Advisory Board meeting presentation notes, January 2005
Oregon Reference Link
- LSTA funded
- read mission
- regional model - 5 libraries share funds
- library to library
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OLA
- OLA is our state library association
- Vision 2010 was in the tradition of vision 2000, a similar early 1990s project.
- "Roadmap for the next decade".
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Statewide E-Reference Task Force
- Charged Spring, 2002 by State Librarian Jim Scheppke
- Report October, 2002
Vision: Establish a cooperative statewide multi-type library reference service available to all Oregon residents that is sponsored by their local library.
Objective:
Develop and implement an integrated reference service statewide using the best possible tools, including digital reference services, to meet the needs of our constituents. Participants would include academic, public, school, and publicly funded special libraries and their users.
...
The new program would offer services directly to the library user.
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Overlapping circles
- Why multi-type? What do we really have in common? What can we learn from each other?
- Also solidarity
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Answerland
- read slide
- I arrived in June, 2003. I was told that the biggest obstacle was the name, "Answerland". Academic libraries in particular (but not exclusively) thought it was too kid-like - one did not even link to the service.
- In July, I met with directors and administrators from academic libraries and recorded their concerns.
- In August, I conscripted the Advisory Board to help tackle the issues that were identified by forming functional teams, each lead by an advisory board member.
Assessment
Licensed Resources
Naming
Privacy
Services
Vendor
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Response to and ouput from the teams varied.
Services team - we had a great group and mix of academic and public librarians. A services guidelines document was created for our chat reference service. But what about e-mail? Could we apply the guidelines?
http://www.oregonlibraries.net/staff/docs/service_guidelines.shtml
Assessment team - fell pretty flat. Ann Payne left her position at PORTALS (and Oregon and Answerland) and it was decided that user satisfaction was the most important thing to measure.
In early 2004, Loree Hyde (Oregon Institute of Technology - Portland Campus) and I organized and implemented a process of transcript evaluation that measured how well we meet our service guidelines.
Licensed Resources team - Maureen Kelly (OSU Cascades) and Janice Weide (Salem) reported on the laws, issues, current practices and implications for our project related to sharing licensed resources.
We later used their report to create guidelines for librarians.
http://www.oregonlibraries.net/staff/docs/licensed_resources.shtml
Vendor - we survey partner libraries to find out what features were most important. We invited Tutor.com and Docutek for demonstrations, we ended up staying with Tutor.com.
Privacy - The privacy team did a fantastic job making sure our privacy policy. It is updated as the need arises.
http://www.oregonlibraries.net/privacy.shtml
Naming - The naming team contracted a design firm, Ralston Group (of Bend) to help us choose a new name and brand identity. We were given a document with hundreds of ideas and chose 3 that were workable. Ralston Group showed us three options and we chose L-net.
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In February 2004, I submitted a report about our project's progress. (print yourself)
In August, 2004, we contracted with an independent evaluator for a qualitative analysis of our activities. It turned out to be a bigger job than anyone imagined. (print yourself - here is exec summary)
The report held 18 recommendations
Advisory Board Response
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L-net: Oregon Libraries Network was launched in April, 2004.
Response was lukewarm. Almost everyone liked "Answerland" better - they had just been quiet about it before.
L-net's chat reference was lauched 24/7 in October, 2004. We started with a free trial for two months, which was evaluated and we found:
24/7 was definitely a factor in getting the service more use.
The hours that questions came in were beyond what we could cover.
Tutor.com librarians were not as good as Oregon librarians at answering our patrons questions, but they weren't terrible either.
We got a quote from Tutor.com and found that we could afford it.
http://www.oregonlibraries.net/staff/docs/evaluating247.pdf
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Library Services and Technology Act
- State Agencies are free to distribute the funds how they like as long as they have a 5-year plan that meets the LSTA Goals.
- L-net is most relevant to LSTA goal 2, but could potentially help meet all 6.
- In Oregon, Much of our LSTA allocation goes to competitive grants, but some has historically gone to funding programs like LINK and L-net. There is a misconception that LSTA money is "seed money" - but there is no law or policy that says so. The Oregon State Library could go on funding a project like this for as long as they want. We have to prove that it's worth it.
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LSTA in Oregon : total allocation for 2004 : $2,071,028
- read off numbers -
- Competitive grant process: Libraries have an idea, fill out a form, send it to the state library.
- The LSTA Council - made up of citizens, librarians, administrators, school librarians - reviews and ranks the proposals and makes a recommendation to the OSL board.
- The OSL Board of Trustees - a citizen board - approves the LSTA Council's recommendations.
- Or not.
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- October, 2004 - Ruth, Deborah and I went
This year, there was some concern that L-net wasn't worth the money.
* they saw the independent evaluation as a negative report - I see it as a roadmap
* "not as good as Google" , "Colorado seems to be doing it better than us" - remember Vision 2010:
"citizens of Oregon are best served if libraries remain at the center of our communities and campuses as primary providers of information services. "
- 28.15 per question - who are we comparing to?
* they hated the name change too
* they saw Multnomah County Library leadership on and commitment to the project as lacking
- I think the common theme is that we did not tell them what to expect, so they came up with their own ideas of what we should be doing and saw us as failing.
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Other Funding Models
Other statewide services have similar funding problems.
- In Alaska, funding for their statewide project has been limited to 3 years only.
- In Colorado, the grant funding is much lower - about $120,000 - and partner libraries contribute to the upkeep of the service. No one contributes more than $3,000.
- In Washington, the grant funding had a different structure. WSL coordinated a marketing, training and evaluation program and gave mini-grants to anyone wanting to try VR. Their funding is ending this year and they are holding a meeting in Seattle February 9th to decide what to do. I am going.
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Some reasons we are not cut out of the picture already
- read text
- L-net outreach librarians are Emily Papagni and Lise Brackbill have started
* our new functional teams, as recommended by our independent evaluator, have gotten started
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TEAMS
- We're going to hear about teams later on today. Each team was given a list of charges, based on our independent evaluation, plus a few other issues and has been charged first to prioritize their tasks.
- Each team has at least one member from a public library and one from an academic library. Each team has a member from Multnomah County Library.
- read text
Team charges: http://www.oregonlibraries.net/staff/docs/teams_draft_charges2004.doc
Minutes and information (esp. Evaluation and Marketing): http://www.oregonlibraries.net/staff/wiki/
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milestons - questions ?
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ARE WE SUCCESSFUL?
chart 1 - questoins by month - describe - going up - January already at 300 - pace for around 450
chart 2 - total questions by fiscal year - doing way more with LINNK
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WEBSITE
- talk about links - all of these are linked from the blog - /staff
- expecting a quarterly statistics report due jan 31
- password gets you vendor's documents but also /buzz which shows recent questions and transcripts
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Outside of Oregon
http://vrstrain.spl.org/virtual101/vrstimeline.htm
Coffman/Arret Articles
Bailey-Hainer, Tucker-Raymond articles
