Minutes of the FAC Meeting February 12, 1998 Madison Building, West Dining Room, 1:00 - 3:00 PM Denise W. Lomax, Secretary, FEDLINK Advisory Council (FAC) Date: March 10, 1998 FAC Present: FLICC/FEDLINK: Michael Conklin Susan Tarr Doria Grimes Milton MeGee Bonnie Klein Meg Williams Denise Lomax Erik Delfino Lee Porter Marcia Talley Fred Rettenmaier Joseph Banks Janet Wright FAC Absent: Maxine Brown Ken Nero AGENDA 1. Approval of January 22, 1998 FAC Meeting Minutes 2. Web Enhancements 3. OCLC Users Council Meeting Report 4. FAC Issues and Topics 5. FLICC/FEDLINK Update 6. Committee Reports 7. New Business 8. Announcements Chairman Fred Rettenmaier opened the meeting at 1:05 PM. 1. The FAC approved the minutes of the January 22, 1998 meeting. 2.Web Enhancements. Meg Williams and Erik Delfino reported on the enhancements to the FLICC/FEDLINK Web site. Vendors' pricing information and OCLC analytical reports are now available on the Web. Meg and Erik have taken line item detail from OCLC invoices and bills and designed reports that analyze expenditure activity, making the data more useful to members. FEDLINK members can use their passwords to access these reports for their specific library's data via ALIX-FS. Erik is setting up listservs for the FAC, FEB, and all other FLICC Working Groups. 3. OCLC Users Council Meeting Report. Marcia Talley presented a detailed review of the OCLC Users' Council Meeting that was held on February 8-10, 1998. The topic of the three-day meeting was "Libraries and the Value of Learning." Four key questions were addressed: (1)What are emerging trends and future developments in learning and education?; (2)What are the opportunities and barriers for libraries as they support life-long learning for library staff and others?; (3)How can OCLC libraries and OCLC work together to strengthen existing services and offer innovative services that contribute to life-long learning, education and communication?; and (4)What strategies are necessary for the OCLC Institute to enhance partnerships with networks and others to provide information and education for library staff and governing bodies? Marcia's full report of the meeting is appended to these minutes. FEDLINK only has 2 members on the OCLC User Council. In the past, we had as many as 5 members. A new formula is now used to determine the number of members represented by each network, which has resulted in FEDLINK's number of members decreasing from 3 to 2. Both Susan Tarr and Milton MeGee have studied the formula and are still unable to understand how FEDLINK's representation got decreased. 4. FAC Issues and Topics. Topics for the FEDLINK Spring Membership Meeting included Fred Rettenmeier's recommendation that Erik and Meg do a presentation of the new enhancements to the Web page. Also suggested was the topic of consortium pricing. Susan suggested we bring in someone for that and she will research possible speakers. A FAC Project to consider for CY98 is a survey of members about what FEDLINK should be, could be, need be doing or is not doing well. The issue was tabled for further discussion at a future meeting. 5. FLICC/FEDLINK Update. Milt discussed developing a focus group on customer service issues in libraries. He designed a nomination form to elect Librarians, Information Centers, Contract Staffers, OGC/IG Reps., and Vendors to make up this focus group. The nomination form is to be distributed to members. Susan gave a brief overview of the upcoming RONDAC (Regional OCLC Network Directors Advisory Committee) Meeting that will be held at SOLINET beginning February 19, 1998. Directors of the 16 Library Networks will focus on sharing innovations of each of their networks. For FEDLINK, Susan will ask Erik to show the OCLC pricing and use of invoice data to provide members with analytical reports of usage and expenditure activity. She will also share about billing procedures, help desk support and telephone logs, corporate databases, and services and product specializations. SOLINET will share about site searching offering cooperative activities between the libraries, cataloging outsources, and alliance meeting about consortia licensing. Susan will report back about the RONDAC Meeting at the next FAC Meeting. 6. Committee Reports. Susan reported that the Budget & Finance Working Group have a firm budget proposal but as for the revenue analysis, they have not settled on what to do with the net increase. Milt said we will be focusing on training programs because we are doing less training classes than the year before. Steve Kerchoff is still in Sri Lanka doing training and he will do some training in New Deli and Bangkok. Registration for Computers in Libraries is going well. Business Manager Joseph S. Banks reported on FEDLINK's financial operations. He said we are tracking the same pace as last year in fee revenue and budget forecast. The American Management System is automating the billing process, which will eliminate duplicate billing and the slow billing process. The automation is to be completed by April 1998. Price Waterhouse has been contracted to do the analysis of FEDLINK Automated Systems Requirements for the next generation of the financial management system. 7. New Business. Lee Porter discussed the Certification for Library Administrators that has been proposed by the PLA and LIMA of ALA. He suggested that the FLICC Education Working Group might want to look at this. 8. Announcements. Doria announced that the NOAA Web site has a feature called "spotlight" that highlights various relevant current awareness topics such as the climatology for the Winter Olympic 1998 in Nagano, Japan. OCLC Users' Council Meeting February 8-10 Topic: Libraries and the Value of Learning Key questions for this meeting included: 1. What are emerging trends and future developments in learning and education? 2. What are the opportunities and barriers for libraries as they support life-long learning for library staff and others? 3. How can OCLC libraries and OCLC work together to strengthen existing services and offer innovative services that contribute to life-long learning, education and communication? 