2022-03-17 Meeting Minutes

Owned by Aura Hill
Last updated: Apr 04, 2022 by Liana Giovando
3 min read

Attendees

  1. Jessica Bugorski (Co-Chair)

  2. John Ellis (Co-Chair)

  3. Julie Mandal (Subcommittee Chair – Discovery/Customer Service/Front End)

  4. Dijana Kladnjakovic (Subcommittee Co-Chair – Metadata/Cataloging)

  5. Katherine Marceau (Subcommittee Chair – Systems/Analytics/Data)

  6. Leigh Cunningham (Subcommittee Chair – e-Resources/Acquisitions)

  7. Liana Giovando (Project Manager)

  8. Virginia Roy (OCLS)

  9. Thomas Guignard (OCLS)

  10. Aura Hill (OCLS)

Regrets

  1. Stacey Boileau (Subcommittee Co-Chair – Metadata/Cataloging)

  2. Jane Burpee (Subcommittee Chair – Training/Communications/PR)

  3. Jana Purmalis (OCLS)

Action Items

@Dijana Kladnjakovic will discuss Connexion tool in Met/Cat Subcommittee meeting today.
@Liana Giovando will set up meeting with Ex Libris to learn more about accrual accounting and what the impact is of this choice.
@Liana Giovando / @vroy will gather more information from colleges on potential named users issues and discuss the issues further.

Discussion Items

Subcommittee Chair Updates

SAD: Working on Briefing Note for mapping stat categories and considering aligning with Seneca’s mapping. Also brainstorming about statistical categories for staff/faculty records and use cases for this situation. Leigh brings up OCAS codes could be used but not all colleges use these codes. The OCAS codes could be placed in Alma. But this could be dealt with after Go Live and it not a high priority.

Met/Cat: They are meeting later today. Leigh asks about the usage of standard tool like OCLC for bibliographic records. There is the Bibliographic Standards Working Group which established min standards for Sirsi based on Marc 21, based on OCLC. They had an agreement that cataloguing would be OCLC standard. Some colleges have Z39 connection with direct connection to OCLC database. The BSWG was struck for Colleges Union Catalogue, and was meant to create standards for all 24 colleges, not just Sirsi Consortium. But there were issues creating/obtaining records that met minimum standards and CUC had limited authority. It is very important to have strong minimum standards to ensure records in Alma are of certain quality with the authority to ensure the standard is kept. OCLS could support the purchase of tools to support bibliographic standards with funding.

ACTION ITEM: Dijana will discuss Connexion tool in Met/Cat Subcommittee meeting today.

E-Resources/Acquisitions: They discussed pilot project for e-Resource sharing (not urgent but under development). Nicole from OCLS talked about services related e-Resources in the NZ and asked for feedback from the subcommittee.

OCLS Update

OCLS had a security challenge that started on Thursday and was remediated by Tuesday. It is almost fully resolved with a few security issues that will be resolved soon.

Syndetics - OCLS will handle a single consortium subscription for Alma Consortium and that will be a charged back service, part of annual costs. OCLS will handle negotiations and subscription management.

OCLS is paying down part of 2nd year software costs for 18 colleges.

They are working on an amendment to contract for Niagara, Mohawk still waiting on approval on their side. OCLS negotiated an reduction on the initial quote for both colleges. Their Go Live date will likely be spring 2023.

Accrual Accounting? (Liana)

It determines how Alma sets up Acquisitions module. It may depend on when library sets up with ERP, it is hard to know that now.

ACTION ITEM: Liana will set up meeting with Ex Libris to learn more about accrual accounting and what the impact is of this choice.

Named User Accounts (Leigh)

The cost of adding a user seems very high. St. Lawrence IT does not permit username and password sharing for any college service. They have 10 named users, but about 30 staff doing circulation. The security issue is that if staff can see patron data, IT will have a problem with shared accounts. But the costs to add users is prohibitive.

Algonquin IT has also asked that there no shared accounts used.

Humber was also expecting to have all staff being able to access to Alma for real-time information. Also it’s important to know the individual that is performing actions (e.g., waiving fines) and being able to offboard individuals and remove their access to the system.

Ex Libris was very firm on the number of named users and the cost for additional users. Ex Libris does audit unique user names.

ACTION ITEM: Liana and Virginia will gather more information from colleges on potential named users issues and discuss the issues further.

Parking Lot (optional)