TSI Administrative Team meeting, April 22, 2014

Ezra Delaney joined us for this meeting.

Bob provided more detail about what transpired at the internal Columbia meeting last week to discuss the operating principles, issues, and use cases regarding 2CUL cross-institutional work:

  • We're going to need to craft an addendum to the 2CUL MOU to cover such things as dispute resolution and liability. For various activities we will need to sign "statements of work" (which will not need to be reviewed by Columbia's Counsel if the terms are covered under the 2CUL MOU and the addendum) to ensure that we have the same understanding of shared activities and cross-institutional work.
  • Columbia is searching for the best way to identify and resolve any potential union concerns  Gail and Jessica (from the Columbia Counsel's office) will be meeting with Columbia's new director of labor relations to arrange a meeting with union leadership on 2CUL.
  • Most of the remaining time was spent on what constitutes "prioritization of work"/"supervision."  All agreed that cross-institutional assignment of work, training, and prioritization of tasks do not represent supervision and are okay to perform across 2CUL.
  • Existing language in the 2CUL MOU allows Columbia to proceed with Alma negotiations.  Columbia Counsel and central financial officers have agreed to add their comments to the draft Alma contract by the end of the month.

Bob, Kris, Gail, and Joe Harney will draft the additional language for the MOU, then send that text to Beryl Abrams and to Xin (who will share with Pat McClary at Cornell).  Bob will double-check with Kris to verify that we can move forward with Alma negotiations.

We need to appoint the Governing Board to which the 2CUL MOU refers, as well as compile the by-laws for the agreement, so we will have all of this high-level documentation in place before we move forward with TSI more aggressively.  Bob and Xin will speak to Jim N. and Anne about appointing the Governance Board to direct this work.

All agreed that Kate and Jim L. should now share the TSI MOU with JSMIN, even though it may need to be amended in conjunction with the final, expanded version of the 2CUL MOU.

Regarding payment for cross-institutional work, we reaffirmed that there are three ways to approach this: small initiatives that are not worth worrying about (e.g. help with cataloging a handful of Thai maps), ongoing arrangements that will require their own statement of work (e.g. the current Korean cataloging arrangement), and more open-ended work (e.g. Columbia support for Cornell's data migration to Serials Solutions' consortial ERM).  For the last, Ezra recommends a flexible, but written agreement that estimates a "not-to-exceed" dollar amount to be reimbursed based on percentage of effort or actual time expended, with the understanding that the agreement may need to be adjusted depending on how much work is actually required.  Bob reminded us that it will be useful to track this work anyway, for the purposes of measuring the relative costs/benefits of individual 2CUL initiatives.  Regarding the help Columbia is supplying to complete the preliminary work required for Cornell's data migration to the Serials' Solutions' ERM, we agreed that to offset the additional cost Cornell is incurring for purchasing the basic system (which Columbia already has), Columbia will provide its staff support gratis, though we do want to track hours nonetheless.

Addendum (4/29):

In an email following the meeting (on 4/25), Xin summarized the discussion on reimbursement as follows:

"Re reimbursement, we decided we will not create a 2CUL currency. Below are a combination of decisions we made in our meeting and follow-up thoughts of mine. (I’m using the language from staff’s perspective, e.g. “hours” etc.)

  1. If reimbursement is not expected and knowing how much a project/pilot/activity costs is unimportant, staff don’t have to track anything.  
  2. If reimbursement is expected and we have no cap for the project expenditure, staff should track their work either by hour or by percentage of effort.
  3. If reimbursement is expected and capping the project expenditure is important, staff should track their work either by hour or by percentage of effort."

We will further consult with Library Accounting reps to develop a template for the "statement of work" documents required to formalize these agreements and a designated place to archive these documents, which will apply not only to TSI but to all 2CUL work.


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