Summit Borrowing Committee Meeting: Thursday, July 29, 2004
July 29, 2004
University of Portland, Buckley Center, Room 163
Members attending in person:
· Clark College: Amy Waite
· Eastern Oregon University: Joy McAndie
· Eastern Washington University: Gary Jeffries
· Evergreen State College: Mindy Muzatko
· George Fox University: Louise Newswanger
· Lewis & Clark College: David Shratter (for Jeremy McWilliams)
· Linfield College: Bahram Refaei
· Marylhurst University: Kirk Howard
· Mt. Hood Community College: Diane Schmitt
· Oregon Health and Science University: Cindy Cunningham
· Oregon Institute of Technology: Laura Migneco-Frentzko
· Oregon State University Lorraine Borchers
· Pacific University: Elaine Bortles
· Portland Community College: Katherine Stevens
· Portland State University: Philip Ratliff
· Reed College: Mark McDaniel
· Saint Martin's College: Sue Graham
· Seattle Pacific University: Paula Kraupa
· Seattle University: Holly Sturgeon
· Southern Oregon University: Karen Hill
· University of Oregon: Shirien Chappell
· University of Portland: Caroline Mann
· University of Puget Sound: Cassandra Palmore
· University of Washington: Pam Mofjeld
· Washington State University: Jill Palmer
· Western Oregon University: Lori Pagel
· Western Washington University: Kim Marsicek
· Willamette University: Maresa Kirk
Members attending by phone:
· Central Oregon Community College: Tina Hovekamp
· Central Washington University: Zippy Nickerson
· Whitman College: Carol Carr
Members not present:
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Guests:
· Alliance staff: John Helmer
· Alliance staff: Travis Honea
· Alliance staff: Nancy Nathanson
· Alliance staff: Michelle Williams
· Central Oregon Community College: Ginny Singleton (by phone)
· Evergreen State College: Jean Fenske
· Portland Community College: Maris Bishoprick
· Portland State University: Paichit Tangpulsakul
· University of Oregon: Erica Rivera
· University of Washington: Judy Davis
· Washington State University: Linda Fredericksen
· Washington State University: Dena Keller
· Washington State University: Margo Taylor
· Western Oregon University: Matty Davis
· Willamette University, J.W. Long Law Library: Galin Brown
1. Welcome and Introduction:
(Louise Newswanger)
John Helmer: introduction, committee charge, how committees work in the alliance, so you'll know how the Council wants you to work. It's not a trivial thing that the SBC is a committee. The Council gave lots of thought to this. Given the size of the consortium they thought about why we should or shouldn't have committees, what functions do we fulfill with committees, etc. See the web page about committees on the Alliance site. We have:
1. .Interest Groups: these are wide-open groups. They don't have meetings, they're informal
2. Task Forces: there are several. They're specific and focused to fill a need. They get the right folks on a Task Force, give them a deadline, a charge, and then they're done.
3. Committees: these are formed when the Council thinks there's a need for continuing input on a specific topic. There are only two in the Alliance: SBCand Electronic Resources. Each committee has representation from each institution and also a Steering Team. The Steering Team does lots of the work, and stays in contact with the full committee.
Review of responsibilities:
§ Committee members: represent their own institution's needs. If you have multiple campuses which may be autonomous at your site, you still are responsible for representing all the needs of your institution. Also, Represent the good of the entire consortium.
§ Steering Team: represent the good of the all.
§ Alliance will schedule a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Council (kind of like a Steering Team for the Council) with the Summit Borrowing Committee Steering Team sometime during the year.
§ Annual report due in October for the Council about Summit Borrowing Committee and Steering Team activities
The Council explicitly stayed away from representation by type of institution on the Steering Team. They chose a diverse group not according to any schedule: the Steering Team is not supposed to represent the views of Oregon vs. Washington, private vs. public, etc. They're supposed to look to the good of the whole. Therefore, when a Steering Team Leader cannot make a meeting, there's no need to send a substitute since that substitute will not have the understanding of the group process that has evolved.
Challenges:
§ Communicate with your institutions. You're not here to give personal, departmental, or individual campus opinions. You represent your whole institution.
§ How does the Steering Team communicate with the broader Summit Borrowing Committee? You need to work that out
§ We want to be intentional about who's a member of the committee and who's a guest. Guests are welcome to observe, but if they want to be on the agenda to speak, they need to clear it with the SBC chair before the meeting. Since meetings are often held in a central area, the schools in that area could easily send multiple people to the meetings, and the meetings could, without this protocol, be overrun by metro area library opinions rather than being representational one institution, one voice. Uneven representation.
