KYVL VLAC Minutes 10/3/03

KY Virtual Library Advisory Committee Minutes
1:00 p.m., October 3, 2003
Frankfort, KY

Present: Arne Almquist, Diane Culbertson, Blenda Fields, Lisa Rice, Tanzi Merritt, Carol Diedrichs, Cathy Reilender, Enid Wohlstein, James Nelson, Laura Davison for Bill Hansen, Janet Stith, Chela Kaplan, Norma Northern

Absent: Dennis Taulbee, Lee Van Orsdel, Kathy Hamperian, Hannelore Rader, Cherry Berges

Cherry Berges will be replacing Larry Rees as the KCTCS representative but she was unable to attend today’s meeting.

Introduction of Chela Kaplan, the new representative from the Education Professional Standards Board (EPSB).

In our fall enrollments, we have over 16,000 students and about 12,000 are academic credit-seeking. The others come from Education Professional Standards Board (EPSB) and Adult Education. We’ve also initiated our e-commerce function. EPSB had requested the functionality for accepting credit cards so that their teachers could enter the credit card number and enroll into the professional development courses.

The Adult Education portion of Kentucky Virtual University – the Kentucky Virtual Adult Education site -- won a national award for most innovative use of technology from The National Association of the State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO). Randolph Hollingsworth and Cheryl King went to Phoenix to accept the award.

We are receiving information requests from the State Auditor’s office. They are reviewing the activities and budget of KYVU and conducting a performance audit. We have been supplying the information as requests are received.

In this year’s budget submitted by the Council, which includes all the budgets for the public universities, we have requested debt service funding for the library databases. For databases, debt service means instead of a dollar-to-dollar buy, we would be able to leverage that in a five to six year bond on information technology items. We would be able to multiply our buying power by five. If this goes through and there is no increase to what the state is contributing now to our database expenditure, we could still be at an advantage. Norma encouraged everyone to tell every legislator to make the databases bond-funded.

On October 9th, Sue Moore, Jennifer Marsh and Norma will be attending a games technology conference. KYVU initiated bringing together a group of people to discuss creating some new partnerships and initiatives. We would like to see an economic cluster in the Ohio/West Virginia/Kentucky area. We would also need to develop academic programs to support this up and coming industry with graduates that would be qualified to work in the industry. We would like to meet with businesses that produce products for the Nintendo’s and X Box’s, those types of play or simulation technologies, but we also want to investigate how we can incorporate this technology into corporate academic learning. Eventually, the kids that have been playing with this technology from age five or six are not going to be satisfied to sit in the classroom. They will want to be much more engaged on many more different levels. We hope that if we can get enough synergy going, we can have a true big conference on it and try to become a center. Currently, there are a very few schools offering degrees in game or simulation technology. Shawnee State, where we are meeting, offers a degree in game technology. Right now, there are just a few schools with this type of program - University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon. Very little is available in the U.S. We are excited to be a part of that and hope that we can get a lot of interest in all sorts of education ventures.

Private/Indpendent K-12 Schools:
In the summer, we announced to VLAC that private or independent K-12 schools could become KYVL members because our definition of schools in our database RFP was not specific to public schools. We had inquiries for the past year or more from some independent K-12 school systems that wanted to join. Enid has made contact with these schools to inquire if they still wanted to join KYVL. We now have Lexington Christian Academy, the Lexington School and Owensboro Catholic High Schools as members. We are really happy about it and they are really happy about it. Lexington Christian Academy has about 1500 students and has quite a few locations around the Lexington area and they are very pleased that we were able to bring them in. Lexington Catholic High School has been invoiced but their librarian is working on the approval. These four schools came to us and had asked. We have not done any type of campaign yet. There are 282 KDE certified independent schools in the state. When it’s time for the next database RFP, we may see an increase in fees from the two vendors which differentiate between public and private K-12. We send a welcome letter and a packet with bookmarks, fact sheets, mouse pads, etc.. We anticipate positive responses from the parents of these students rather than having to go to through their public library.

Work Groups:
The new work groups, ADA, Outreach, and Portal, met around the first week of September. We have the full membership complement that we should have to represent our user communities. We had been lacking AIKCU and KCTCS representation on the three groups and we have those now. Info Lit and Government Information Access are coming back to life. For the Information Literacy Work Group, we have quite a few projects to discuss such as reviewing our “How To Do Research Tutorial.” We have approval for instructional design money and we would like to evaluate our tutorial, possibly break into different modules or do it completely as an ANGEL course, so that our KYVU instructors, whomever, can bring it into their ANGEL/KYVU classes. Also, we are probably all aware that Information Literacy Assessment is very much an issue on a national level, whether its K-12 or academic. The group will talk about assessment tools. Can we create some tools that will tie into our tutorial – that sort of thing.

