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Notes from the 10/28/97 meeting
Attending: Ross Atkinson, Lee Cartmill, David Corson, Tom Hickerson, Janet McCue, Sarah Thomas, Ed Weissman
1. Inclement Weather Procedure
We agreed to send up a telephone tree for notifying heads of library units in the early morning when the University closes or partially closes due to inclement weather. Ross will be the Library's contact with Day Hall. He will notify the AUL for Science Libraries, the AUL for Social Science and Humanities Libraries, the AUL for Information Technology and the Director of Finance and Administration each of whom will be responsible for contacting the units reporting to them. Units will need to keep a list of staff who will report during partial university closings when the the Library remains open. A memo will be distributed to the Library staff when the annual University memo on this topic is received. This procedure will be reviewed at the next Council of Librarians meeting.
2. Public Access Work Stations
Ed reviewed public access work station requirements with regard to the Library Gateway implementation. The Library Gateway can be implemented without any loss of functionality from the library kiosks even if no changes are made to the existing kiosk configurations. Access to many Library resources and services is now dependent on the Web (e.g., the Web pages prioviding access to indexes and abstracts, electronic journals, reference sources and the circulation/reserve forms.) The Library Gateway Steering Committee recommends however, that the PowerMacs be upgraded so that they can run Netscape 3.0 since the Gateway is being designed to work optimally in that environment.
Tom presented a proposal to upgrade all the existing PowerMac public kiosks to 32 MB of RAM--enough to run netscape 3.0 and also enough to serve as a "low-end" public work station by the time the new LMS is implemented in 1999. There are 47 of these computers in the endowed libraries and LTD is checking on the number in statutory units. We agreed that this PowerMac upgrade process should proceed. With regard to replacing the LCII work stations, we agreed that this is linked more directly to the implementation of a new LMS than to the Library Gateway and that the work stations we buy and install now must fit into the new LMS environment. There is approximately $90,000 available this year for new work stations. This is not enough to replace all the LCII's. We asked Ross to form a group to review the issues associated with public work station replacement and to make recommendations by December 15 so that we can move ahead quickly on this front. This group should recommend what we buy and install, taking platform and cost into account, and how we phase in and distribute the new work stations, keeping in mind the following issues:
These recommendations will be focused on public work stations since the new LMS will impose other criteria with regard to staff work stations. The new group should include statutory unit needs in its deliberations.
3. Budget Reallocation
We reviewed the status of budget reallocation decisions and agreed to continue talking about a methodology to make these decisions as effectively as possible.
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rev. 12/19/97 dih