February 14, 2001

The Executive Board meeting was called to order at 2:10 PM by President Marjorie Hill-Devine.

Present: Marjorie Hill-Devine, Deborah Abraham, Martha Driscoll, Ron Gagnon, Camilla Glynn, Kim Lynn, Thomas Scully, Daniel Shipman, Verizon Account Representative.

The Treasurer’s Report was presented by Tom Scully and approved.

Marjorie Hill-Devine reluctantly accepted the resignation of Patrick Cloherty, Salem Public Library, from the Executive Board.

The meeting then moved to a discussion with Mr. Shipman of our recent problems with our Verizon network.

Mr. Shipman then reviewed our account history for the past several months. He explained that the FCC had issued an order requiring Verizon to set up a subsidiary company to handle a part of the data communications system. Part of the order required that Verizon maintain an arm’s length distance with this subsidiary to ensure that Verizon had no competitive advantage. Verizon had 60 days to get this company up and running and this all occurred at approximately the same time that we were experiencing our service problems. If Verizon had directly intervened to help resolve our problems, they would have been subject to FCC fines. Mr. Shipman assured us that most of our issues about service response were as a result of the shakedown period for this new company.

Kim Lynn, Reading Public Library, relayed her history of downtime and stated that Verizon’s response was not acceptable. Mr. Shipman believed that much of the problem at Reading was due to intermittent wiring problems which often fixed themselves by the time the service person arrived on the scene. He agreed that the service personnel should not have left it at that, and should have worked to find the problem.

He assured us that most of these problems were behind us, and he encouraged us to call him, or any of the relevant managers, whenever there is a problem and they would do whatever the FCC rules allow to resolve our issues. Martha Driscoll pressed him on the issue of how long we should wait before escalating our service calls. He said that a repair order should be issued within a couple of hours and a manager should be able to tell that such an order was in fact issue. If the order was issued outside normal business orders a repair person might not respond until the next business day.

Ron asked about credits for downtime. Mr. Shipman said credits were regulated by FCC tariff and were so small that they probably weren’t worth pursuing.

Mr. Shipman left and the meeting went on to other business.

The Brochure Working group gave an update. The proposal from Extra Mile design was received and appeared more ambitious than expected. Questions were asked regarding rights of use and the desired flexibility. Ron will run the contract by Ron Hoffman for his advice. Discussion will be continued at the next meeting.

Electronic Resources Working Group report was given by Camilla Glynn. They have been working on netLibrary. MARC records have been ordered. Also records for EBSCO titles should be in the catalog for it at least in some form by July. Later they will be refined. They also looked at the Public Documents Project at the Beverly Library. Next they will tackle Web Resources and the possibility of including records of Web sites in the catalog.

The meeting adjourned at 4:15

Respectfully submitted,