Document#06-77

 

Director’s Report

November 2006

 

 

Membership Visits

 

As of the end of December I will have visited all but 4 of our members.  I hope to have the remaining visits scheduled as soon as possible (although we are waiting for the construction to conclude before scheduling the Red Bank visit).

 

Software Upgrades and Enhancements

 

The major focus of our activities for the next month or so will be the upgrade to GL 3.1 Unicorn server and client.  See the attached memo for more detailed information on this project.

 

In addition to the planned Unicorn upgrade, it was decided after the SAM Users meeting to pursue an upgrade of the SAM software.  We have no timeline for this yet but will be working with Comprise on this project.

 

I will be coordinating the implementation of the Central Search portal software.  I asked Sirsi to put us on an implementation timeline.  At that time they indicated there were contracts that needed to be signed due to the change in the product from the Single Search to the Central Search (provided by Serials Solutions).  We are still working through this process but it seems that Serials Solutions does not have a pricing model for consortia.  This means that the 2nd and subsequent year costs for this product are considerably higher than we were originally quoted by Sirsi for the Single Search product.  When we agreed to the substitution of the Central Search product we apparently agreed to pay the higher future year costs.  I am working with our sales rep at Sirsi to see if we can change this.  The ongoing costs are several times over the ongoing costs in the original contract and are possibly prohibitive.  I am hopeful that we can resolve this issue.  I believe that since it was Sirsi’s decision to pull the product we purchased, it is there responsibility to come up with a pricing model that is comparable to what we originally were quoted.

 

Activity Report

 

In October we made 29 troubleshooting visits to 17 different libraries.  Other measures of activity include:

 

New Items Added                                                                             25,869

      Bib Records Added by LMxAC                                                         2,730

      New Bib Records Added (Total)                                                       5,095

            New User Records Added                                                                 4,367

 

System downtime was brief but there were random periods during the past month when member libraries and remote patrons were unable to log into iBistro.  The problem lasted for several days until ClientCare was able to determine that there was a problem with a log file on one of the 4 iBistro servers.  Sirsi sent us a new exe file that corrected the problem and will prevent this problem from occurring in the future.

 

Meetings

 

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

 

Meeting with Auditor                                                 October 12

Finance Committee Meeting                                               October 16

Circulation Meeting   - Monroe                                             October 17

MCC Library Tour and Visit                                     October 18

LMxAC Board Meeting                                                        October 19

Membership Meeting                                                           October 20

SAM Users Meeting                                                             October 20

BCCLS Trustee Program – Secaucus                               October 23

Matawan Aberdeen Library Tour and Visit                        October 26

E-Rate Workshop                                                                 October 30

Consortia Meeting (BCCLS, PALS, MAIN)                       November 1

LMX Meeting                                                                         November 3

LMxAC Staff Meeting                                                           November 3

Dunellen – Meeting to discuss loading records                November 7

 

 

 

Respectfully Submitted,

 

Eileen M. Palmer

Executive Director