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Cornell University Library

Council of Librarians

Minutes, February 19, 1997

1. Fiscal Year 1998 Budget
The Library received information on the fiscal year 1998 budget. The key components include:

• General expenditures and capital equipment: 2% increase. Some of this increase will be used to cover additional ethernet lines, etc., so the entire 2% is not likely to be passed through to departments.
• Salaries: 3% increase. Guidelines for administering this increase have not been received. As in past years, promotion increases will be drawn from the librarians' pool. The "clusters" process for handling the Salary Improvement Pool will be used again in the endowed units.
• Materials budget: 4% increase
• Pay out on endowments: 12.7% increase over last year. This reflects the outstanding return on investments last year and the University's desire to keep the yield on endowments at approximately 4%. It is expected that the increased pay out will add another 1% to the 4% increase in the materials budget.
• Student wages: 5% increase. This increase will be covered centrally.
• Project 2000 costs to the Library have been factored into the budget, i.e., our increases were not as large as they would have been without Project 2000. We will receive a statement itemizing the Library's Project 2000 costs, but we will not have to make any payments.

In allocating the budget, consideration will be given to high priority needs, such as staffing the Offsite Facility. This may result in the reallocation of resources. Sarah Thomas will begin the process of inventorying system needs and priorities with the Senior Staff and then will move the process out into the library system. Funding for the construction of the Offsite Facility is already accounted for and will not require reallocation nor will the new library management system require the reallocation of funds in the FY1998 budget.

2. Offsite Facility
Catherine Murray-Rust reported on the state of the Offsite Facility planning effort:

• Public Relations.
  • There will be two letters from the University Librarian to the university community. The first will be distributed soon and will describe the project and why it is being done. The second will be distributed in the Fall.
  • Information session will be held for the library staff. Information packets will be distributed to the staff for use when talking to the public covering information about the transfer of materials and selection policies.
  • A Web site will be established.
• Selection of an inventory control system
  • An RFI for an inventory control system will be issued soon. A critical issue is the ability to link the inventory control system to the Notis circulation system.
• Staffing
  • Staffing for construction and for the transfer of materials must be taken care of. Funding for a project manager position is included in the project budget.
• Transfer of materials
  • This is being planned in two streams: Olin Library (500,000 volumes) and all other units. The order in which materials will be transferred will be "most desperate first."

LTD will run a report listing items in the Olin stacks based on circulation history and imprint date. Once this report is run for Olin, other units can request similar reports.

Two additional issues were raised. The first concerns the method for marking the records of items selected for transfer. Some units have already selected items for transfer and would like to begin marking the records. A decision on how to do this is needed. Catherine said that a method would be tested using the city and regional planning (NAC-classified) collection that has already been transferred from Fine Arts to the Library Annex. The second issue is retrospective conversion. Items can not be moved into the Offsite Facility unless they are barcoded and represented in Notis by an item record. Neither recon nor item record creation/barcoding activities are funded within the project budget, although some money set aside previously for recon is available. A process to coordinate discussions about recon is needed.

Ross Atkinson reported that there was considerable discussion about offsite facilities issues at the ALA Midwinter meetings. Many ARL libraries are either in the process or have recently completed the process of moving materials to remote facilities.

Catherine has written an article about Offsite Facility planning that will appear in the next issue of Kaleidoscope.

3. Performance Planning

Sarah announced that academic staff appraisals are due by February 28. She considers these to be important documents not only because they provide the opportunity to review performance for the prior year but because they provide the opportunity to coordinate individual, unit and library-wide goals and priorities for the coming year. Sarah is working with Lee Cartmill and Ann Dyckman to implement a systematic performance planning process that will include a review of the performance plans, an assessment of associated training needs, and an analysis of how the plans reinforce the goals of the system.

4. ALA Midwinter Meeting Reports
Lynne Personius reported that members of the committee evaluating new library management systems met with seven vendors in Washington. She is encouraged by the progress some vendors are making with their systems and expects to invite a few vendors to campus this spring for demonstrations.

Ross reported on the National Digital Library Federation meeting held prior to the ALA meetings. The focus was on the Making of America Project Phase 2. Regarding content, the group decided to target the period 1875-1900, specifically rare and special collections rather than the monographic literature. Regarding metadata, the group endorsed the inclusion of an intermediate level of record (such as Encoded Archival Descriptions) between the MARC record and the digital object. Regarding architecture, the aim over the next three years is to create an environment in which an institution's local system interface could be used to access digital information on remote systems. Until then, it will be necessary to use the specific interface on each system to access the digital information on that system.

Tom Hickerson noted that Sarah had been honored for lifetime achievement by the Program for Cooperative Cataloging and that she had also been named as one of the top ten newsmakers by Library Journal.

5. Deans Council
Sarah reported that at the last Deans Council meeting, the need for campus-wide coordination when posting positions was discussed. Specifically, the Provost asked the Deans to consider the implications for the library when posting new faculty positions. On the agenda for a future meeting is a discussion of administrative charges assessed by Day Hall and their possible rationalization. Finally, Sarah will hold a future Dean's Council meeting in the library to focus on issues such as the digital library and the materials budget.

Submitted by: Edward Weissman
2/21/97

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rev. 7/24/97 dih