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LMS Steering Committee
Notes from the meeting, June 11, 1997
Attending: Ross Atkinson, Lee Cartmill, David Corson, Zsuzsa Koltay, Catherine Murray-Rust, Lynne Personius, Pete Siegel, Ed Weissman
Absent: Claire Germain, Tom Hickerson, Sarah Thomas
1. Pete Siegel, Director of Network and Computing Systems, CIT, a new member of the Steering Committee, introduced himself.
2. Preliminary budget
Lynne distributed a preliminary budget with the estimated one-time and continuing costs for implementing the new LMS. Lynne, Catherine and Lee used cost projections from Endeavor's response to the Library's RFI as a basis for many of the figures. The budget includes costs for upgraded staff and public works stations as well as "associated staff costs"--the cost of the staff hours needed for testing and training. Sarah requested this preliminary budget to inform her discussion with Don Randel that took place earlier this week.
3. RFP
We discussed the status of the RFP. Lee and Lynne will meet with Glenn Morey, University Purchasing, next week to start the process of moving the RFP through University channels. The functional requirements drafted by the Evaluation Committee will be just one piece of the final RFP. Purchasing will add other pieces. Ed will send a reminder to staff via CU-LIB that the final opportunity to send to Lynne Personius comments and suggested changes to the functional requirements is now through June 30. (Comments are also requested from Steering Committee members.) After June 30, Lynne will take all suggestions, including those from Purchasing, and create a new version of the RFP for review at the July 9 Steering Committee meeting. The goal is to produce the final version at the July 23 meeting. Lynne agreed to take responsibility for this process with assistance from Lee.
We discussed the "make-or-break" criteria and agreed that the first criterion--"vendor must have a complete set of modules by the time CUL makes a selection decision"--should be modified to distinguish between critical modules, such as circulation, acquisitions, cataloging, OPAC, which must be operational as opposed to non-critical modules, such as electronic reserves, which could be under development. The new LMS should have at least the same functional modules as Notis.
4. Timetable
We briefly went over the timetable Lynne distributed and agreed that we needed to add markers related to funding. These markers are:
We also agreed to change the date for issuing the RFP to 7/31/97.
5. Legacy system contingency planning
Pete reported that CIT has placed an order for new software to replace the software that has been causing the poor mainframe performance. Its installation should provide adequate performance and capacity for the library and other mainframe systems through mid-1999, assuming no increased usage. We discussed the fact that library system usage so far has been directly related to database size and enrollment and that the database will continue to grow over the next two years. Pete suggested that by the time the students return in the fall, we come up with a method to effectively monitor system performance. Also, he said that CIT needs to know whether the library and other mainframe users expect to be off the mainframe by mid-1999 and the degree of certainty, so that there is adequate time to plan for contingencies. Year 2000 and other problems will make staying on the mainframe expensive and CIT needs to begin planning now to deal with stragglers. Finally, the stability problems that plagued the mainframe systems earlier this spring appear to have been taken care of.
The next meeting will be on Wednesday, July 9.
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rev. 12/23/97 dih