Charge: from the Alliance's page for the SBC:
The Summit Borrowing Committee (SBC) discusses workflow and problem-solving procedures and drafts policy recommendations for Council related to Summit, the Orbis Cascade Alliance INN-Reach system, as well as those aspects of courier service that apply to Summit Borrowing. The committee discusses local procedures related to Summit Borrowing with the aim of providing fast and economical delivery of library materials. Committee members share "best practices" and facilitate compliance with the policies and guidelines governing Summit Borrowing. The Systems Manager supports the work of the committee by recommending topics for discussion, forwarding selected system enhancement issues, and providing background research related to vendor products and system capabilities.
Rhetorical question: When should we ask Council things?
Answer: Nancy knows. Louise knows. Council does care a lot about Summit
Borrowing; they will be in touch and informed about SBC concerns.
2. Council Assignment: Review use of policy on patron eligibility for Summit Borrowing:
(Nancy Nathanson)
The Council isn't asking to review the policy on who's allowed to borrow; just how well you are able apply the policy, the way people are identified or labeled, and the records are coded.
Q: is the underlying question "is somebody giving privileges to groups of people they should not?"
A: no.
Alliance staff have access to the codes used in bib and item records via the central machine. Sometimes we stumble on coding in records that institutions accidentally used codes in ways they didn't intend to. We don't have access to the patron codes, though. As we've been bringing up new sites we've noticed some PTypes that are new, and we're just wondering whether the old sites who have been up for some time are satisfied with their existing PTypes. Thought it would be good to review them.
All felt satisfied with their use of PTypes. We reminded ourselves of the Council's permissions and admonitions:
1. To address temporary situations, length of term and end of school year, each institution may define "currently enrolled" as long as it does not exceed one year of non-enrolled or non-employed status.
2. Each member determines whether students, staff, or faculty in special programs offered by or in affiliation with that institution merit privileges, but following programs or groups are excluded: community borrowers; corporate borrowers; Friends of the Library groups; and alumni association members. Selected individuals not automatically covered by adopted policy may receive privileges at the discretion of the Council member.
Q: Can we dump the PType for the "adopted" patrons since we're all supposed to be using Visiting Patron?
Discussion ensued. If a site "adopts" a patron from another institution, they may not know that the adopted patron really is a current borrower in good standing with their home library. You're forging a relationship to that student and later may ask us, the patron's institution, to pay for lost or non-returned items when we didn't give consent to be involved in this relationship. We don't want anybody adopting our patrons: we want them to use Visiting Patron, and if they cannot, we want a referral to our library about the problem with the patron record.
Decision: Referred to the Steering Team as a future agenda item.
3.
Annual
Account Reconciliation Review :
(Nancy Nathanson, Michelle Williams)
a. Introductory remarks:
§ 1/3 of the items were removed from the list as a result of searching, in other words, found a lot
§ .13 of 1% of all items loaned (fulfillments in FY04) are going to be official recorded as lost (AAR for March03-March04) -- that's very small
§ 1/4 of items found were found at Borrowing Site (not previously searched, communication between the "partners"?)
§ 10% of items were returned by patron after initial list was submitted, so quite a few removed that had gotten started in the process (Bahram: so, we're searching some items that will be returned shortly)
b. Schedule and timing (patrons returning materials; IO search requests at same time as AAR searching)
Comment: schedule at the end of
March rather than February.
Comment: timing with the end of the academic year -- books come back when folks
are packing up for the summer.
Comment: the lists would be smaller if done during the summer.
Comment: would be good if everybody end one month later, but start the process
at the same time.
Comment: PUA may make more lost books next year.
Ideas:
· Use March 31 as the cut-off date. Shift everything else up one month.
· Alliance staff give Borrowing Committee stats on the net gains/net losses consortium wide. They can maybe work on that next fall. If it turns out to be a minor net difference, maybe we could consider recommending that we don't have to pay each other for the lost books; it would be considered part of the cost of belonging to a consortium. Maybe, on the whole, the cost of staff time (in libraries and business offices on each campus) in paying the net losses to each other is smaller than the amount of money, consortium-wide, is worth. (Comment: our auditors would never buy that. Comment: maybe, if the numbers are even enough, NLN could look into whether those legal issues could be resolved)
· Watch PUA next year to see if there's an increase in lost books. If so, think about how to address that. Note from NLN: will think about a way to satisfy auditors regarding reimbursement.
