Meeting Minutes for 03/10/2020

E-Content Committee Meeting
03/10/2020
Minutes

SimplyE App by Minitex Demo - (Paul Swanson, University of Minnesota)

Minitex is working on trying to increase adoption of the app in the library community, help libraries deploy into the platform, as well as add features that would be of special interest to academic libraries. Just to highlight they are doing more than working on academic functionality.  

Demo Recording

• When a library purchases a Macmillan title with its Advantage account, it does not get shared with any other library.
• When a patron goes to Marmot OverDrive and searches the collection, they would not see any Advantage Macmillan titles unless they were logged in, and their library purchased it.
• Each library contributed to the fund to help purchase Macmillan shared titles that any patron would see without having to log in.
• We have plenty of money in that fund for purchases.
• Liz would like to encourage people who want to purchase a Macmillan title to send that information to Alysa so she can purchase the shared title at the low $30 cost.  
• You can purchase a second copy for your library to help bring down the hold list for your patrons.
• Having Alysa purchase the consortial copy will help to keep the collection looking unified for all the library shared patrons.
• Since you all contributed to the Macmillan shared fund that money should be spent before you spend any of your own money.
• The Macmillan purchasing that Alysa does for the consortium is only for the $30 one copy, one user titles and not for the metered access copies.

New York Times Pricing (Adam)

• Adam shared the pricing for all the Marmot libraries for one year and three years for the New York Times online edition.  
• Marmot would be billed for the total amount and internally work out how to handle the cost per each library.
• Marmot did a first draft of the breakdown of percentage pricing using the total population. They used that percentage to apply to either the one year or three-year annual cost to get some method to break down that annual cost.
• Adam was just curious about the level of interest. He realized that people have not budgeted for this cost, but wondered if people would be interested enough to redirect funds within a library’s collection budget towards this deal.
• He asked people to put “yes” or “no” into the spreadsheet.  
• We have not discussed what the start date would be for this subscription yet. The start date would depend on participation.
• Lloyd asked what would happen for someone who already has a multi-year contract for the same product. 
• Adam replied that we would have to talk to the New York Times people about it.
• Liz asked about what happens when some libraries want it, but other libraries do not want it. She wanted to know if we will have to get a new quote.
• Adam thinks there are a couple of different routes:
  • we could go back and get a new quote for the libraries who are interested in the product
  • he would talk to the Board about having the New York Times as part of the products offered to the Marmot voting members this would be along with an ILS and Pika.
• Action Item: Adam will continue to ask people to respond to the spreadsheet about their interest in the New York Times. He will get in touch with the reps to talk about how it might work to have this as part of the Marmot voting membership.

Update since the meeting: The New York Times people are going to look at the pricing grid that Marmot created to see if they can make some adjustments that might work better for larger libraries. They will also create a pricing grid for the libraries that seemed interested in moving forward with a subscription.

The next meeting is on April 14th at 1 p.m.