Maine InfoNet Board Meetings, February 21, 2007

Date: Feb 21, 2007
Location: Maine State Library Conference Room
Time: 1:30 – 3:30
Next Meeting: March 28, 2007 1:30 p.m. Maine State Library

Members Present: Judy Frost, CMCC; David Nutty – Director of Libraries at USM; Sue Jagels, Eastern Maine Medical Center Health Science Library Director; Barbara McDade, Director, Bangor Public Library (via ATM); Clem Guthro, Director Miller Library, Colby College;; Karl Beiser, InfoNet CEO; Richard Thompson, CIO for the State of Maine; Gary Nichols, Maine State Librarian; Joyce Rumery, Dean of Libraries at UM Linda Lord (non member – recording secretary).

Members Absent: Ralph Caruso, CIO University of Maine System;; Steve Podgajny Director, Portland Public Library; Elizabeth Reisz, Library Supervisor York School Department; John McManus, Director Millinocket Public Library

1. Minutes from the January 31, 2007 meeting

January 31, 2007 were unanimously approved after two revisions (proper spelling of Cora Damon’s name and Liz Reiss moved to members-absent list) after a motion from Clem, seconded by Gary

2. CEO Report:

(Secretary’s additions are in italics in parentheses.)

Report to the Maine Info Net Board by Karl Beiser, Executive Director

Staff

Bonnie Collin has expressed an interest in continuing on a reduced time basis (8 hrs/week) if we are willing to divide the work between two people. I am considering the pros and cons of that.
Lack of sufficient staff time to do monthly statistics for database usage, both within Marvel and within the UMS collections, has become a sticking point. I am exploring options. (December statistics are not yet available. This used to be done by student employees but there is no money in the budget for them now. Discussion ensured about the important of timely statistics when asking for additional funding for MARVEL; Karl will reprioritize responsibilities to get statistics complied.)

Security

Unauthorized access to licensed databases has reached a level such that vendors are concerned. UMS access to the ACM database was briefly shutdown entirely due to obvious content-raiding originating overseas, but routed through several hacked staff desktop systems. Marilyn is exploring more robust security approaches and will have a recommendation soon. (This problem has not impacted MARVEL.)

Pilots

Google Scholar to debut in next 7-10 days. (Watch for this on the InfoNet test site.)
Espresso: Functionality of LibraryFind and several other initiatives was examined for possible overlap with objectives of Espresso development. Integration of index format and OAI-PMH harvesting facility from LibraryFind with Espresso design seems the best course. See Jonathan Williams’ attached report.
Google Books Lashup: Awaiting news on when the promised MaineCat data export functionality will be made available by Innovative. (Lashup = wiring things together)

Current Services

Minerva Relations

Work with Minerva group awaits March 2 meeting of Minerva Planning Group and Minerva Executive Committee, facilitated by Arnold Hirshon.
Planning group members are developing in greater depth the specifics of desired changes in the process of adding new libraries to Minerva.

Minerva Authority Processing

Sample data records resulted in small changes to processing specifications.
Data for reload has been made available as of 2/21/06
Reload process will likely take several weeks

SOLAR 2.0 re-launch in mid-March

Resource Records loaded 50,000 – 100,000 per day. (Jon Forest is in charge of the reload.)
Load profile for incoming records getting final testing

Introduction of SOLAR Express mid-April

Need to discuss one last time with ARRC contacts
Download, install and go approach

The URSUS upgrade to an Intel / Linux server platform and implementation of enterprise disk-based backup system has been rescheduled for early March in order to minimize the number of students and faculty inconvenienced by the migration. Work will begin at 5am. It was not possible, even for a fee, to reschedule the work to a weekend or night-time hours.

PR & Marketing

50,000 brochures printed (and donated) through Fogler library, ready to mail. (A cover letter will go with it.) Should discuss which libraries should receive them in print form:

272 public libraries
40 academic libraries
108 special libraries (includes 40 health science libraries)
211 high schools
103 middle/junior high schools
512 elementary schools

Sending URL labels with each mailing

Other Matters

Delivery Service: Survey to be posted next week

3. Project Espresso

Jonathan Williams report follows:

Project Espresso and other open-source metasearch projects:

I have spent some time over the past week comparing Project Espresso to other emerging open-source search applications. While there are certainly similarities among these applications, Project Espresso does occupy a unique place in the spectrum of development. It can, however, stand to integrate some of the technologies that are being used in other projects, notably Oregon State University’s LibraryFind.

In addition to LibraryFind, I looked at two other projects: OJAX, and MIT’s SIMILE. OJAX is a very useful application, but it appears to depend on repositories having OAI-PMH interfaces. While many of the repositories we plan to use do have such an interface, the catalog records do not. This means that OJAX apparently would not allow us to integrate URSUS ‘out-of-the-box.’

