Present: Marjorie Hill-Devine, Deborah Abraham, Alyce Deveau, Camilla Glynn, Dennis Kelley, Doug Rendell, Ron Gagnon. Guests: Bonnie Strong, Martha Driscoll.

Call To Order: The meeting was called to order by Marjorie Hill-Devine at 2:20 pm.

Minutes: There were no new minutes to approve.

Treasurer’s Report: The Treasurer’s Report was presented by Ron Gagnon. Overall, the budget is slightly underspent at this point in the year. A few high items were discussed: Job Advertising is over budget due to two rounds of advertising for the PC Support Specialist position; the audit and government return work is essentially completed by auditor Bob Guimond, and he has been crediting our account to stay within his cost forecast for our annual work; Legal is high due to revision of personnel policies and recent contact regarding a handicapped applicant for the PC Support position who withdrew from consideration.

Executive Director’s Report: Ron reviewed five key items for the past month.

Telecommunications: The new frame-relay network has been problematic, with a ten-library, two-day outage on November 13 and 14 and many small outages. A vendor meeting was held at NOBLE with several representatives from both Verizon and Dimension Data. The meeting was polite, and both vendors vowed to schedule a follow-up meeting with their technical personnel to examine the problems further. A meeting is scheduled for Monday morning at Montserrat. Earlier in the month, Ron had sent a letter to the President of Verizon outlining our significant problems. NOBLE is also exploring alternatives to Verizon, most importantly the Mass. Community Networks/Digital Broadband partnership begun with state funds to serve the state educational community. Ron and Martha met with MCN/DBC on November 22 and they were willing to address the privacy, proper use and filtering issues raised in Ron’s February letter. Delays in completing our new Verizon network are close to completion, involving four colleges, three with internal campus wiring issues, and Salem State, where Verizon installed our connection in the wrong building. Verizon has agreed to relocate the connection. Our first FY2002 E-rate form, Form 470, has been submitted.

Millennium Project: Problems with the current release have been escalated and some resolved. NOBLE staff has been investigating the next release, Update D, on the training system and Update D will be installed on the main system on Monday. NOBLE staff has also been using the training system to explore consortium holds functionality and direct patron services. NOBLE staff met with the staff of C/W MARS, also an Innovative system, to compare notes and discuss consortium issues on the 16^th.

Working Groups: NOBLE staff have been meeting with, and providing information and alternatives to the working groups examining various issues in NOBLE. As a result of working with the Electronic Resources Working Group, bibliographic records for individual full-text EBSCO titles have been loaded into the Web catalog.

PC Support Specialist Hired: The position posting for PC Support Specialist was rewritten and posted to 13 national and local library groups and lists early in November, with no qualified applicants. The position was advertised in the Sunday Globe and weekend Eagle-Tribune on 11/26 and generated a large number of qualified applicants. Between Monday morning and Thursday afternoon, resumes were examined, three interviews arranged and held, references were checked and a candidate hired. George Lally began on the following Monday, December 4. George was head of buildings and grounds at Bradford College, and since Bradford’s closing has earned PC software and hardware certification.

Create Lists Training: Most of the training time over the past month has focused on assisting librarians with the Create Lists program which enables libraries to run specific reports on segments of their collections. Some questions ensued on the use of Create Lists in other networks and the more powerful but more cryptic statistical reporting on the Innopac system. Comparative statistics were also requested. Martha and Ron will investigate. A statistics workshop was suggested.

Patron Services From the Web Catalog: Ron explained that patron services were identified as an important function a year or so ago, but implementation had been delayed for a few reasons: to minimize the complications of the new system for library staff, assure that NOBLE staff had knowledge and resources to support it and to await a more mature release of the software. Patron services can fall into three phases: 1. Patron account view and renewals; 2. Mediated requests; 3. Direct requests.

Confidentiality will be maintained through the use of unique PINs to be issued by library staff on small cards containing the NOBLE web address and basic information. PINs will need to be input initially by staff; after inputting they are encrypted so that staff will no longer be able to view them, and the PIN can be changed by the patron later to something more meaningful via the catalog. Dennis asked about using something familiar to the user such as the last four digits of the Social Security number. While the patron can make that change after the fact, NOBLE public libraries do not have that information presently and getting it could be difficult. We are also striving to speed the process and to avoid having the patron verbally requesting a number or devising a PIN on the fly at the desk. If a patron feels strongly about having a familiar number used instead of the unique assigned number, that can be accommodated, though for best security the user should change the number themselves to the desired PIN after the fact. NOBLE will provide libraries with business-card sized cards with unique PINs which can be input and given to the patron. No pins will be automatically put in patron records, nor will records be activated with blank PINs, as at some networks. All patrons interested in the service must have a PIN entered by library staff initially. If a PIN is completely lost or forgotten, a new one can be assigned by staff as above.

Martha demonstrated the screens and process of patron services from both the patron and library staff viewpoints. While easy to implement, mediated requests were not deemed workable by many present due to the significant additional volume expected, even though each individual transaction would be less work than current written requests.

Discussion of direct, unmediated requests hearkened back to issues raised earlier in the year by the Patron Policy Working Group. It was pointed out that libraries often have unwritten or informal rules about what can be requested on ILL, especially regarding new items and media. The placement of direct holds, and to some extent the consortium holds functionality, will depend on accurate rules being programmed into the system since items will be requested without staff intervention. Libraries to be requested will be determined by random by the system, alleviating perceived difficulties of appearing alphabetically at the top or bottom of listings. Further, requesting library staffs will be relieved of having to handicap the odds of getting needed materials quickest from a list of libraries. All libraries will have an onus to keep their rules and their item statuses up to date.

The issue of limiting holds on in-demand items to "your’" patrons was discussed. Martha felt that this functionality was available, assuming a clear definition of "your" patron could be achieved. Ultimately, for public libraries, residents of a given town was the most justifiable explanation (as opposed to frequent users which was impossible to program), but in response to a question Martha would check to see if residents of certain neighboring communities could be included as well. Discussion of limits on the number of holds was begun without conclusion, as it was felt that patrons would learn to self-limit after being inundated once.

After much discussion, and owing to the hour, those present agreed to meet again on Wednesday, January 3 at 2 pm at NOBLE to continue the discussion of holds.

The picklist and consortium holds functionality was accepted without debate. A meeting of circulation supervisors will be held in January to introduce the consortium holds and PIN applications.

The meeting was adjourned at 5:30 pm.

Respectfully submitted,

Ron Gagnon for Mary Rose Quinn