Decision: It's ok to change the schedule for next year, but not for this year. So, after this year's reconciliation, the dates will be:
1. Items lost or irreparably damaged which had due dates between April 1, 2004 and March 31, 2005 (for 2005's AAR).
2. Announce beginning of AAR process by email: June 15
3. Report reimbursable items: members send lists to Alliance: July 1
4. Consolidated list posted on Web: July 15
5. Search for missing items: July 30 - August 15
6. Master list and Web pages updated: July 30 - August 15
7. Problem-solving between libraries: finish by September 1
8. Master list updated (final): by September 10
9. Clear the transactions: September 10 and onward
10.
Invoice and Payment: September --
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c. Searching by call number -- searching the right place?
This year there were lots of non-book materials. Just want to be sure everybody is searching not only their general collections, but other areas where other institution's materials might have ended up mistakenly in your own collection. See some of the following entries on the AAR listing for 2004 that might be shelved in an area other than where you could be looking:
See the listing for CHIL
387.2.G441b? Maybe you should search your Juvenile Collection areas, if you
have them.
See the listing for M1500.S89 F523 1984 v.1? See that it's a video?
Q: can Alliance staff highlight next year's entries that might have call numbers which should be checked in multiple locations? A: we'll try.
d. "claims returned": Committee understands why procedure was written that we should not use Claimed Returned for Summit items. See: minutes from Feb 6, 2004 SBC meeting:
"Claims Returned: Nobody should use III Claims Returned feature or status code for an item borrowed through Summit.. The item should remain on the item's site Institutional Overdue report, so the Borrowing site still owes the Owning site for the item, The patron's site can still do whatever they want (either hold or not hold the patron responsible) and the Off Campus status code "checked out to another institution" stays in the item record until the AAR is finished."
NLN will talk with III for an
enhancement to change the programming so for INN-Reach items the link isn't
broken. Note from NLN: I will be discussing an enhancement where Claims
Returned for INN-Reach would work similar to Reported Lost for local circ, so
that it stays checked out to patron; when the status changes to
e. responding to e-mail search requests: Please reply to the list if the item is found so others can stop searching. If you don't find it, don't bother replying.
Q: can Alliance post email to Summit Circ formally asking folks not to respond if they don't find an item? A: ok.
f. value of searching, billing, etc. (large project and much time; clearing problems; institutional costs and benefits)
Discussion ensued.
4.
Bookbands
and book Labels :
Q: Will Alliance pay for the book labels, as they do for
the bookbands?
A: 200,000 bands cost $6,000. 150 book labels cost $11.87. Printed labels are
at least 1/3 more expensive than bookbands.
The Alliance can maybe buy bulk blank labels and get a cost break, and then institutions can buy them for less $ through us, and photocopy your own. The Alliance orders book bands for all but three members. Some sites mostly use bands but also a few labels, for various types of materials.
If the Alliance were to try to pre-print the labels as they do for the book bands, it would be extremely complicated to know how many for each site, depending on which percentage of fulfillments get labels vs. bands for each site.
Comment: We see the advantage for each site printing their own labels; we'd just like to buy our labels for less $ in bulk, if possible.
Decision: Committee is asking Alliance staff to get price info about buying blank labels in bulk and report back to the group.
5.
