MEMBERS OF THE CORPORATION MEETING

AT ENDICOTT COLLEGE

MAY 26, 2005

 

PRESENT:  Twenty-one libraries were represented at the meeting, attendance sheet attached.

 

CALL TO ORDER: Mary Rose Quinn called the meeting to order at 10:15.  John Beauregard introduced Eloise Knowlton, Dean of Academic Resources. Mary Rose introduced Michele Mann, a member of the Mass. Board of Library Commissioners, and Ruth Urell, the new director at Reading Public Library.

 

APPROVAL OF MINUTES: Linda Shea moved to approve the Minutes from the February 17th meeting.  Carol Gray seconded the motion.  The motion passed unanimously. 

 

TREASURER’S REPORT: Ron Gagnon reported as of April 30th the budget is 73% expended. Deborah Abraham moved to accept the treasurer’s report.  Nadine Mitchell seconded the motion.  The motion passed unanimously.

 

MANAGERS’ REPORT:

Ronald Gagnon -

·       Ron’s quarterly Executive Director’s reports have now been replaced with an ongoing blog-powered news column on the Staff Information System.

·       NOBLE’s office lease was renewed for five years.  The rent portion will decrease by 17% and will be fixed for the term. The Flatley Company, our landlord, will also replace the two HVAC units for the office at no charge, saving us an estimated cost of $15,000.  NOBLE’s outside sign was replaced and our logo has been added to the new sign.

·       Our main insurance coverage has been renewed with a new carrier, CNA. 

·       Ron is on the Mass. Library Association Legislative Committee and has been working on library legislative events. Ron and Elizabeth attended Legislative Day in April.  Deborah Abraham and Mary Puleo arranged a meeting for them with Sen. Jarrett Barrios.  They also attended the Ways and Means Day in February and Legislative Breakfast in March at the Reading PL. 

·       Ron reviewed a handout with the FY 2006 Senate Ways & Means Budget.  The House budget is proposing $841,811 for line item 7000-9506, Library Technology and Resource Sharing, and the Senate budget is proposing $2,000,000.

·       Received $20,000 in E-Rate funds.  Have not yet heard back on FY 2006 request.

·       Executive Board voted to keep FY ’06 costs for the PC Support Program level at $275 annual base fee and $95/PC fee.  Reading library joined the program in May.  Sue Koronowski added how cost effective the program is. 

·       NOBLE staff is working with the Mass. Board of Library Commissioners staff as they move their offices between June 8th – June 13th to move the NOBLE Verizon connection and install their new router.

·       The June Members Meeting will be held at Abbot Public with luncheon following the meeting.

·      Work will begin this summer on updating NOBLE’s Technology plan, with approval from the Membership in the fall. The plan is required to receive E Rate funds.  Libraries may receive surveys over the summer for some information to be included.

·      Ron attended the Network Administrators Meeting at CLAMS network.  The networks are working on various projects.  MVLC is converting their data lines from Verizon to Convergence.  CLAMS  is having some financial difficulties.

 

Elizabeth Thomsen -

·       Reported on the following meetings that were held over the past few months; Circulation Roundtable, Annual Email Trainers, Reference Roundtable, Tech Services Data Cleanup, Annual Multilingual Roundtable, Summer Reading List Roundtable, NOBLE Hosted Web Sites.

·       Elizabeth and Christine continue to visit libraries for template training.

 

 

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May 26, 2005

 

·       NOBLE’s Annual Tech Expo will be held June 9th, 9:30-3:00.  It is an open house format with presentations by EBSCO, Innovative, and Atrion.  In addition there will be workstations set up in the training and conference rooms.  Agenda is on Staff Information System. 

·      Innovative is beginning to do regional training and asked NOBLE to host a regional training session on Advanced Systems Access Administration (ASAA), which was held in March. In exchange for hosting, Martha Driscoll attended the training at no cost, a $900 saving.

·       NOBLE hosted a NELINET training session on Connexion, the new web-based OCLC client.  The session was available to NOBLE members on a cost-recovery basis, saving travel time and resulting in a more localized session.

·       Elizabeth attended the Innovative Users Group meeting in May and did three create lists presentations. She is in the middle of her term on the IUG Steering Committee. 

·       Elizabeth is a functional expert for management information in the IUG’s software enhancement process and has been working with other functional experts on the enhancement requests that have been submitted by users.

·       On an invitation from Tom Cesarz, Elizabeth gave a presentation at the New England Association of Independent School Librarians (NEAISL) held at the Taft School in Connecticut.

·       Elizabeth reported on her presentations on Wikipedia at MLA and on Firefox at the Systems Librarians meeting and at the Hamilton/Wenham Library.

·       At the upcoming Library Leadership Institute at Endicott College, Elizabeth will be participating as a mentor.

·       Ron and Elizabeth met with the EBSCO Success Team at NOBLE.  This is a new division of the customer satisfaction group and is responsible for value added services, training, etc.

·       Electronic Resources Working Group is moving forward with customization and changes to the NOBLE catalog. 

·       Continue to work on the redesign of NOBLE’s web site.

 

Martha Driscoll -

·       Spam filter continues to work well.  Last month out of 122,000 emails received 54,000 were marked as spam.

·       In April the latest release of Millennium, 2005 LE, was loaded.

·       Five libraries participated in a group purchase of Dell PC’s.

·       Continuing to work with George and Atrion installing the new equipment at the libraries.

