Others present: Deborah Mazzolini, Belvedere-Tiburon Community Library; Carol Perot, Marin County Board of Library Commissioners; Philip Youngholm, MARINet Project Manager.
1. Minutes
The Board approved the minutes of the meeting of September 19, 1996.
2. Sign previously-approved budget transfers and invoice payments.
The Board signed memos to the County Auditor-Controller's Office requesting transfers from unbudgeted funds into the current year's budget, to pay for the bibliographic database upgrade ($70,000), renewal of the Library of Congress authorities subscription ($5,000) and the purchase of INNOPAC File Transfer Software ($4,130), and approving the initial payment of $24,473.75 to TALX Corporation for the bibliographic database upgrade.
3. Patron-placed holds
Testing is proceeding, but slowly. The Board approved the following schedule: through 12/1/96: Testing in Mill Valley and Fairfax through 1/1/96: Testing in additional (preferably all) libraries by 2/1/96: Introduction to public
4. Self-service renewals
The Project Manager reported that this seems to be going well. Staff have not reported problems.
5. Acquisitions
Belvedere-Tiburon has been in discussions with Baker & Taylor and Brodart, for two purposes: acquiring its opening-day collection, and acquiring materials on an ongoing basis. Since these activities have some impact on MARINet (particularly if cataloging provided by one of these vendors is to be loaded into the database), the Project Manager suggested that the vendors make their presentations to MARINet as a whole. The Board instructed the Project Manager to make arrangements for these meetings. [They were eventually scheduled for November 14 (Baker & Taylor) and November 21 (Brodart).]
6. Setting OCLC symbols during bibliographic upgrade
Since the OCLC database will be used for the bibliographic upgrade project, it will be possible to attach holdings symbols in that database for records upgraded. The Board decided not to attach holdings symbols in OCLC, largely because the libraries have not kept OCLC up-to-date with additions and deletions in the past, and have no current plans to do so.
7. Year-to-date and previous-year circulation totals in item records
These new fields in item records are useful for knowing whether an item has circulated recently, but they must be maintained by staff (that is, staff must run a program to roll the year-to-date circulations into the previous-year field; it does not happen automatically). The Adult Services Committee recommends that MARINet do this for all libraries at the end of the calendar year. The Board approved the committee's recommendation.
8. Direct loan survey statistics
The Board approved the Project Manager's suggestion that MARINet perform these calculations in the future, to ensure uniformity. The Board also decided that renewals shall be counted as circulations in calculating direct loan statistics.
9. MIDAS Steering Committee reorganization
Gail Haar reported that MIDAS is reorganizing its Steering Committee to be representative, rather than inclusive, and that MIDAS wants MARINet to be represented. She will ask MIDAS for a formal invitation.
10. Revision of Joint Powers Agreement; staffing plan
Each jurisdiction will ask its own counsel if MARINet can hire at-will employees under the existing JPA. Several options are still under investigation, including agency status, and status as a non-profit corporation.
11. Telecommunications study
The Board decided to take no action (for the time being) with regard to the Marin Community Foundation's grant. It may be desirable to request that the money be assigned to reorganization expenses, or to use it for a telecommunications evaluation next year when the Nike Project is well advanced.
12. Port and user-license pricing; deposit of moneys received for ports
Decisions on these matters were put off until after a special meeting at which the Project Manager will explain in-depth the issues involved. This meeting was scheduled for Tuesday,
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