Sage Council Meeting Minutes

September 17, 2024

Recording Link: https://vimeo.com/1017245385

Attendees: Beth Ross (Sage), Dea Nowell (UCSLD), Jon Georg (Sage), Perry Stokes (Baker, Vice-chair), Maggie Pando (The Dalles), Carrie Bushman (Cook Memorial), Rachael Fox (Hood River), Cheryl Hancock (Harney County), Delia Fields (Hermiston High School)

Request for agenda items: Meeting platform changing to Zoom

Approval of July minutes – Perry moved to approve the minutes as presented. Carrie seconded. Minutes approved as is.

 Committee Reports

Cataloging Workgroup- The committee met on August 6th. The name of the group has been changed from Cataloging Committee to Cataloging Workgroup to make it more inviting and hopefully encourage more people to attend.

We were looking for a new chair for that group to start in October. We discussed the difference between transcribed and recorded titles. A reminder was also given to correctly specify non-filing characters, and to watch out for short bibs in the Z39.50 imports. Next meeting to be held October 1st.

Systems Update
The system had been experiencing issues the last few weeks, as the servers were inundated with queries from out of country, mostly from Singapore, which were causing the servers to become overloaded with traffic and crash- basically a denial of service attack.

We took several measures to handle the situation as it was happening to minimize the impact we were seeing. Jon enlisted the help of both EOU and Emerald Data Networks to resolve the issue. EOU doubled the amount of available space for the swap files on the application servers, allowing them to weather the influx of traffic as we worked to find solutions to stop that traffic. We were able to link the various log files together in a way that it would give us the origin IP of the queries, so we could determine where they were originating from.

Tim at EOU was able to geoblock all traffic to our servers on their firewall that was not originating from the US and Canada which has solved the issue. The service used for that [IP Deny] is open source, so if it is no longer updates at some point in the future we may have to look at a paid geoblock service through the manufacturer of EOU’s firewalls [Juniper].

Thankfully, the measures I employed during the attacks last time on the database servers meant that they were unaffected as all old queries are still killed automatically every minute. We also altered how some of the monitoring is handled with the app servers to reduce internal network traffic. We’ll also be looking at an add-on that would work with the service that handles web traffic that would block malicious bots.

Evergreen update

Emerald is still working on the test server upgrade, but that is expected to be completed this week. The upgrade to the production servers is scheduled for the second week of November, but a specific day has not yet been set.

Financial Report

Perry added a link to the financial report as an FYI. Perry mentioned that there hasn’t been a lot of activity and it’s still early in the fiscal year.

Streamline Proposal

Perry presented on Streamline. A web hosting platform that focuses on making sure sites are ADA compliant due to insurance concerns about ADA claims. Web accessibility claims have risen 56% since 2022 with the average claim of almost $40k as of 2023. Baker County Library is already using Streamline, and is still in process of updating all of their PDFs to be compliant. One of the benefits of using Streamline is that they include a $10k indemnification towards ADA defense if a claim is submitted. Since Sage is essentially a division of Baker Library District, having Sage also use Streamline ensures that neither Sage nor Baker is exposed to that kind of liability.

He showed the basics of the interface, as well as went over the costs, which included the monthly fee and initial migration fee. Perry made the motion to use Streamline for Sage’s web sites, and Delia seconded. Streamline requires a district email address for Beth, so that was going to be taken care of. Delia asked if there were any schools that were using it, as she wants to talk to them about it, so that she can see about using it at her school.

Authority Control Vendor

MARCIVE announced that they were going out of business at the end of the year, so Beth wanted to start the conversation about what we want to do in the future. She did have an old quote from Backstage from when we signed up with MARCIVE after LTI went out of business. She raised concerns about the direction of authority control vs linked data given two vendors in that field going out of business within a relatively short time period. The plan is to use MARCIVE through December and then revisit this topic in the spring, which will allow us to do some research into where Authority Control is headed, and what our options are. There will be some cost savings by not having a vendor for a few months, but there will of course be start up fees if and when we do choose to use another vendor.

Meeting Platform Change

Our GoToMeeting subscription ends in November, so we’ll be switching over to Zoom, which we already have a subscription for.

MessageBee

Beth and Jon wanted to make sure that MessageBee stayed part of the discussion for the council as something they want to implement whenever possible to help facilitate patrons receiving notifications from Evergreen. The council felt that improving text notifications would be the highest priority to focus on should we be able to find funding for MessageBee.

Meeting adjourned at 10:48 am Pacific Time.

Next Meeting will be November 19th