The SIMILE project turned out to be a dead end for this comparison. While the project includes many interesting tools for working with the semantic web, it does not really include a search tool. The closest tool in the SIMILE project is PiggyBank, which they describe as a semantic web browser. It is certainly an interesting tool, but not appropriate for our needs.

OSU’s LibraryFind was the application most similar in philosophy and execution to Project Espresso. Like Espresso, it is built with Ruby on Rails and the Ferret search index. Its results lists provide links directly to the original resource, which means fewer clicks for the patron than many commercial metasearch products. Unlike Espresso, however, LibraryFind provides true federated searching, submitting the same request to multiple search engines, which is an approach that our original work with Espresso has eschewed.

Like any other federated search project, LibraryFind requires the maintenance of a knowledgebase to keep track of which resources it can access, either through OAI-PMH or z39.50. LibraryFind does not rely on screen scraping, so the lack of reliability associated with that method of retrieving metadata is not a concern. Keeping a knowledgebase of valid connections would require significant set up and maintenance if used with commercial vendors’ databases, but might make sense if limited to repositories in digital libraries that are accessible through OAI-PMH.

Despite LibraryFind’s dependence on federated searching, it certainly provides a way for records to be harvested and indexed locally. This appears to be possible only for records available through OAI-PMH, however. This feature is not documented yet, so it is difficult to tell whether direct indexing of MARC records is planned or supported, but it does not appear to be the case. This means that we couldn’t index our records from URSUS or any other III catalog we choose to include. Unlike OJAX, however, LibraryFind would still give us access to these resources through z39.50.

How LibraryFind can inform the development of Espresso:

Despite LibraryFind’s emphasis on federated searching, it still bears many similarities to Espresso, and some of the technologies developed in the former would benefit the latter. I propose the following steps to integrate technologies from LibraryFind into Espresso:

Make Espresso indexes compatible with LibraryFind indexes
Using the same index structure as LibraryFind would mean that indexes could be easily shared between Espresso and an implementation of LibraryFind. This would be an advantage if we, or any library in Maine, decided to implement LibraryFind at some point in the future. An Espresso index could simply be exported to LibraryFind, or vice versa. This would enable one to search the indexes of either application from the same place. Even if we never implement LibraryFind, it would make sense to structure our indexes in the same way, as it would help to develop an standard for index structures in applications of this type.

Use the OAI-PMH harvesting facility from LibraryFind
Espresso’s OAI-PMH harvesting facility has not yet been developed. It might make sense to use the facility developed for LibraryFind, rather than write it from the ground up. I would need permission from the developers to do this, of course, but I do not anticipate any problems securing that permission, as LibraryFind is released as an open-source project.

Time Estimates:

The proposed integrations should not extend the development time on Espresso considerably. Currently, we have the end of March as our estimate for a working implementation of Espresso. I believe that this should be revised to the second week of April if we implement the integrations I propose.

Jonathan Williams
2/13/2007

4.Status of communication to all Maine libraries from MINB

Brochures are ready to go but with the addition of the InfoNet web address on the front. A cover letter will go with each mailing one for schools and one for libraries. Library Development staff will do the mailings.

5. Creating Board Committees

a. Finance Committee

Sue Jagels is the Chair and Dick Thompson will serve on this committee.
Role of Committee – there is no description of the duties of this committee in the by-laws. What should this committee do? (1) Monitor the financial status of Maine InfoNet; (b) capture expenditures; (c) Work on budget for next year; (d) Project expenditures and sources of funding (revenues, grants, etc.). A deficit is probable in next year’s budget because of personnel.
FY08 Financial Planning (See above)

b. Resource Sharing Committee

The bylaws describe the duties of this committee. This committee may be divided into subcommittees including one that focuses on e- resources.

Walk-in borrowing issues
Delivery Service Contract – This contract is nearly up for renewal. How do we approach this?
Cooperative Collection Development Strategie
Potential “last copy center”
Committee members should include – if possible – Kevin Davis, chair of the Minerva lending/borrowing committee; Barbara McDade, ARRC director; and Dean Corner, Director of MSL’s Reader and Information Services.
Board members should consider the group(s) each represents and who should be on each committee. Non-board members can be asked. Please submit suggestions toDavid Nutty.
. E-resources - David, Linda Lord, and Judy offered to be on this committee.
Coordination/facilitation/Process with multi-interests

Should we create all committees at once? Clem responded, no, since the Board can’t deal with six committees reporting all at once.

6. Legislative Update

Gary Nichols reported on library-related bond issues and legislation. A complete list of these with descriptions may be found at: http://www.maine.gov/msl/libs/legislation.htm

Meeting dates: All meetings will be held at MSL and will go from 1:30 to 3:30.

March 28, 2007
April 18, 2007
May 23, 2007

The meeting was adjourned at 3:30

Respectfully submitted,

Linda Lord, Recording Secretary

For the Public

For Librarians