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Notes from the meeting, December 4, 1997
Attending: Ross Atkinson, Lee Cartmill, Kathy Chiang, David Corson, Tom Hickerson, Helen Mohrman, Catherine Murray-Rust, Ed Weissman
1. Ameritech visit 12/15-12/16
We discussed the Ameritech visit to campus December 15-16. Ameritech is sending three representatives. In addition, a technical expert will arrive for Tuesday's technical review session. All sessions except the technical review session which will be open to all library staff. Tom will chair the general presentation and the chairs of the functional groups will chair the functional sessions. The functional groups will provide assessment reports following the sessions. Dates for the other vendor visits will be set soon. We will keep to the same schedule for all the vendors.
2) Vendor Maintenance Analyses and other issues
Lee distributed a document summarizing the cost of system maintenance he derived from the information in the RFP's for the four vendors coming for campus visits--Ameritech-Horizon, VTLS, Endeavor, and DRA. As with the analyses of one-time costs, these costs are difficult to compare because the vendors based their estimates on different assumptions, e.g., 250 simultaneous users as opposed to 500 simultaneous user. We decided to ask the vendors for cost (and performance) estimates based on a standard set of numbers, e.g., a specific number of simultaneous OPAC users, servers, BIB records, transactions. We will also ask for cost estimates based on increments to our current numbers. Catherine agreed to draft a statistical sheet with these numbers.
We also agreed to ask the vendors to be very specific about what they provide--e.g., data conversion services, training (how many people they are responsible for training, etc.), hardware--in order to be able to make the best price/performance comparisons.
Finally, we discussed the importance of negotiating the implementation schedule and process before signing a contract. Implementation is a project management job and we will need to assign someone in the Library to manage this process explicitly.
3) CIT's Technical Assessment of the Vendors
Tom distributed the technical assessment of the vendors from CIT along with specific technical questions CIT wants the vendor to answer when they visit.
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rev. 12/23/97 dih