Sage Council Meeting Minutes

February 16, 2022

Attendees: Perry Stokes (Vice-chair), Ryan McGinnis (Chair), Jon Georg (Sage), Beth Ross (Sage), Maggie Pando, Maribel Pagan, Dea Nowell, Rachael Fox, Mary Reser, Cheryl  Hancock, Kathleen Schmidtgall, Delia Fields

Request for agenda items – Academic seat on council

Approval of November, 2021 minutes – No adjustments to minutes were needed and no objections. Minutes approved.

New Business

Community Agreement – Perry introduced a Community Agreement for Sage User Council Meetings. It outlines a code of conduct for meetings. Dea moved to accept it, Ryan seconded. With no objections the decision was made to adopt this agreement as our official code of conduct for meetings. Beth volunteered to put the document up on the Sage web site.

Committee Reports

Cataloging Committee – the committee met on December 6, 2021. There were 16 attendees. Topics discussed were bibliographic references, retention of identical subject headings when they are from different thesauri, cataloging contact spreadsheet, 655 unsourced genre headings used in Sage, DVD search in z39.50, 852 fields, precat items, and library of things. The full minutes and recording for the meeting can be found at sagelib.org/cataloging.

The committee also met February 7–A new genre for board books was announced, an update on the cataloging class with the University of Nebraska was given, guidelines for Library of Things were discussed, and a brief demo of the angular catalog was provided.

Circulation committee – the committee met on January 11, 2022. The results of the survey were discussed. Right now checkout limits are set to 50 for most patron profile groups (increase was approved at some point in the past). School patron types are set to 35. Beth will check with the schools to see if that should be changed to match the others. Discussion took place on whether it was ok for libraries to have different fine thresholds and the consensus was yes. Also discussed was changing the language from “Place hold” to “Request”. Beth will announce the change ahead of time to prepare staff and give a date of change.

In the February 8 meeting there was continued discussion of circulation policies. Attendees talked about using transit slips instead of removable labels since several libraries have notices issues with removing the residue. Standards and best practices for book processing were also discussed.

Financial reports – links were provided to the last three financial reports. $1500 is our new annual fee for hosting our servers at EOU.

Sage Cyber Security Policy (Jon) – Jon invited feedback on what needs to be changed in the draft. The password management section was reviewed. The consensus was to change to a 60 minute timeout for staff and to recommend a maximum password age of 365 days. Minimum length of 12 characters was recommended as well. Baker County uses a combination of words (passphrase) suggested by staff. A suggestion was made that password management would be a good Evergreen development project. Also suggested was the use of a password management utility.

Would all staff have to sign the acceptable use policy? Maybe it should be at the director level instead. It could be a part of a future MOU signing. If the library already has a policy in place and they differ, what is the hierarchy? It makes sense to defer to the stricter policy.

The document should be shared more widely before adopting. Jon will take care of alterations suggested during meeting.

Evergreen software upgrade update – Baker still having some SIP issues. Jon will follow up and see what still needs to be addressed. Jon traveled to EOU to install operating system software on the old Sage database servers. These old servers are not covered under the hosting contract with EOU and their staff will not work on out of warranty equipment. This was a necessary step in order to use at least one of the servers as a test server. Equinox asked that we migrate our data to a test environment before doing the production upgrade. As of the meeting Jon was waiting for a response from Equinox on who was going to do the test install. EOU wanted us to recycle the old test server due to its age so Jon removed the server and took it back with him. Due to its low value the council agreed that the machine would essentially be recycled to Jon.

Sage Budget – Perry presented a draft of the budget along with proposed Sage membership fees. Major adjustments were to salary amounts, with a recommendation of a 6.5% increase there. Courier costs are expected to go up as well. Perry and Beth will get together and refine the draft and present it at the March meeting. The question was asked as to whether there was a preference for fixed rate or the variable rate based on service population change for assessing membership charges. The preference voiced was the variable rate.

Academic Council Seat – Beth will recruit someone to fill this position.

Meeting adjourned at 11:13 am Pacific Time