Government Information Access will also meeting soon and evaluate our current government resources and access. Can we pursue any funding or grants that will help us in a conversion project to get these into the library systems, so that people know that they exist and know that they don’t have to be onsite at a repository to get the material. The group has about ten topics to discuss. We’ll keep you updated on that.

KYVL Database Use/Contributions and Database Costs:
Enid distributed a two-sided handout -- one side is KYVL Database Vendor Costs, from FY01-02 through FY03-04. The costs reflect the database changes. Since we lost Sociological Abstracts, the Collections Workgroup chose two new databases to fill the gap. The group selected products that cover requested subject areas, based on our database assessment survey. We passed out this same document in the Spring. This revision shows the EBSCO has reduced its 3rd year contract price. Proquest amounts have increased because the two new databases chosen, International Index to Music Periodicals (full text) and Alt Press Watch, were Proquest products. The new Proquest databases became available October 1, 2003. Two new buttons for the native interfaces of these products are on our search page as they are not available in the classic Proquest interface yet. One comes from Chadwick Healy and the other comes from Softline. Over time they will be integrated into Proquest standard native interface but now they are separate.

On the reverse of that handout, we have database usage, another updated chart which was handed out in the Spring. In the last column, we now have our July 2002 through June 2003 search statistics. If you look and compare, we had just about 5.2 million searches in the FY01-02 period and FY02-03 we had 6.5 million. We’re pretty pleased – that’s a huge jump. But as far as percentage of usage, usage amounts are about the same. In FY02-03, usage was about 20% for public K-12 schools, 50% for public institutions and about 18% for private institutions. Public libraries were about 8% and special libraries were a little over 4%. The numbers have fluctuated a bit but not significantly as far as percentage of use by user community. We are working toward the December password change, having those new user communities like KCTCS, the independent K-12 schools, Adult Ed and there will be about 9 or 10 when we’re finished. We hope this will give us a better picture of usage – independent versus public K-12, since we are adding those new schools, KCTCS, academic, etc.

The second chart on this page, Database Usage vs. Annual Contribution, has been distributed to VLAC over the years, with updated numbers. It is basically informational to give a perspective of usage versus contribution. There have been discussions in the past about fees based on usage or some combination of usage and FTE.

Diane commented that the last time that we talked about contributions, VLAC discussed that more and more in the future, people are going to have to pay their own way. If our costs go up substantially, they are going to based on usage. The Contributions Subcommittee met to discuss contributions. When you look at it, there were some groups that are more than paying their way and some that were not. If we wanted to ever add and grow, we discussed that everyone is going to have to pay based on their usage. We believe the last discussion regarding fees ended with the fees would being based 50 percent on usage and 50 percent on FTE. But that has not yet been enacted.

We’re in the middle of fall training sessions. We used to do about 10 or 15 every fall but now that we are a smaller staff and Tanzi is our trainer, we had to cut back on that number. Six sessions are scheduled this fall and we’ll try to do at least four in the spring. Tanzi has been to Gateway CC, Western and Murray and trained 40 people in those three sessions – school librarians, teachers, and a few scattered throughout the other types of libraries. The sessions have gone really, really well this year. This year the interest level seems higher than in the past. They are interested in learning about KYVL, the databases and what we have on our site. Tanzi emphasized the enthusiasm of the participants in the sessions she’s conducted thus far. In October, there will be sessions in Lexington, Louisville and Lindsey Wilson. In the spring, we will try to do second sessions in Louisville and Lexington because those two always get filled up very, very quickly. Then we’ll probably do two sessions some where Eastern Kentucky, maybe as far as Pikeville. All the training materials are on our website.

Lydia Wells Sledge recently retired after 38 years in education. She is the one who was instrumental in securing the initial $300,000 funding from KDE for the Virtual Library. When the Department of Education could no longer pay that, she was the one who requested it from the KETS funds that are for the entire state. Some of the percentage of that goes back to the KDE and basically, most of the money that goes back to the KDE is not coming to the Virtual Library to cover the 312, 000 dollars. She is a real friend of the Virtual Library and has supported it from its inception. We would like to honor her on her retirement, because she has been such a good friend of KYVL.

The Resolution was approved at the August meeting. Diane will invite Lydia to the next VLAC meeting in December so we may present the framed resolution.

Amended bylaws were approved at the VLAC meeting in August. We had quorum that we could vote these changes in. We’ll have these posted on our website. We will also email them around to all our members. The three major items of note that we have added: The representative from Adult Ed, representative from EPSB and the third item that which is also significant, if you are not here three consecutive meetings and you don’t send an alternate, we will call you. Enid or the VLAC Chair, will call the representative to encourage that person to attend and remind the rep of their responsibilities to the group represented.

