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Notes from the meeting, May 28, 1997
Attending: Ross Atkinson, Lee Cartmill, David Corson, Tom Hickerson, Zsuzsa Koltay, Gordon Law, Helen Mohrmann, Lynne Personius, Catherine Murray-Rust, Sarah Thomas, Ed Weissman
Absent: Pete Siegel
1. Sarah introduced a new member of the Steering Committee--Helen Mohrmann, the Director of Administrative Systems & Distributed Technology at CIT. Pete Siegel, the Director of Network and Computing Systems at CIT, is also joining the Steering Committee but he was not able to attend today's meeting.
2. We reviewed a proposed schedule drafted by the Evaluation Committee for selecting and implementing the new LMS. We pushed back some of the dates in Phase 1 to allow the library staff to make final comments on the requirements (available on the LMS Evaluation Committee Web page (http://www.library.cornell.edu/staffweb/LMScomm/LMS.html) through the end June and to allow enough time for University Purchasing to process the RFP in July. The revised schedule calls for reviewing the responses to the RFP in late August and September, campus visits by vendors in October, a decision on finalists and site visits in November, and a decision on the "lucky" vendor in December. This will allow a period of 17-18 months for implementation planning, installation and, finally, the cut-over from Notis to the new system in June, 1999. Helen reported that CIT plans to implement the P2K administrative systems in July, 1999. As we move closer to this date, we may have to adjust our implementation schedule to take this into account so that we do not waste effort creating linkages to legacy systems that are being phased out.
ACTION ITEM: Lynne will take the schedule changes to the Evaluation Committee for final review and will add a column in which the person or group responsible for each activity can be listed.
3. Next, we discussed "make-or-break" criteria for selecting the new system. The Evaluation Committee had come up with six criteria. These are:
We decided to include the cost of purchase and of ownership (i.e., on-going costs) as a critical criterion and Helen suggested including a spreadsheet in the RFP which the vendors will be asked to fill in detailing things such as hardware and software maintenance costs, capacity issues, staff needs, and vendor plans with regard to platforms and the impact this will have on the depreciation of our equipment. All of these need to be factored over time.
ACTION ITEM: Lynne will create a spreadsheet containing categories related to on-going costs factored over time to be included in the RFP
4. We discussed the creation of a preliminary budget for the new LMS implementation. We will, of course, continue to run Notis during the implementation period (January 1998 through June 1999) and we need to factor staff costs (e.g., training, specification writing, testing) into the project budget in order to be able to insulate staff and on-going operations, to the greatest extent possible, from the intensive implemetation effort.
ACTION ITEM: Sarah asked Lynne to prepare a tentative budget for the new LMS implementation using the information we received from Endeavor as a basis for purchase and other up-front costs but including estimates for on-going costs and for staff costs during the implementation period. She would like this information by June 9, in time for her next meeting with the Provost.
5. With regard to the campus technical infrastructure, Helen said that Project 2K will run on IBM's SP2 but that CIT expects to be supporting a variety of "backend " platforms. We need to be aware that CIT support for other platforms could cost more, however. With regard to "front-end" platforms, there is a clear trend towards WinTel on the campus.
The next meeting is scheduled on Wednesday, June 11 in 703 Olin Library.
There will not be a meeting on Wednesday, June 25.
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rev. 12/23/97 dih