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LMS Meeting Notes, 3/10/97
Attending: Howard Raskin, Susan Currie, Scott Wicks, Anne Kenneym Jim LeBlanc, Elaine Engst, Linda Westlake, Tim Lynch, Zsuzsa Koltay, Fred Mutatori, Nancy VanOrman, Lynne Personius
The 3/3/97 Minutes were approved with the corrections that Jim forwarded in e-mail included.
A ) A discussion of the 3/4/97 Steering Committee meeting raised two issues that developed into animated exchanges.
1) Regarding the following quotation from the minutes of the steering committee meeting: "We asked that the document clearly distinguish between mandatory and optional LMS features. The Steering Committee will review the requirements to confirm what is mandatory and optional." The evaluation group asked how we could be expected to do this - the consensus was that requirements documents and desirables documents are two different things. We decided to produce what we consider are our requirements, and then to use this as a check off list when we compare vendors. The worry about what it meant to be asked to do this was further discussed. The evaluation committee believes that if we get to the point of "horse trading" to make a decision, that we should be involved in that discussion.
2) Much discussion surrounded - "We discussed holding a staff meeting during the spring to communicate information about the process and to gather feedback. We will consider inviting key people from other institutions to discuss the process and the decisions made at their institutions." The evaluation committee felt that holding a general staff meeting was an excellent idea, but felt that we would better serve the staff if the session was conducted by the us (the LMS Evaluation Committee) rather than by individuals from other institutions.
Among the reasons cited were: a) the CUL staff has been educated in the ways of computer systems at this point, b) the timing is screwy - if that session would have helped we should have done it last Fall, c) we predict that outsiders would sanitize their experience and report to us how well it all went and how happy they were with it. We concluded that it is more important to share with the staff what is going on at Cornell than at other institutions. And, we did volunteer to conduct a session.
B) We discussed the RFP process. Are we expecting our requirements to become an RFP, should we expect vendors to respond, how much detail do we need to include, should we be looking at the documents from other institutions? We decided to review the original RFP that Cornell produced in 1984. We decided that vendor visits will inform the RFP process, and we do not need to try to complete it prior to listening to vendor's presentation. We decided to ask the Steering Committee for specific direction about the level of detail that needs to be included in the RFP, and how they expect it to be used. I will do this at the next meeting.
C) Scott reported that he had recently attended a meeting of multiple institutions - there was discussion of new LMSs. Scott said he saw a bunch of depressed people with major horror stories. The general advice - if you can wait, do so. Fred has also been traveling and had an opportunity to talk with colleagues - he had not met anybody who is happy with anything! We affirmed that as an evaluation committee, if we do not find an LMS, we are indeed authorize to say that we need to wait longer.
This prompted a discussion about how long we can continue to stay on NOTIS. We do have to have to run a "maintained" system (we need to have the system kept current within a changing environment) because, as a modern library, we exchange information with lots of other organizations - and we depend on various standards that do exchange. We talked about what might happen to us if the library was the only mainframe application left - Nancy said that she believes that we will have a mainframe for 3-4 more years. To inform staff of why we think a new LMS is needed we considered sending out the document that we compiled addressing why we need a new LMS. We felt that it might need some additional editing, and decided to take another look at it first - let Lynne know of changes needed. Then we will get it out to CU-Lib.
D)In considering what installation times might be viable options, we concluded that June is when we want to switch to a new system. January was considered as another possibility, but rejected because it is a bad time for acquisitions and a really tight squeeze for circulation.
Recorder: Lynne Personius
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rev. 4/1/97 dih