2CUL TSI Steering Committee / Working Group Leads Meeting
April 22, 2014
Attending: Gary Branch, Adam Chandler, Sarah Elman, Kate Harcourt, Irina Kandarasheva, Jesse Koennecke, Jason Kovari, Jim LeBlanc, Colleen Major, Chew Chiat Naun, Matt Pavlick, Robert Rendall, Alan Schaplowski, Deb Warfield, Mark Wilson
1. Kate summarized recent developments regarding the 2CUL MOU and Alma. Although the basic text of the MOU has been approved by both library administrations, a recent discussion about 2CUL operating principles, issues, and possible use cases with legal and financial officials at Columbia prompted a request for more detail in this document. This addendum is required to address issues such as dispute resolution and liability related to cross-institutional work. The good news is that everyone who has a say in the MOU at both institutions supports the principles of what we're aiming to do. Regarding Alma, Columbia Counsel and financial officers are now reviewing the draft contract and hope to complete this work by the end of the month.
2. Jim talked about the recent reorganization of Cornell's Library Technical Services. Three events led to this restructuring: the change in status of two key members of the LTS Ordering Unit (Lois Purcell's phased retirement on April 15th and Mafalda Moore's full retirement on June 30th), Bill Kara's request to reduce the scope of his administrative and supervisory responsibilities, and Boaz Nadav-Mane's departure for Leiden, Netherlands and a position with OCLC on April 14th. The relative secrecy regarding the planning for this reorg, to the extent that Cornell did not involve Columbia, illustrates one of the potential limiting factors in working together with the kind of "virtual" integration 2CUL is trying to achieve -- more precisely, where do we draw the line for the "need to know."
3. Mark and Gary reported on the recent efforts of the Batch Processing Working Group. They highlighted their group's focus on pre-Alma clean-up of Voyager data and their review of Cornell's LS Tools software for possible use at Columbia. Regardless of whether Columbia implements this software now or not, it is likely to be useful (and necessary) for both institutions after we migrate to Alma. See the Batch Processing wiki pages for more extensive notes on their work so far this year.
4. Matt reported on what the Ordering and Receiving Working Groups have been up to. Joint investigation into the possibility of a shelf-ready firm order program with Casalini revealed that such a program would not yield any savings for Cornell. The groups have recently compiled a list of vendors with which the two libraries have approval programs. Columbia just lost their hard-to-find order specialist, so as at Cornell this function will be in flux at Columbia this year.
5. Alan and Deb reminded us of the narrow focus and diminishing workload of their respective print-centered operations. Although their regular phone conversations have been enlightening, there is not a whole lot the Print Serials Working Group can do right now in Voyager.
6. Jason reiterated the updates from the Non-MARC Metadata Working Group that he and Melanie Wacker presented during the TSI session during Cornell's Career Development Week: coordinating the programs of our respective Metadata Working Groups, development of a formalized 2CUL metadata consulting network, and conducting an environment scan for metadata capture and editing tools.
7. Irina and Naun summarized the outcomes of a very productive face-to-face meeting of the Cataloging Working Group at Cornell on April 16th. Among the topics covered at that meeting were Columbia's archiving of contemporary composer websites, Cornell's use of FAST subject headings, plans for sharing documentation more easily, how to approach Cornell's "Romanian gift," and shared approaches to authority control. Detailed minutes from this meeting will soon be posted to group's wiki page.
8. Jesse reported that the preliminary work to implement together the consortial version of Serials Solutions 360 Resource Manager (ERM) is underway, in spite of a frustrating delay in getting access to a sandbox version. This project is currently the main focus of the E-Resources Working Group.