Meeting Minutes for 09/13/2022

Meeting Schedule & Demo Day (Adam)

• Adam had observed over the last year that we are having pretty regular presentations from potential vendors but we are seeing very little uptake of the vendors that we arrange to come and present.   
• Adam wants to make sure that we are making the most of everyone’s time. For this reason, he chatted with the board about moving the ECC meetings back to quarterly like they were a couple of years ago.  
• Moving to quarterly meetings, we will need to address a workaround for vendors. Adam and the Board thought it might be a good approach to try to have a demo day instead of having vendors present at random times throughout the year when libraries have already set their budgets or not even thinking of their budgets.  
•  The demo day would have a stack of vendors during a time that makes sense for libraries when building their budgets for the next fiscal year. Most public libraries are on a calendar fiscal year with a couple of public libraries on a July/June fiscal year. The academic libraries are predominantly in the July/June fiscal year. 
• Adam hopes this approach will help us start to separate out some public, academic, and school library vendor content. This can help with more focused presentations which will allow some of the libraries to skip out on the vendor content not relevant to their library type. 

Vendor Day & ECC Meeting Change Discussion

• Oliver asked how Marmot distinguishes between vendors for public and academic libraries.
  • We have a general vendor questionnaire form that we have all vendors fill out. This form asks if the vendor content is for academic, public, or school libraries.
  • Also, some vendors will offer the content for all three library types, but it may be a different rep for each library type.
• Alison asked if this would be an all-day vendor demo day.
  • Adam originally envisioned it as an all-day event. The full day is just an idea at the moment to help maximize everyone’s time.
  • There was a suggestion from several libraries to have the demo day be two half-day events instead.
• Adam mentioned that the next step would be that instead of an ECC chair we have a small group of representatives from the libraries that would help plan the demo day or demo days. 
  • Demo Days volunteers would help with dates within the year that makes the most sense for everyone.
  • Volunteers would work with the full group to start to identify the vendors we would like to pull in, and work with Tammy to schedule those vendors. 
  • If you are interested in helping plan the vendor days, please send an email to Adam or Tammy. 
• Jo mentioned that there may be times when a quarterly meeting will not work and other meetings may need to happen. This could be something for OverDrive or another vendor that affects a group of members where email is not adequate. It may be a smaller group of people who are affected by the vendor change and not the entire group. 
• Leah suggested that it is useful to learn about vendors at any time even if we wait until the following year to subscribe.
• Adam mentioned that with the six libraries from the Flatirons libraries that are joining Marmot that we may have content providers like the Washington Post that we at Marmot might consider. We may be able to take the list of what Flatirons have for current vendors to invite them to our vendor demo days. By combining forces we can leverage even better-buying power.
• For the information in the chat, Adam suggested targeting the demo days for August which might be the best happy medium for everyone. 
  • Carol replied that if we plan to do it more than once, she would suggest August and January. 
  • Adam replied that may be specifically for academics to see about doing something in the winter time frame.  
• Adam mentioned that most academic libraries do end-of-year one-time spending. He asked if collectively we would like the group that helps plan the vendor demo days. 
  • Carol mentioned that they do something like that in April and May to purchase eBooks
  • Lisa chatted about their purchase from JStore through the Alliance.  

Action Item: Marmot will start working in the new year towards having a group of representatives putting together these vendor demo days with an eye toward having the bulk of it done in August with some more focused content that may be provided in January or February. Marmot will have each vendor fill out the vendor questionnaire form.

Best Time of Year for Demo Days (2 half days)

• Oliver (CCU) - July/August (If it’s quarterly at the beginning or end of the fiscal year)
• Carol (Aims) -  Winter - November/December/January/February (depends on the content)
• Alison (WPL) - Summer
• Lisa (Pine) - Fall
• Leah (Delta) -  Summer
• Nancy (Bemis) - July
• Lisa (CMU) -  August 
• Jo (Vail)  - Summer
• Shelly (SD51) - July/August

Volunteers for Vendor Demo Days

• Selene Gardner (Englewood)
• Tallie Gray (Grand)
• Leah Morris (Delta)
• Tracie Seurer (CMU)

Other Business

• The Flatirons libraries (Boulder, Broomfield, Lafayette, Louisville, Loveland) will come on board as individual members on January 1, 2023. Marmot is working with them on a transition plan. It is a very different project from a normal migration because Marmot already has their Sierra server in our server room. 
• Our last vendor demo was for the Palace Project. Tammy sent them all the information they needed to give us pricing. She has not heard back from them. Tammy wondered if she should contact them again or wait. 
  • The people that replied are good with waiting for them to get back to us.
• Discussion about CPC limits for OverDrive
  • A subset of members purchase CPC titles from OverDrive
  • More of the bigger questions for another meeting might be how their purchasing of titles that are only accessed by their patrons might affect the entire shared collection.
  • Adam mentioned that Yuliya wanted to experiment with extending the number of checkouts for CPC titles, so maybe she can report back at the December meeting.    

The next meeting is on December 13 at 1 p.m.

• Agenda 
  • Discuss the OverDrive Blackstone Audio and OverDrive Magazine Renewal