Sage Council Meeting Minutes

May 21, 2024

Recording Link: https://vimeo.com/954567232

Attendees: Beth Ross (Sage), Dea Nowell (UCSLD), Jon Georg (Sage), Perry Stokes (Baker, Vice-chair), Maggie Pando (The Dalles), Cheryl Hancock (Harney County), Marsha Richmond (Lake County), Carrie Bushman (Cook Memorial), Mary Reser (Gilliam), Heather Spry (Baker), Rachael Fox (Hood River)

Request for agenda items: no additional items given

Approval of March minutes – Dea motioned to approve the minutes as presented. Carrie seconded. No one opposed. Minutes approved.

Committee Reports

Cataloging Committee – The committee met on April 2. The discussion included the following: using LibraryThing.com to come up with Dewey Decimal numbers; Oregon Battle of the Books 500 entries have been added to the appropriate records; Homosaurus terms are being used in more and more 650’s and 655’s and catalogers were reminded to leave those entries in since it is an authorized thesaurus; and there is an additional serial reference guide on SageStaff.org.
Budget Presentation – Perry reviewed the Options Summary that was sent out which outlined past strategies and two proposed future strategies to alleviate the disparities both within the existing tiers and between the tiers themselves to a strategy that is more fair to all members. The fairest strategy that Perry could come up with was to use a one to one per capita rate model using the average of the last three years to determine the fee structure going forward. The new fee structure would be rolled out over the course of 4 years, whether that is an increase or a decrease in fees for each member. The member fee would also have a minimum for small libraries that the fee would not go below. That rate is dependent on whether the library uses ILL or is a circulating library. The proposed new fee strategy also took into account expected budget growth for Sage as a whole.

There was also a brief discussion about Sage’s current surplus as a result of Beth postponing retirement and verification that we had enough in reserve to replace any hardware should that be needed. Perry assured us that there was plenty of reserve to cover that. Rachael motioned to pass the budget, and Dea seconded the motion. No one opposed and the budget was approved.

Dea moved to approve the use of the second proposed fee structure. Cheryl seconded the motion. No one opposed and the fee structure was approved.

Evergreen Conference Recap – Overall the sessions were well done. The one regarding accessibility was good and we got to see a lot of overall improvements for future versions. Brief discussion about Aspen, which is a discovery layer for the OPAC that allows additional customization and to bring in outside sources into the search results without having to have the records in our database.
Jon attended Hackfest and mentioned that it was a great networking opportunity as well as having learned more about how permissions functioned within Evergreen.

Scheduling Next Evergreen Software Upgrade – We expect to have it scheduled for September or October. The issue has been slow responses from Equinox of late. Beth is going to look into options besides Equinox for Evergreen support. We’ll be having the test server upgraded first, so Beth can test out OPAC customization, as well as use it for training and presentation on new features.

AI – Perry had a question about whether Beth or Jon had heard anything about AI being used for catalogs at the Evergreen Conference. Neither of them had heard anything, although Jon mentioned using it for transcripts of meetings to speed up creation of minutes.

Meeting adjourned at 10:36 am Pacific Time.