Sage Council Meeting Minutes

March 15, 2022

Attendees: Perry Stokes (Vice-chair),Jon Georg (Sage), Beth Ross (Sage), Dea Nowell, Maggie Pando, Mary Reser, Rachael Fox, Marsha Richmond (Lake Cty), Michele Timmons

Request for agenda items – no changes or additions

Approval of February, 2022 minutes – No adjustments to minutes were needed and no objections. Quorum not present. Minutes will be approved via email.

New Business

Committee Reports

Cataloging Committee- The cataloging committee met February 7. They discussed a new genre term for board books, the LitF field and continued discussion on the audience fixed field. There was also an update on the cataloging class, guidelines for library of things and a brief demo of the Angular catalog.

Circulation Committee– the circulation committee met on March 8. They are continuing to review changes to the standard circulation policies. A draft was sent out last Tuesday and the next meeting will be April 19.

Sage Financial Report – Perry shared a link to the Sage Financial Report. There are still some membership fees outstanding, along with CatExpress fees. Beth indicated that reminders had been sent out. The rest of the lines look good. Courier line is within $10,000 of reaching the max budget so will need to be watched. We are in a good financial position.

Cyber Security Update (Jon) – Jon sent out the latest document last night. He discussed the changes made throughout the document. Beth asked about consequences of not signing. Assumption is that the document will be signed by member library directors when the next iteration of the MOU is adopted. The Cyber Security policy will be voted on by the Sage Council via email. Dea suggested that a link to the recording be shared in the email vote.

Sage Evergreen Upgrade Update – test server is up. Beth will send out a link and login information. Our data is on the server. Logins will work. She will also send out a Doodle poll for possible training dates. Jon’s concern was since the server looks like our production server, staff need to be careful not to do their regular work on it. Beth will look at changing the look of the test server so that it is more obvious. As far as an upgrade date, Jon has been communicating with Equinox and they are ready to go when we are ready. Beth asked about dates. A suggestion was made to do the upgrade the third or fourth week of April. It was also suggested that an email be sent out with a tentative time frame and see if there were any objections.

Perry remarked that service interruptions had lessened.  Jon indicated that some changes had been made to logging and other changes to servers which seem to be helping. There are more tools available to monitor.

Sage 2022-2023 Budget Review – Perry reviewed the draft budget. Membership dues are increased to $245,000 to cover operation costs. There is an increase in the amount requested from LSTA grant funds for courier costs. Perry is proposing a 7% increase to the Systems administrator salary to keep up with cost of living increases. Getting it up to $80,000 has been a goal to be competitive. Beth has announced that she is looking at June 2023 for her retirement. Jon’s contract amount will also increase by 7%.

The Sage fees proposal was reviewed. Perry updated the population figures based upon a 3-year average. The fees consist of a base amount plus or minus the variation in average population from the year before. Examples are given in the video recording of the meeting. The largest decreases we are seeing are in schools, particularly academic. Enrollment numbers have dropped. This method is advancing us toward a more logical and fair strategy but we are still off. There is a wide diversity in cost per capita. If we need to make a special fee assessment, it would make sense to approach larger libraries.

Perry will reach out to ILS vendors to see what the ILS would cost an individual library for comparison purposes. Beth will send the proposed budget out for a vote via email.

Sage Website – We are having problems with the website after updating the software. We either have to upgrade to version 8 or 9 of the Drupal software or we need to move to another platform. Research there has been a lot of dissatisfaction with moving from version 7 to 8 or 9. We’ve also received feedback that staff would like the site to be more user-friendly and accessible for updating.

We will be converting our current Drupal site to WordPress. The conversion will have to proceed more quickly if we continue to have problems with the Drupal site. We will be asking for feedback on the new site and possible additions.

Action items from previous minutes – Do we still need to check on checkout limits for schools?  Yes

Changing “Place hold” to Request? – Beth is waiting to make the change when the Evergreen update takes place.

Additional items – Beth needs a copy of the meeting policy to put on the website.