4. What strategies are necessary for the OCLC Institute to enhance partnerships with networks and others to provide information and education for library staff and governing bodies? Users' Council Business: Four nominees were selected from the Users' Council to fill two vacant positions on the OCLC Board of Trustees. They are: Victoria Hanawalt, Library Director of Reed College; Barbara Gubbin, Director of the Houston Public Library; Brad Baker, University Librarian/Director of Media Services at Northeastern Illinois University; and Edward Meachen, Associate Vice President for the Office of Learning, University of Wisconsin. The election will be held in May. The search continues for a successor for Dr. K. Wayne Smith, retiring President of OCLC. Please refer names of any potential candidates to me, Bernard or to OCLC. Brief Session Summaries: Paul Hardin, Head of the Educational Technology Assistance Group of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spoke on "Innovative Technologies for Education: Changing the Paradigm of Teaching and Learning". The traditional "publish or perish" formula which has led to an explosion of scholarly articles and places to publish them will result in new processes to transform this raw data into information, the information into knowledge and the knowledge into "smart product" databases that know what you're looking for and go out to find more. He sees a desperate need for new "blue collar" workers of the information age -- computer technicians, network administrators, network analysts and software engineers -- and predicts that best business practices will prevail. This presentation is available at http://www.oir.uiuc.edu/etag/ Patrick O'Brien, Director of Libraries, Alexandria, VA and a member of the OCLC Board of Trustees, spoke on "Current and Future Education Trends Implications for Libraries". Technology is ubiquitous everything will be networked, wired or webbed. He predicted that by the year 2018 libraries will still be housed in a building where books will form the core of the collection but laptops will be everywhere, high speed internet connections will be provided along with self-service centers and 800 numbers. Patrons will be assisted along an "airline model" reference librarians will "float", information will be customized and delivered directly to patrons. He recommends reading "Competencies for Librarians in the 21st Century" on the SLA website. Addressing the issue of "What are we doing and what innovative things should we do to educate those who work in libraries?" Martin Dillon, Executive Director of the OCLC Institute, talked about the Role of the Institute and OCLC in the Life-Long Learning of Library Administrators. The OCLC Institute has been wildly successful. Classes have been sold out, classes were added and they, too, sold out. Beginning in a few months, in cooperation with the regional networks, classes will be sent "on the road" beginning with the highly popular Metadata workshops which will also be offered as an ALA preconference. For more information visit the OCLC Institute online at http://purl.org/oclc/institute. (Updated monthly.) Susan Tarr, Executive Director of FEDLINK and RONDAC chair, talked about "Network Learning Initiatives". In FY97, networks profiled and trained 466 new OCLC customers and conducted more than 1300 OCLC training sessions with a total of 12,500 attendees -- this is more library staff than were trained in US library schools. In addition, they publish newsletters and manuals, sponsor conferences and teleconferences, provide helpdesk support, etc. The increased need for regular updates on hardware and software changes as more demands are being made on the time of library and network staff provide an ideal opportunity for the 16 OCLC networks to share common "plug and play" training modules among them. Suggested joint projects include: managing and cataloging electronic resources, OCLC cataloging and ILL searching basics, small libraries cost efficiencies, cost-effective use of OCLC and OCLC telecommunications options. To do more without increasing costs -- cooperate! Leigh Estabrook, Dean of the Graduate School of Librarianship and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gave a spirited talk describing the LEEP program, focusing on distance learning for librarianship. Under this innovative program students from as far away as Alaska can pursue a MLS degree from the U. of Ill. while living at home. See the LEEP homepage at: http://leep.lis.uiuc.edu. This talk was followed by demonstrations by the OCLC Office of Research of innovative technologies for education in which a "librarian" conducted interactive online search sessions with "patrons" communicating via video and voice from homes and offices. Liz Bishoff, Vice President for OCLC Member Services, provided her regular update: 80 millionth ILL on 1/26 by the British Library 38 millionth bibliographic record 11,500 First Search libraries world-wide OCLC will be merging it's EPIC service into FirstSearch but will take its current users into account, especially on issues having to do with cost. FirstSearch version 5.0 will be available later this year. Expect to see more full- text databases and more databases including SIRS, IAC Health Reference, ATLA Religion, Contemporary Women's Issues, Periodicals Contents Index. Electronic Collections Online (ECO) has enrolled 26 publishers, including Academic Press, with more than 600 titles. Expect 1000 titles to be loaded by June. Project Muse from Johns Hopkins will be available at a cost no higher than the cost of a paper subscription. ILLDirect via FirstSearch was used by 123 libraries on the first day it was offered. This service is also available in conjunction with several local systems. Z39.50 for cataloging works with local systems allowing users to contribute holdings to OCLC and perform original cataloging on local systems. BNA and the OCLC authority services are merging. OCLC bought the BNA software and is in the process of merging it with OCLC's authority service. This has turned out to be more labor-intensive than anticipated but all clients, both BNA and OCLC, are being supported until the products are fully merged. OCLC is working with LC on a uniform title project, developing algorithms to correct music uniform titles which will be distributed through NACO. ERIC federal documents will be available, full-text, on FirstSearch by this spring. The OCLC Access Suite pricing issue will be examined by a regional network task force. The cut-off date has been extended until July. Consideration is being given to providing the software free or at low cost to everyone. The TCP/IP rollout began in December, working with various consortia in Florida and North Carolina. This has gone smoothly so far. A small library project which will result in an easy-to-use, point and click cataloging module will be ready for testing soon, beginning with small libraries in Ohio. A new internet provider has improved system response time. OCLC now uses a combination of Sprint and MCI. SiteSearch v.4.0 is being beta tested in GA on project Galileo. It will be able to search both z39.50 and non-z39.50 sites. Delegates also participated in small group discussions organized by interest group and by type and size of library where the four key questions were addressed. Summaries of each of these group sessions will be posted on the Fedlib listserv as soon as we receive them. For more information, please contact your FEDLINK OCLC Users' Council Delegates: Marcia Talley mdtalley@nadn.navy.mil Benard Strong strong@ndu.edu Miscellaneous Resources: Principles for Licensing Electronic Resources, http://www.arl.org/scomm/licensing/principles.html