Notes from 2CUL TSI Steering Committee Meetings, May 14-15, 2013

SITE VISIT: NYPL LIBRARY SERVICES CENTER, BOOKOPS (5/14)

• BookOps is shared technical services between NYPL & Brooklyn PL, with focus on circulating material
• Expect annual savings of $3M - $3.5M that NYPL will devote to other strategic initiatives; total budget was $14.3M / year
• Process approximately 2M items / year
• Hired Booz-Allen as planning consultant (not a library consultant)
• NYPL was already very efficient and had excess capacity
• Went live on May 6^th: BPL staff moved to LSC; most staff already knew each other from one context or another
• Hired a project manager to implement plan (a one-year temp; hired someone w/ experience in military logistics); he was so good they hired him to do logistics for LSC
• Like RECAP, named one of the partners as the single host (NYPL)
• Staff involved pre-implementation
• Morphed from steering committee to planning committee to implementation committee
• So far, focus is on co-location (they’re in one place), not co-engineering (standardization); no mandated timeline on co-engineering – need funding (e.g. for shared LMS)
• Impressive sorting machine that reads barcodes on completely processed material and distributes by library & call number range; used for branch material (not “research” material) only
• Did pay some attention to minimizing impact on staff identity
• Needed to negotiate with two unions to allow for cross-institutional reporting
• BPL staff “became employees of NYPL”
• NYPL and BPL IT have been working together to provide support; DBM at LSC does record loading and some scripting
• Queens PL was part of original plan, but opted out and decided simply to implement additional best practices
• NYPL has 90 branches and BPL has 60 branches, and they sometimes order multiple copies for some branches
• [Some gains specific to co-location and public library issues and workflows]
• Will send us electronic versions of PPT and handouts
• Stressed importance for them of implementing a shared LMS; also, pay attention to effects on staff
• Discovered that support systems need to work together (accounting, HR, etc.); assumptions were that legal and financial issues would be easier to address than they were

MEETING WITH WORKING GROUP LEADS (5/15)

• We asked the leads if they felt like we were all on the right track and the general sense was that we are. Melanie reported that they are inventorying procedures. Joyce reported that Troubleshooting is testing Callisto. Batch processing is translating procedures for each other.
• TSI needs to discuss a concern brought forward by Ordering that it is hard to know what to do about CJK. Other groups agreed. It was suggested that TSI talk to Sarah. A suggestion was made to add Sarah to the Steering Committee.
• The centralized/decentralized situation was discussed with a reminder to consider our outliers especially in areas such as checkin and database maintenance.
• Sharing documentation continues to be a barrier. Rob Cartolano and Dean are looking at interim solutions. All new documentation must be accessible to both institutions. More work is needed on the ideal home(s) for 2CUL documentation and procedures.
• Time table so far seems doable.
• The Union Environment document was discussed. We will use ART (assigning revising training) in place of the term functional supervision. We may want to take the word redundancy out of TSI documentation as it has a negative connotation and look at our choice of words in general. Non Professional has a negative connotation in a non-union environment.
• We will talk with Nisa about statistics and production. Issues include how long to count, what to count, when to sample, what to do when we don't count for efficiency, e.g., pick and scan.
• Rich Entlich at Cornell works 25% of his time on 2CUL and can also help.

TSI STEERING COMMITTEE (5/15)

• We discussed standardizing documentation and using Visio for flow charts vs. Powerpoint.
• Jim and Kate will write a proposal for using Alena Ptak Danchak 2 days a week on a TSI problem or brainstorm about Phase 2.
• We discussed the BookOps field trip and issues for Bob and Xin. Issues for Bob and Xin are governance, Alma, fall out on technical services from other 2CUL initiatives, boundary issues between functional groups.
• We agreed to launch Original cataloging on Monday and invite Nisa.

MEETING WITH JEFF CARROLL & KIZER WALKER (5/15)

      2CUL Collection Development collaboration --

• Rob Davis has been doing CD for both institutions; also doing reference and meeting w/ faculty at both places; has been traveling to Cornell quarterly; Slavic studies at Cornell have been pleased with arrangement after some initial skepticism; strategy has been to broaden the collection with savings generated; impact on TS has resulted in an additional 0.50 FTE needed to handle increase in acquisitions
• Sean Knowlton doing selection and reference for Iberian and Latin American for both institutions; working w/ approval vendor in Colombia to do joint APPR for both institutions; if that works out, will try to extend this kind of approach to Brazil and Argentina; issue of where Cornell will get money for vendor records that are available from these vendors
• Exploring possibility of Columbia input regarding Southeast Asia collection at Cornell and maybe reference services for SEA
• Looking forward, have identified four more areas of potential collaboration: linguistics, women’s studies, English & American literature, Middle Eastern studies
• Would like to develop 2CUL cooperative collaboration document after the Stanford / Berkeley model
• Got 2CUL deal on e-book collections from Oxford University Press
• Hoping to develop a collaborative way to look at trial subscriptions and managing feedback and decisions with a wiki; could possibly just open up the Cornell trials wiki; this is an area where TS will need to be involved; Jeff and Kizer will keep Bill Kara and Joyce McDonough in the loop; good place to start would be with NERL offers
• Exploring possibility of Cornell joining MARLI (Manhattan Area Research Library Initiative) - having a Cornell representative join the meetings?
• Looking at Eastview collection of ebooks as a 2CUL / MARLI purchase
• From Borrow Direct “Summit,” idea of working with Harrassowitz to provide comprehensive collection building across BD libraries
• Kate: is there a wiki for 2CUL Collection Development?  Not yet, but Jeff and Kizer will look into this
• Work on allowing access to Cornell's and Columia's approval plan inventories in order to compare collections strenghts
• Columbia and Cornell may want to jointly work on selectors guidlines and training
• Columbia will be looking at Cornell's selector's statments model in VIVO. 

MEETING WITH 2CUL PROJECT DIRECTORS (5/15)

• Issues for Bob and Xin: growing awareness of need for 2CUL governance structure and good communication among different library divisions engaged in 2CUL; need to involve divisions that aren’t “integrating” into the discussions early; working groups eager to explore options that go beyond their charges, especially in regard to new systems and software (e.g. e-resources folks looking at Callisto)
• Rob and Dean have been asked to develop an identity management plan for TSI access issues