Present: As attached.

1. CALL TO ORDER/WELCOME – Marjorie Hill-Devine. Marjorie called the meeting to order at 10:05. She reported that the Holds Committee is making progress. They will be issuing some guidelines for interlibrary loan practices. Diane Young of Reading has agreed to write a draft for the Committee to review. Anne Tullson announced there would be presentation on copyright laws on March 28^th, at 2:00, at NSCC.

2. APPROVAL OF MINUTES. The minutes from the January 20, 2000 meeting were voted on. Doug Rendell made a motion for approval; Dennis Kelley seconded the motion. The vote was unanimous.

3. TREASURER’S REPORT. Ron Gagnon presented the treasurer’s report in Tom Cesarz absence. Ron reported we are two-thirds through the year and have spent 64% of the budget. He noted that the meeting supplies is up due to all the meetings being held, and also the insurance bills will be coming in shortly.

4. MANAGER’S REPORT – Ronald Gagnon. Ron discussed the Mass Community Network (MCN). They are a non-profit company that is going to wire all the municipalities in the state to the Internet. NOBLE has been in touch with their vendor, Digital Broadband, since November. Ron reassured members that this wouldn’t effect NOBLE costs. If NOBLE members decide to go with Digital Broadband they could take the roll of Bell Atlantic and maybe part of the roll of Data Comm. The costs would be similar to what we are paying now, except offers potentially more capacity. Ron stated he sent a letter to MCN with a copy to Rob Maier expressing concerns about MCN privacy and acceptable use policies. Currently we have a private network where we rent the line from Bell Atlantic to each library and are the only ones that use it. That may change with MCN and Digital Broadband. Ron explained that the reason MCN would not effect assessments or service is because e-rate funding and MBLC Telecommunications subsidy covers the costs of the data lines and Internet access.

Ron also reported there would be an ILL Center Meeting on March 22nd. Marilyn Graves, our ILL Librarian, is hosting the meeting. The meeting is for region members in NOBLE’s geographic area, not just NOBLE member libraries.

Ron spoke to the North Shore Computer Society last week about how to access NOBLE from home and did a demonstration for about 65 people.

Martha Driscoll. Martha briefly discussed that she is still looking into issues of slowness. She does have a new tool to monitor the traffic going over the network lines. She will do a demo later on in the agenda.

5. MILLENNIUM PROJECT UPDATE - Ron reported Release 2000 has been installed on the training system and NOBLE staff has been reviewing it.

Elizabeth Thomsen - Elizabeth reported that as of this afternoon members will be able to access Release 2000 on the training system. Two items that are in the new version of MilCirc are course reserves and IUse counts for materials used within libraries. She discussed the changes in these two items. Also there is a new version of GuiCat in Release 2000. A separate copy of the software needs to be downloaded to try it out. Instructions will be sent out on how to do that. One major improvement is that there is a "multiple item creation feature". Elizabeth also reported on barcodes and scanners. She passed around a hand out on "Creative Uses for Barcode Scanners". She reviewed the hand out and did a demonstration using the barcode scanner. One way is to set the barcode scanner to read the ISBN. Most read "Codabar", but can also be programmed to read a second language known as EAN. Another language that can be programmed into the scanner is "Extended Code 39" which is letter and numbers. You can create barcodes that represent any series of keystrokes that you want to perform. A barcode font would need to be purchased and installed in MS Word. In Word you

Members of the Corporation Meeting Page 2

March 16, 2000

type what you want the barcode to be, change the font to barcode, and print it. Elizabeth also explained how this can be used for Create Lists. Nothing in the system requires the use of a barcode font. This is just another way to do data entry or reports. The barcode font recommended is Carolina Barcode, http://www.carolinabarcode.com, and costs $29. Elizabeth also reported she has been doing some editing of the web catalog screen. She did a demonstration on other ways to access the catalog. A couple of examples were having a search link embedded in another web page, and having a "hot book lists" links to the catalog. The lists can be copied from one library, then search and replace it with a scope you want for your particular library. This will be discussed at the Catalog Links Meeting on April 11^th. She would like this to be a cooperative concept where the book lists are available for libraries to copy and localize if they want to. Elizabeth also stated there is a new "Search" box on the bottom of the Staff Information System that can be used as a shortcut to search the catalog. She showed how to do an item barcode search to find what title record an item is attached to, and two other search shortcuts.

Martha Driscoll - Martha reported the system would be down tomorrow for a few hours while Innovative updates our server so they can configure the serials and acquisitions units. She distributed information about the PC-CIRC program that can be used while the system is down. This allows people to run on a PC DOS based program that lets you check in/check out. It records the barcode in a file that can be uploaded when the system is up. The catalog will also be down, the web and e-mail will be up. Also Martha discussed the Circ Meeting coming up on March 21^st. There will be a demo of Release 2000 at the meeting and the implementation schedule will be discussed. Some issues that will be discussed are notices and schedules, patron data entry, registration, circ stats using the web management reports, and holds. Follow up sessions on web management reports will be scheduled. These will be hands on sessions in the training room.

Ron added that NOBLE is in the process of moving from being supported by the implementation team at III to the customer service desk. Overall Ron feels this is a good thing because the implementation team knows the software as it exists now, but are not familiar with the upcoming release. They will be meeting with CW/MARS next month to compare and discuss the system.

6. CREATE LISTS - Elizabeth Thomsen. Elizabeth did a demonstration on the Create Lists program. The program creates a "review" file, which is a group of records that can be brought together based on any criteria. The result is a file, which can be used in a word processing program, or be used as a report or statistics for some other use. It works off of a shared set of files. The normal III system comes with 40 files, NOBLE bought 160 files. The training is scheduled for May and the on-line registration will be available this afternoon. Every library should send at least one person during the first round of training. There are no restrictions on how many people can attend from each library. There is a link on the main page of the Staff Information System with documentation about the Create Lists. Elizabeth explained that the review file can also be used to globally change data through rapid updating. Since there can be errors in the criteria NOBLE will handle any rapid updating that a library needs done. This will avoid one library inadvertently rapid updating another libraries items. Elizabeth reviewed the April calendar on the Staff Information System. Upcoming sessions are Web Linking on April 11^th, Work Flow Discussions for the Centralized Cataloging Libraries on April 4^th and the OCLC libraries on April 6^th , and Inputters training.

Ron stated that Dean Baumeister is doing hands on training sessions on "Making the Most Of WinU" in April, and "Improving Performance of PC’s" in May.

7. DATA NETWORK USE STATISTICS – Martha Driscoll. Martha discussed a program she will be using to monitor the traffic on the phone lines that go out to the libraries. The program, Multi Router Traffic Grapher, is being used by U Mass, our ISP, to monitor their phone lines on their network. She was able to install the program and is running it on one of the servers. Every five minutes the program queries the routers and gets statistics for that specific period of time, creates a log file then plots and graphs it. The graph is in real time. Martha did a demonstration and explained the graphs. There are daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs. Martha stated that NECC and Bradford aren’t using their dedicated lines and are being routed through the Internet. Ron explained there are some funds remaining from the telecommunications grant we

Members of the Corporation Meeting Page 3

March 16, 2000

received for the new members and he has written to Rob Maier to request to use the funds to get the new

members completely connected. Diane Young asked if there was any way to separate Internet traffic from Millennium traffic. Martha explained that couldn’t be done because all the traffic is going down one phone line to the library. Ron pointed out that the graphs also include EBSCO traffic.

8. ADJOURNMENT. Diane Young made a motion to adjourn, Bonnie Strong seconded the motion. The meeting was adjourned at 11:55.

Respectfully submitted,

Sue Koronowski