Minutes for 03/10/2015

E-Content Committee Minutes March 10th, 2015

Agenda Items from February 10th meeting that needed to be discussed at the March 10th meeting. 2.2 Britannica eBooks - Do we want to purchase "youth library collection, applied science collection, etc." – Jimmy

• We need a couple of volunteers to look up what Britannica is providing and give some thoughts to whether these eBooks are suitable for the Marmot shared collection, or if they are so particular that they might only be needed by a couple of libraries than Marmot does not need to approach this as a consortium. If that is the case you would buy these items on your own. If two people want to volunteer to look at these eBooks to state where they are interesting enough in the catalog of what is offered and put thought into whether Marmot should pursue this or make a statement back to the member libraries to say that Marmot does not need to get involved at this time and you should all do what you want with these eBooks. Britannica is new to us and none of these eBooks have been added to the Marmot shared collection.
• Jo – My children’s librarians love Britannica, so I will volunteer.
• Chris – I love Britannica all around. I would be glad to investigate with Jo.
• Jimmy – I will forward to Jo and Chris the information I got from Britannica, if you will look at it. At the next meeting either present the recommendation for what Marmot should buy, or say we would love to do this but we need more involvement by people who will actually be paying for it. We might want to do this like we did with McGraw-Hill with an ad hoc purchase where we identified a couple thousand dollars’ worth of content and maybe a half dozen libraries throw money into a hat and we bought the content. That is not a sustainable model, but what we did last time. What we do that with Britannica this time stay tuned.

2.3 Gutenberg collection - Do we want to expand on the CLiC base of ~400 titles? –Jimmy

• Years ago we collected the 400 titles in Gutenberg that Clic cataloged. We have not added to that collection. Now, there a thousands of Gutenberg titles out there in a repository of eBooks that comes with no metadata. One of the questions before us is whether we want to work more proactively to gather into our eBook collection more of the Gutenberg collection. They are all open access out of copyright and free, but labor involved will be for use to catalog them. Mark Noble is discussing with the New York library what they have been doing with Gutenberg. They have been working on interesting ways to come up with jacket art for items that do not have jacket art with any link that we can link to like Google Books. My sense is that Clic cataloged the ones that had the most immediate value like classics. Any comments, or are there two people out there who are interested enough in Gutenberg to look at more of what is available and give some thought about what effort it would take for us to catalog more than what Clic has already done? Mary Katherine do you have an opinion?
• Mary Katherine – I do have an opinion that it would be a huge cataloging task. My questions has to do with Pika and the absorption of the Overdrive site into Pika where we had a separate Overdrive site with a link. Now with Pika there is a link to online collection. There is no way to easily find the Gutenberg titles through our OPAC.
• Jimmy – There is actually a way to find the titles, but we are not making this as obvious as Overdrive was making it. We could make it more obvious. That would be the type of question to put in the hands of two people who care and maybe you (Mary Katherine) are one of them?
• Mary Katherine – I care because they are an extension of our max access collection with classics for the schools to access those things that are on the High School reading list. Jimmy – Lets do two things. 1) If you go to the opac.marmot.org and click Go. You will get the facets on the side. Click on eContent Source and click more to see the Gutenberg titles. There are 414 Gutenberg titles that are in the catalog today. They are in Sierra now, where we want to put the future MARC records whether in Sierra or Pika is a technical question we can answer later. 2) How much harder do we want to work as a consortium to get more of the Gutenberg titles in the catalog? We do need metadata and we do need to put it somewhere. Finding that metadata somewhere else is a research project. Does anyone care enough about Gutenberg to find ways to grow our collection? Do I have two volunteers to talk more about Gutenberg offline?
• Jimmy – No volunteers, so we are not doing anything more with Gutenberg for the foreseeable future. There is stuff we need to do to tide up the Gutenberg collection. There is an effort we identified internally that is a housekeeping chore with the project Gutenberg. We should not disenfranchise the people of the E-content Committee who are not here today for this meeting. Of the people who attended the meeting there is no interest in doing more with the Gutenberg collection. Get in touch with me (Jimmy), If you did not attend the meeting and you do care about adding titles to our Gutenberg collection.

2.4 McGraw-Hill eBooks - renewal? –Jimmy

• We did buy a bunch of McGraw-Hill books a year ago. Mark Noble reported to this committee the stats that anybody can get out of Pika for circulation. McGraw-Hill’s own circ stats that come out of their own server are zero for Marmot, because they don’t actually check eBooks out. We check them out of Pika. We do the circulation out of Pika. We check them out of the Adobe Content server that we maintain for this purpose. The question is that we bought a bunch of McGraw-Hill a year ago, some of the titles are nonfiction for which new editions might be valuable. They might be growing new titles that we do want to pay attention to. Same question as the last two topics, who cares?
• Jo – They are checking out. I’m not sure if I want to grow the collection. However, if there are newer editions to the titles we already own we might want to think about repurchasing the updated editions.
• Jimmy – What would Jo and Chris think about looking at Britannica and McGraw-Hill together as a unit? It’s the same purchase model both ways. What we do with McGraw-Hill and how much we put in to maintain the collection is question one. What we do with Britannica or the next eBook vendor to follow the same pattern. Chris are you okay with me dumping McGraw-Hill into your conversation with Jo as well as Britannica?
• Chris – If Jo is okay, I’m okay.
• Jo – I think I can make it work.
• Jimmy – I will forward information from both publishers to both Jo and Chris. None of these are urgent.

E-Content Committee Chair nomination - Jimmy

• Some of you may not be aware that we signed yet another new member. The Pine River library in Bayfield, Co, called two weeks ago. They called us to say they just migrated from a new system and realized that was a mistake. They asked how fast can they migrate to Marmot? The Marmot staff talked it over realized we could migrate them very fast because they had their own standalone Millennium system. There was a special meeting of the board last week to approve their membership. I asked their director, Shelley Walchak, to chair this committee and she said yes. Shelley use to manage the Overdrive collection under the AC/DC consortium. She facilitated Marmot’s strategic plan in 2008 for 2009 – 2012. She is well versed in all the topics for this committee. If it’s okay for you all to nominate Shelley as Chair of this committee, than I will have Gayle Gunderson who is the President of the Board. The President of the Board is the one who approves a committee Chair. Any questions? Do you want to talk about it, object or support?
• Response to Nominating Shelley Walchak as the E-content Committee Chair: Some approved vocally. Others approved by chat. No one who attended the meeting objected.

Mark Haley at Marmot to discuss what the new changes to Zinio will mean to patrons and members, how to get the complete list of titles and marketing materials for your library. Members who are not part of Zinio were instructed that they did not have to stay.