Direct
Delivery to patrons, and service to distance ed. students:
PUA is a great help in serving distance students. WWU submitted a letter to the Summit-circ list to begin a discussion on direct delivery to distance education students on Jan. 13, 2004:
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To: summit-circ@lists.uoregon.edu Summiteers! Now that INN-Reach Pick-up Anywhere is nearly here we'd like to suggest that the Orbis Cascade Alliance give some consideration to how we might use this enhancement of Innovative's software to bring better service to distance education students and other far-flung users another step if possible. Since what we are going to suggest would probably require all sites to be in agreement to participate we'd like to put it out there so we can all start thinking about it. This is not something that would need to be implemented immediately but could be done after we all become comfortable with just how Pick-up Anywhere works. We should be able to use this feature to deliver loanables directly to the end user from the lending library. That is to say books and videos mailed directly to the patron's home address. How?? For Pick-up Anywhere to work checking out materials to the patron is no longer tied to the users home library. Therefore it should be possible for the lending site to check the item out to the requesting site's patron and then mail the item to that person's home address as it appears on the Summit paging slip. How would we know that this is what the user wanted? It would be necessary for each site to create and list a pick-up location called something like "Mail To DistanceEd User". This information would, along with the user's address, appear on the paging slip and indicate to the lending library that this level of service was desired. A flyer or bookmark would be included with the item indicating when the item is due and most importantly where it needs to be returned to. We include a bookmark like this now at WWU with materials we mail to our Distance users which has a clip-and-use return mail shipping label. Who pays the postage?? That would have to be discussed and also agreed upon so that there was a standard in place and users are not having to reimburse some lenders but not others. Currently the policy at WWU is that the university pays to ship library materials to our Distance users but they must bear the burden of return shipping. Or of course bring the materials back to us. Why should we do this? Distance Education programs along with other non-traditional program structures are increasing at many if not all of our institutions. If it's technically possible and we can agree on how to make it work it certainly seems like an important step towards making this valuable resource available to users away from their home institutions. At WWU we’ve been reshipping Summit materials to our DE users after checking the items out to them. This works but the transit time from our library after checkout and return shipping so that it is back before fines accrue take a sizable bite out of the patron’s time using these items. We think that as a group we might be able to do a better job for all of our distance students. Thoughts? Comments?? |
Proposal: There are lots of distance ed students in remote sites where PUA doesn't work. Could all of us work toward a process of the owning library sending materials directly to the patron instead of to the patron's library, where it would then be forwarded to the patron.
Discussion ensued:
· There are some of us who have no distance ed students, so we'd mostly be supporting yours?
· There's not that much difference your paging the book from the shelves and mailing it to the home of the patron rather than sending it to the library of the patron, work-wise, though, is there?
· There are systems issues: would need programming changes because the book's library could not check out the book to the patron's record: the patron's library would need to do that since they have the record there.
· ILL seems already set up to handle this.
· The main reason we'd like to talk about this is so that our distance ed students don't get shorted the few days it takes for the book to come to our library and then for us to mail it to the student. If it could go directly from the owning library to the student, then the distance ed student would get the same amount of time with the book that others do.
· The time on the hold shelf for patron to pick up the item is about equal to the time in the mail, so it seems it comes out even, there's not necessarily a disadvantage for the distance ed. borrowers. (if you could post-date the check out, or check it out a couple days after mailing it)
· But won't renewals do it for the distance ed student, almost as well?
· Could we have some different loan rules to tack on a few more days to the loan period for these distance ed students?
· But how would we tell the difference between the distance ed student and the local ones?
· Could you put a special code in the patron record?
· If we overlay data from registration records (and if the registration records don't contain the special code that indicates distance ed participant) then each time we upload, the special code is removed.
· What if there was a generic PUA site named "mail" so folks could check out to the owning site?
· Wasn't there a feature that III said they were developing called "Ship Shelf" which took care of this problem? We should find out more about that.
Decision: Shelved, until later. Ask Steering Team to find out more about the ship shelf feature, if it still or ever existed. No changes recommended for the immediate future.
6.
Damage
to Materials :
Maresa proposed that we prohibit use of padded envelopes for media materials:
Q: Shall we discontinue the use of padded envelopes for media materials (except for those in microformats) for Summit shipping, and use cardboard boxes only?
Decision: With the exception of microfiche, Summit libraries will not ship media items in padded envelopes.
7.
Miscellaneous:
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Q: Who's using invisible barcodes on their patron IDs?
(Mag stripes rather than barcodes)
A: Some folks.
Comment: if you do, please use the univ ID field as your verifier since your patrons do not know their barcode numbers.
· Q: how many more sites can we add to the current book band? A: several. And when we run out, if we had to, we could go to short numeric codes instead of names.
Comment: we could also think about dumping all the stuff about fines, etc., at the bottom, and for those sites who feel a need for it, they could develop a little bookmark or handout. Some of us don't give our patrons fine/billing info on each checkout slip for local checkouts, so maybe we can save space on the book bands/labels someday if we need to.
8. Wrap-Up:
After Steering Team members were identified by the Chair, meeting adjourned. Summit Borrowing Steering Team convened after a short break.
Minutes prepared by: Shirien Chappell, August 4, 2004 Amended by L Newswanger, Nancy Nathanson, and Michelle Williams: August 19, 2004
Approved: September 1, 2004