March 4, 2014 Meeting of Content Access Policy & Technology (CAPT)

Agenda not yet available.

Tim Cole, Tom Teper, Michael Norman, Lynne Wiley, Jim Dohle, Bill Mischo, Lisa Hinchliffe, Jenny Teper, Robert Slater, Sue Searing, Beth Sandore. For only the CARLI/IShare Next portion: Susan Singleton (CARLI), Kris Hammerstrand (CARLI), Brandon Gant (CARLI)

Conversation about IShare Next selection process with Susan Singleton, Executive Director, CARLI

Two handouts provided, draft application/list of questions for potential task force members and a tentative timeline for the I-Share Next (ISN) CARLI consortial catalog. 12 evaluators will be selected to serve on the task force to score systems during the RFP process, based on library type (3 private, 3 public, 3 CARLI reps, 3 community colleges) plus a few executive members (like Susan Singleton). That task force will then come up with sub-teams (circulation, cataloging, technological infrastructure, etc.). Those will not be divided out by library type as the I-share next are. The task force members do the scoring, but the team members establish the evaluation criteria (for each of their areas) for the RFP, and can advise on how to determine if a system meets/how well particular criteria. Each team will be chaired by a member of the task force, to keep communication among the groups and task force open and efficient. Release time (and travel support for those librarians not located in Champaign, where all in-person meetings will be held) from your director is key for participation in this project, since participation on the task force (especially if you also chair one of the teams) may account for a 50%-100% appointment during some weeks towards the end of the selection process.

Smoothest process, per Campus Purchasing, is to do an RFI first in preparation for the RFP. By the March 2015 board meeting, they will make a decision on either releasing the RFP for a commercial process or committing to an open source product (Kuali OLE).

There is a period (the “cone of silence”) where non-disclosure agreements will prohibit any team/task force members from being able to talk about the products they are reviewing. We can’t talk to members of our own library (how the product looks, who said what, etc.), but during presentation/open sessions you can elicit feedback and suggestions from faculty and staff. What you can’t do is have a conversation about the products based on what they ask/you know. We may only solicit their input, not offer them answers based on the information the task force members/teams are privy to. It is unclear if task force members must always input every communication with a vendor into the Procurement Communications Reporting System (http://pcrs.illinois.gov), but purchasing has verbally told Susan that the restrictions/requirements (or at least the interpretation of them) has been relaxed, and until you are in the purchasing phase that will not be required. CARLI will have all of these rules written up and provided for all CARLI staff and IShare Next task force/team members.

In March, OLE/an open source LMS will be evaluated against the same criteria established for the commercial RFP by the task force, and that analysis will be submitted to the board.

As far as CARLI’s involvement with the eXtensible Catalog now and future developments of the XC is concerned—they (CARLI) own it. It’s been transferred to them from the University of Rochester (or is in the process of transfer and that soon will be completed/official). There are no other active members of the XC group now beyond CARLI, except companies that want CARLI code updates but are only using that to build code to work with their own products (for sale, not free, not being contributed back to the XC group).

Our current contract with Ex Libris for Voyager runs out in 2017, and it is possible that none of the products on the market nor open source alternatives will meet the requirements of the RFP. Should that occur CARLI can renew their contract with Ex Libris for Voyager (EL has given some presentations showing Voyager upgrades/support through 2020).

CARLI doesn’t plan to do development of advanced features like Universal Borrowing for an open source LMS (OLE) in the early phases of review, but to investigate how it might be done if it needed to be coded by CARLI, as well as evaluate the landscape to see if other open source contributions are available/being worked on for the UB functionality. This early research if proof of concept work rather than the development a functional UB component for OLE/an open source LMS. Development or adoption/modification of such features would not occur until (if) the CARLI borad decides at the March 2015 meeting to go the open source route for a new LMS rather than sending out an RFP for commercial alternatives.

By April 1 CARLI will make a decision on whether or not they will be moving to Voyager 9. They are waiting for a general release version (or hard date for that release) before making that decision. They did some field testing of pre-release version so far. If they do a Voyager upgrade this summer, that brings CARLI up to date with Ex Libris Voyager releases. Staying on 7 for the next three years seems precarious.

Update on vuFind and how it plays into the next Library LMS. The XC Drupal interface has so much work to be done, CARLI may choose to instead explore if they can use the vuFind interface on top of XC. However, vuFind is not written to be consortial, so CARLI knows they have some considerable work ahead of them if they pursue that path.

ExLibris Hosting proposal (Lynn Wiley—see attached background documents)

All of the institutions that Lynne contacted, save one, were happy with moving to the hosted solution. The one that wasn’t happy (Maryland) was frustrated because they thought they were getting a service level in between just hosted by EL and the EL Total Care package, but really got Total Care. They found that to be untenable and choose to go back to hosting their SFX locally.

A few other institutions tried (and backed away from) the Total Care solution as well, but they just switched to the next step down in EL hosting, allowing them to still handle the administrative end (activating collections, etc.) but freeing them from handling system and knowledge base updates. The hosting options are we host/do everything (current situation), EL hosts (KB updates, etc.) but we still do administrative tasks like collection activations directly, or Total Care (EL does everything, including activations, which was reported as a major inconvenience by people that tried Total Care).

We (other institutions have) can seamless move to the EL hosting solution (no need to update links in libgudies etc.) by updating the DNS information for our current SFX hostname to the IP of the new machine at EL. CDL ran their old server in parallel with their EL hosted solution for a week to make sure there was enough time for the DNS changes to make it out worldwide and reported it worked for them flawlessly.

The plan is to update to the EL SFX hosted solution during the summer, ideally as early in the summer as possible. Library IT will have a chance to interview John Straw/Ex Libris to verify/pin down the details before we commit to moving to a hosted solution but, barring that meeting discovering any unforeseen problems, CAPT approves moving from locally hosted to EL hosted SFX (but not the Total Care level).

AEON Special Collections Management System

Brief related updated. Several people were given the option to choose their CNAME/hostname for the new AEON system, and although specialcollections.library.illinois.edu and collections.library.illinois.edu were suggested, RBML suggested armarium.library.illinois.edu instead. CAPT discussed how this might go over with all the special collections libraries (or not) as well as other libraries that might wish to use the AEON system in the future. The possibility of being able to assign multiple CNAMEs to the service was raised, and although technically feasible (with a few minor caveats) members of the group felt that this was unadvisable and would create confusion down the road. One suggestion was to limit it to two host name, one with a more obvious meaning to the casual observer (e.g. specialcollections.library.illinois.edu) as well as the less widely understood armarium.library.illinois.edu.