. 
• CARLI has received very positive response to the “Importance of the Director” statement. Several other consortia have asked to use the statement within their own organizations.
• The FY21 Selection Cycle closed with an overall subscription count decrease of 12.9%, which is a spending decrease of less than 1%. A few libraries had not yet made selections due to budget uncertainties.  
• CARLI E-Resources staff devoted significant time this spring negotiating various discounts with vendors on behalf of CARLI members because of COVID-19 uncertainty. 
• At their September 2020 meeting the Board will assemble a task force to begin a lengthy and complex review of cost factors and cost sharing related to Alma in order to recalculate I-Share Assessments beginning in FY25. 
• Board committee liaison assignments are complete. The liaisons are: 
  • Collection Management Committee: Taran Ley
  • Commercial Products Committee: Frances Whaley
  • Created Content Committee: John Pollitz
  • Instruction Committee: Rebecca Donald
  • OER Committee: Karen Janke and Jacob Jeremiah
  • Preservation Committee: Pattie Piotrowski and Fred Barnhart
  • Public Services Committee: Spencer Brayton and Rob Morrison
  • Resource Sharing Committee Matt Ostercamp and Sharon Silverman
  • Technical Services: Tammy Kuhn-Schnell
• CARLI has completed an agreement with Wiley Online Books to provide unlimited access from July 2020–June 2021 to 3000+ Wiley ebooks available on their online platform with the publication dates of 2017+ with monthly updates throughout the access period. CARLI staff is working to provide access to these materials for I-Share libraries via Alma/Primo VE. CARLI is awaiting final signatures for a similar agreement with Oxford University Press to provide access to all Oxford University Press ebooks on their Oxford Scholarship Online platform with publication dates of 2018+ with monthly updates throughout the access period, plus all content published on their platform for 18 Partner Presses. We hope to have more information to announce soon. CARLI will purchase E-books in July 2021 based upon consortial use. 
• ILDS vendors RAILS and IHLS, are preparing to restart delivery. Vendors are currently working with libraries to coordinate the return of items that have been held in the delivery hubs since March. Both vendors are expected to return to full delivery by July 6 to those libraries that request it. Questions regarding individual delivery for ILDS stops should be directed to the appropriate vendor. 
• CARLI has been working with the University of Illinois library to extend their Institutional Repository solution to CARLI members in order to establish a multi-tenant IR. CARLI staff have met with the UIUC Library staff and UI System Office Legal about the agreements that would need to be in place prior to beginning this project. Next steps include reaching consensus on the terms and building a timeline for pilot and kickoff.
• In light of the pandemic, CARLI put on hold the work of a Shared Storage Investigative Task Force. The task force will begin its work in the new calendar year, moving its timeline forward about six months to report at the June 2021 Board meeting.
• CARLI Counts, the IMLS Laura Bush 21^st Century Librarian grant program, has moved to Zoom for its scheduled July in-person meeting. Project staff have added one in-person meeting, Nov. 12, 2020, to the Cohort’s calendar. Grant support for this day-long meeting will allow participants to attend the CARLI Anniversary Celebration in the evening. Cohort members will make their poster presentations the next day, Nov. 13, at the CARLI Annual Meeting. 
• CARLI Senior Director Anne Craig gave her FY21 Budget Presentation to the University System Office on May 7 by Zoom. CARLI was credited for its great work and informed that the PowerPoint presented to the Illinois General Assembly included a slide about CARLI as an example of the work of the System in statewide higher education.
• Two applications were received for CARLI FY21 Research Funding, due May 15, 2020. The first, from Rebecca Donald, Trinity International University, was awarded immediately after review by the Board Committee (Karen Janke and Jacob Jeremiah). The other application was returned to the author seeking additional information prior to awarding funding.
• The Program Planning Committee is working with Illinois Wesleyan University’s Stephanie Davis-Kahl on a proposal to develop an undergraduate research program that would showcase and reveal best practices of CARLI member libraries. 
• The CARLI Open Educational Resources Task Force will hold Train-the-Trainer Workshops virtually as a series of webinars with both synchronous and asynchronous components. OER Faculty Workshops will also be held virtually with input and support from the CARLI members. 

Tasks Assigned

• CARLI will hold an All Committees Webinar to kick off FY21 in a coordinated manner and to discuss the review of their work.
• CARLI will work with Board members and other relevant sources to create a list of resources related to anti-racism and social justice.

Meeting Dates and Deadlines

• 2020–2021 Board meetings (at the CARLI Office, Champaign)
  • Friday, September 18, 2020
  • Friday, December 4, 2020 
  • Friday, March 5, 2021 
  • Friday, June 11, 2021
• Proposed 2020–2021 Executive Committee meetings (via conference call): 
  • Wednesday, September 9, 2020
  • Monday, November 30, 2020 (Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 26)
  • Wednesday, February 24, 2021
  • Wednesday, June 2, 2021
• CARLI iSchool Virtual Career Fair 
  • Wednesday, October 7, 2020
• CARLI 40^th Anniversary Reception
  • Thursday, November 12, I-Hotel, Champaign
• 2020 CARLI Annual Meeting and Governing Directors Meeting
  • Friday, November 13, I-Hotel and Conference Center, Champaign