7. Work Group Updates

Collections (Davis):
Charlene mentioned the two new databases added in October. The International Index to Music Periodicals Fulltext and Alt-Press Watch are truly wonderful. Very small but very significant addition to our family of databases. They do directly represent some of the top requests expressed needs by our constituents. We’re very pleased. What we’re trying to do now is determine what the next step is in conjunction with the procurement process.

ADA (Wohlstein):
No chair has been selected yet. We did have a wonderful meeting and the first order of business for the ADA Work Group is to choose a Chairperson. One of the first projects is to come up with an accessibility statement. That’s step one. The first meeting was essentially “meet and greet” - not a whole lot to report there.

Endeavor (Wohlstein for Keller):
The workgroup met on 4 September. A new Incident Report system has been made available for users to login and look at open issues. KYVL can log in and see everyone’s open issues. If you’re from a particular institution member, you log in and see only your reports.

The work group had a lively discussion about the upgrade process. We think Endeavor needs to do a better job with the instructions and scripts for AIX libraries who upgrade on their own. Having the continuous OPAC is a major help during an upgrade. We discussed the need to upgrade to the next release as soon as it was ready, only if it included compatibility with AIX 5.X since IBM was dropping regular support for the 4.X versions in January. We can get pay-as-needed help support from IMB until we are on a release that supports AIX 5.X so we should be OK. It looks like next upgrade will be in Summer 2004. We will combine releases, if practical and safe to keep up with improvements in the system.

We also discussed editing the SLA to improve wording, using more specific criteria. We need to get some examples of what is being used elsewhere to meet the needs of the members as well as the sponsor of the project. We will try to get examples from other state consortia, but it would help if we also had examples of what Kentucky officials are looking for in an SLA. This will be the major agenda item at our December meeting, on the 5th.

A patch will be installed on Westlib on October 17th to upgrade the server. Eastlib will upgrade January 6th. The upgrade involves installing new versions of client software on all staff PC’s, as well as applying the patch to the server.

Portal (Wohlstein for Stapleton) :
Our Chair is on vacation. The group took a list of portal vendors and divided it amongst the Portal Work Group members and we are looking at the different products. Everyone two to four different vendors to investigate. We are using the Library of Congress Portals Application Issue Groups document which lists portal application functionalities. We went through the LCPAIG criteria for evaluation and said this pretty much covers all the desired and mandatory elements. At first glance, we really didn’t see any additions that we needed to make. 16 October is the next meeting. At the next Portal WG meeting, we’ll share our vendor reviews and start work on an RFI.

Outreach (Wohlstein):
We will be announcing a “Create a KYVL Public Service Announcement Video” Contest. The announcement will be sent to the students and coordinators of the Student Technology Leadership Programs in the public K-12 schools. STLP emphasized technology, leadership, community service, entrepreneurial skills and thought processes, doing good things for your community. STLP is

Elaine Harrison, the STLP coordinator at KDE, has shared some documents with us that she uses for contests like this one. The rubric covers issues like fitting a theme, including certain criteria, including music, whether it is original or copy-right free, having graphics or animation, etc. Our plan is to have the STLP kids create a fifteen second spot for television. We intend for one entry per school and if a school has multiple entries, they have to have an internal contest to select only one. The students will have their advisor helping and their school media specialist must serve as a consultant. They have to cover various issues and represent the diverse user community of KYVL. Elaine Harrison at KDE has been very helpful in putting together the criteria for the contest. We get a variety of PSA’s to distribute that benefits us but also showcases what these students are doing in this program. Elaine Harrison will let us give awards during the STLP award ceremony at the Kentucky Teaching and Learning Conference (KTLC) in March, which is the big conference for K-12 in the spring.

Virtual Library Users’ Group (Davison):
Our only announcement is the reception at KLA on Thursday, October 9th from 5:00 – 7:00pm at the Galt House. Bill has ordered refreshments and assured us that it will be a lot of fun.

The Kentucky School Media Association is meeting next weekend. The KYVL Tutorial for Kids was a finalist for an award.

Jim mentioned that the LCC Library certification course is now going to be offered through Solinet, so all the ten states in the southeast, Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands, will have access through KYVU. It’s a major thing for us to be proud of to address that one little niche. A lot of KYVU courseware try to do is to meet those different professions need for certification. Enid said the program wasn’t on the academic common market and it wasn’t on the electronic academic common market because it wasn’t approved program/certificate/degree. In the last month, LCC had that approved.

Future meeting dates: December 19th at 1:00 and February 20th

Meeting adjourned.