 

NOMINATIONS AND ELECTION OF OFFICERS:

Mary Rose Quinn reported Martha Holden has been nominated to continue as Secretary/Clerk, and Linda  

Shea has been nominated as the Vice President/President Elect. Current VP/President Elect, Sue Koronowski, will become president as of July 1st. No other nominations were presented.  Mary Rose appointed Deborah Abraham as acting secretary for today’s meeting in Martha Holden’s absence.  Deborah Abraham cast one ballot for the election of VP/President Elect and Secretary/Clerk.

 

EXECUTIVE BOARD NOMINATIONS FOR UNEXPIRED TERM OF TREASURER:

Mary Rose Quinn informed the Members that due to Tom Scully’s retirement announcement earlier this month, the treasurer’s position is vacant for the remainder of his term through June 30, 2006. When Executive Board met, which was prior to Tom’s announcement, they voted to nominate Doug Rendell as Assistant Treasurer through June 30, 2005, and Mary Rose Quinn was nominated assistant treasurer effective July 1st through June 30, 2006.  In light of subsequent events, Sue Koronowski made a motion to amend Executive Board’s nomination and to appoint Doug Rendell as treasurer through June 30, 2005, and Mary Rose as treasurer  July 1, 2005 through June 30, 2006, upon her presidential term expiring.  Barbara Lachance seconded the amended motion.  The motion passed unanimously.  With no other nominations presented, Deborah Abraham cast one ballot to elect Doug Rendell and Mary Rose Quinn to complete the unexpired term of treasurer.

 

 

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Ron distributed a description of the treasurer’s duties.  Sue Koronowski stated NOBLE’s By-Laws allow for an assistant treasurer and that Executive Board will be looking into fulfilling that position.

 

GRANT UPDATES:

Ron explained NOBLE is managing three telecommunications grants in various stages.  One from FY 2004 for the first phase of the network upgrade was completed, the second phase of the network upgrade for remaining libraries and central site is currently on-going from a FY2005 grant, and grant funding from the Gates Foundation through the MBLC is also under way.

 

Martha Driscoll reported on the telecommunications equipment upgrade. 

·       She distributed a handout of the equipment that has been replaced on NOBLE’s network.  A year ago we began replacing the Bay Networks routers and hubs at the libraries with Cisco routers and switches.  BlueSocket wireless gateways were installed at libraries that use wireless.  The BlueSocket units provide statistics and wireless users can be prompted to log in and accept a the library’s Internet Access Policy. The BlueSocket can also manage wired access.

·       NOBLE’s Internet capacity has been doubled.  Previously had two T-1 lines, now have four.

·       Reviewed diagram that shows graphs of Internet traffic going over the four T-1’s using a program called MRTG.  One T-1 is approximately 1.5 megs. The diagrams show with the addition of two T-1’s our Internet traffic is no longer reaching 100% capacity.

·       Martha reviewed the spring 2005 central site upgrades that will help better manage the bandwidth:

-          Replacing seven T1 lines with T3, doubling capacity.

-          Replacing central Bay router with Cisco router.  This will allow Millennium traffic to be prioritized.

-          Replacing the firewall, which was no longer supported due to its age.

-          Replacing 10/100 switches with a one gigabit switch to improve throughput

-          Add Packeteer Packet Shaper, funded mostly by Gates grant.

·         On Saturday, June 11th, we will be switching over to the new T-3 line.  System will be down all day.  There will be no access to Internet, Millennium, email, or web.

 

Ron stated NOBLE received $63,600 in FY 2004 grant funds and $61,703 in FY 2005 from the MBLC.  This represents approximately 75% of the costs of the entire project.  The remaining costs are from NOBLE’s capital fund.

 

Ron reviewed the two FY 2006 grants that were submitted:

Hardware Grant- This will replace the two servers for our Innovative software.  Grant request was for $42,000, which is 75% funding.  SACL will be meeting next month and are expecting to hear in July if grant is approved.  Since it is LSTA federal funds can not contract until October 1st, which is beginning of the federal fiscal year.

Software Grant - The initial grant application was for a federated search product, AirPAC, Inventory Express, EDIFACT, and a SIP2 license.  The federated search product was the most expensive component. Grant funding would have been 60% of the costs in our initial application, the traditional rate.  After conversations with MBLC it was recommended that we rewrite the grant application for full funding of a federated search product instead.  After the grant is voted by the Commissioners, Executive Board will consider the remaining components identified in our process last fall.

 

·         Elizabeth explained that federated searching is a way for a user to submit a search once and get results from many different databases, which the user can choose.  Since the product is searching many databases at one time it is slow at returning results.  Users can still perform advanced searches at the databases’ web site.  Several vendors that offer federated searching products; Innovative, WebFeat, Innovative, and EBSCO, are being researched.  Elizabeth and Ron will be meeting with these vendors at ALA. 

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·         Over the summer four libraries will be selected to participate in Usability Studies.

·         Ron stated implementation is tentative in January once the new server is installed.

·         Mary Rose Quinn added this is an avenue the Membership wanted to go forward with.

 

 

NEW BUSINESS/NEWS:

·         Lorraine Jackson announced Salem Public will be open Sundays June-August, which will give the library Sunday hours year round.

 

ADJOURNMENT:

Barbara Lachance made a motion to adjourn.  Diane Smith seconded the motion.  The meeting adjourned at 11:50.

 

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

 

 

 

Deborah Abraham

Pro Tem Secretary