Document #07-53

Director’s Report

July 2007

ALA Conference

I attended the ALA Conference in Washington, DC.  Most of my time was spent in meeting with vendors.  Over the 4 days I attended the conference I met with Kate Duval, our strategic account manager, Kate Howe and Jeff Shilling (for a demo of Director’s Station that Anne Roman, Irene Goldberg and Leah Wagner were able to attend as well), Chris Harris, our Sirsi self check contact, 3-M, ITG (self check machines), LibLime (a provider of open source ILS software), Userful (PC management software), Comprise, and Envisionware.  I also met with one of the possible respondents to our RFQ on planning – Paul Meyer of Tecker Consultants.  To feed my soul I was also able to squeeze in the Ken Burns and Garrison Keillor programs.

I think it was a successful conference and I was able to secure discount pricing from 3-M and ITG for self check equipment.  I am pursuing discussions with Envisionware for discounted pricing as well. 

Annual Evaluations

Staff performance appraisals were completed this week and recommendations for salary increases will be presented at the Board meeting.  This process followed much the same pattern as in previous years, with a few small adjustments.

Health Insurance

Our benefits manager, Patrick Grant, has evaluated our existing health care program and provided a number of alternatives.  I hope that he will attend the meeting and assist me in presenting my recommendation that we move from the Oxford Liberty plan we have had for the last several years to the Blue Cross Blue Shield Horizon POS plan.  This plan will save us more than $22,000 this year.  I have discussed this recommendation with the staff and most favor this move.  Details on the plans will be provided when we meet.

iBistro Meeting

In late June LMxAC convened a meeting of people interested in working on some improvements to the iBistro catalog.  It was a great discussion, generating a lot of ideas.  Ann and Mei will be working on implementing those ideas and I think you will see some changes to the test server as we experiment with enhancements to iBistro.

SVA

Ann and Mei have completed recording the text of phone notification messages to replace the computer-generated voices we have used previously.

Cataloging, Acquisitions and Baker & Taylor

Ann and Ruth have worked extensively on improving how we use SmartPort to bring bibliographic records in to our database.  This is part of our overall effort to make more bibliographic records available as soon as possible and to decrease our overall cataloging costs. 

We are moving forward with the B&T agreement and thus far we have 10 libraries who will be participating in this project.

INFOLINK

Cheryl O’Connor has asked me to join the INFOLINK planning committee.  I am looking forward to this opportunity to be more involved!

Activity Report

In June we made 22 troubleshooting visits to 13 different libraries.  Other measures of activity include:

1. New Items Added                                                        30759   

2. Bib Records Added by LMxAC                        3105                          

3. New Bib Records Added (Total)                                  5206

4. New User Records Added                                             4694                            

5. Brief Record Upgraded to full MARC                              607

6. Duplicate records merged                                            1124

7. Inventory Reports                                                              76

8. API reports                                                                           4

9.

Meetings

In the last month I have participated in the following meetings:

            ALA                                                                            June 22 – 26

            iBistro Meeting                                                          June 28

            Commerce Bank                                                       July 10

            Personnel Committee                                              July 11

Respectfully Submitted,

Eileen M. Palmer

Executive Director