Director’s Report

March 2007

Federated Searching

The Reference Committee met on March 14, 2007 to work on the Board’s request that they evaluate federated searching products and make a recommendation. They have decided to conduct vendor demos of at least 3 products (MetaLib, WebFeat and Central Search) and will open the demos up to all interested members. They are working on an evaluation criteria and tool which will include speed, usability of results, ability to access the native search, access to full text, ability to dedup results, reporting, administration and customization, URL resolver, phrase searching, and authentication.

Sirsi SuperConference and News

Ann and I attended the Sirsi SuperConference in February. The abrupt departure of the Sirsi CEO just prior to the conference certainly made for some interesting speculation throughout the 3 days. But little was forthcoming from the company about either strategic direction or new leadership. What little information we did get about software development plans was altered just a couple of weeks later with Sirsi’s announcement of Rome – it’s new ILS product. While this does not, I think, impact us right away, it is certainly something we will have to watch closely. This announcement is most significant to Dynix/Horizon users who have been waiting for Horizon 8.X to be released for sometime now. This admission that the Horizon product line development will be abandoned is certainly disappointing for those customers. Rome will be built on the Unicorn foundation and that is good news for Unicorn customers. My hope is that, with the combined programming efforts focused in one direction, we will see accelerated advancement of new capabilities of interest to us. We’ll be watching this closely.

Office Space

I have been working with Pat Masi of Weichert Commercial Realty to assess the marketplace in Middlesex County for office space. We (Ann and I) have looked at several options. All would provide a savings over our current lease, although in varying degrees. We have looked at space in Edison, Piscataway and Woodbridge. We are scheduled to also see some space in North Brunswick. Space in Piscataway seems to be the most affordable and offer the highest potential savings thus far. I expect to have a more detailed report for you next month. If there are specific proposals to be considered I will have Pat Masi attend the April meeting to respond to your questions.

Activity Report

In December we made 15 troubleshooting visits to 8 different libraries. Other measures of activity include:

1. New Items Added 21082

2. Bib Records Added by LMxAC 1922

3. New Bib Records Added (Total) 4053

4. New User Records Added 3728

5. Brief Record Upgraded to full MARC 154

6. Duplicate records merged 3619

7. Inventory Reports 1

8. API reports 4

9. Downtime: There was no unplanned System down time, but iBistro was down for approximately 5 hours patches were applied to address daylight savings time issues. The downtime was on a Sunday evening and early morning before the libraries opened.

Meetings

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

Meeting with PALSPlus Committee Feb. 12

LMxAC Board Meeting Feb 15

Sirsi SuperConference Feb. 18 - 21

Meeting with Realtor Mar. 1

Meeting with Jinny Baeckler Mar. 1

Meeting with Realtor Mar. 6

Meeting with Finance Committee Mar. 8

Meeting with Realtor (tour of office space) Mar. 9

Meeting with Reference Committee Mar. 14

World Cultures Conference Mar. 15

Respectfully Submitted,

Eileen M. Palmer

Executive Director