Meeting Summary for Sage User Council

March 18, 2025

Recording Link: https://vimeo.com/1067884117

Attendees: Beth Ross (Sage), Dea Nowell (UCSLD, Chair), Jon Georg (Sage), Perry Stokes (Baker, Vice-chair), Rachael Fox (Hood River), Delia Fields (Hermiston High School),  Maggie Pando (The Dalles), Cheryl Hancock (Harney), Chris Ostberg (Grant)

Request for agenda items: IMLS LSTA Grants

Approval of November minutes – The minutes for November 19th and January 21st were ready for approval.

Perry moved to accept the minutes as presented; Rachael seconded the motion. Minutes were approved.

Committee Reports

Cataloging Workgroup- The committee met on February 4th. The discussion focused on issues related to the upgrade- this included bugs as well as some things that had been fixed.

In addition, we discussed reports briefly and highlighted the new website, particularly the new staff website. Beth also discussed the upcoming authority control update. Links for non-fiction catalogers was also discussed along with an online blog for current news relating to Dewey decimal classification - 025.431: The Dewey blog. ISBN subfield z [ISBN numbers that are deprecated or otherwise have issues] and 700’s were also discussed, as well as how we’re currently handling self-published works.

Systems Update
Evergreen issues relating to reconciling lost charges and checking things in has been resolved. The issue involved the database table definitions in a way that Emerald Data had never seen happen before. While we’re still dealing with some bugs, we’ve made a lot of progress.

In relation to the external attacks we’ve been dealing with, we did have EOU geoblock all countries but the US and Canada. However, the unexpected consequences of modifying the logs to list out the original host’s IP address, is that it contributed to log bloat. The logs went from a couple of hundred megabytes daily to upwards of 20 gigabytes, which caused issues as the log server only has a total capacity of 80gb.

Jon has been manually cleaning the server to ensure it doesn’t run out of room. Additionally, there are bot farms here within the US that are actually owned by international organizations, so while the majority of the international traffic has been blocked with geoblocking, it cannot automatically block servers whose IP’s are based within the US and Canada. Jon had reached out to EOU to see if they could assist with installing an application on our servers to help weed out bot traffic.

Financial Report-
Budget Draft

Member Fee Schedule

Perry shared the Budget Draft for 2025-2026. Interest has been higher than expected so that amount is increased from 8.5k to 12k. Currently we’ve decided to stick with our four year plan in regard to membership due fees.

The big question that needs addressed is the LSTA funds used for the courier. Courier funds were increased to 120k, which leaves us with 187k for our ending fund balance. The bookkeeper and Jon Georg’s salary are proposed to increase by 2.5% in accordance with the consumer price index. PERS is increasing with a new biennium, and those rates are reflected in the budget. Since we don’t have a definite number for that, we’re using 7% as a best guess at the moment.

There is an increase in hours needed with our tech vendor, Emerald Data, as well as adding costs for MessageBee and the new website. At this time the fee schedule has not changed.

A motion to accept the budget as presented was submitted by Maggie and seconded by Cheryl. The budget was approved as presented.

Authority Update

Backstage has completed profiling. The Cataloging Mentors met to go over the Backstage questionnaire in order to make decisions about what we did and did not want Backstage to do as part of the process.

The next stage is to send off 5k records for them to test update, so we can see what needs tweaked before sending them the whole database [minus electronic records]. After that, we’ll get monthly updates when we send them the new records imported that month.

LSTA Funding

Given the uncertainty around the IMLS LSTA grants after the recent Presidential Executive Order, Beth wanted to propose some options. At this time, no one has heard anything from Oregon State Libraries, but Dea had received something from a state librarian in Montana. That librarian had said that IMLS expected to be able to make their next LSTA award by April 22nd. It was unclear if the award would be partial or not.

Given the uncertainty, some ideas on how to address funding in a worst case scenario were presented. One was that Sage would continue to fund the main Orbis Cascade hubs and then try to figure out additional funding or volunteers for the other hubs. That would keep funding going for 9 hubs since that is where the majority of the traffic comes through. An option is to reduce the days that the hubs are operating from five days to two.

Right now Sage allocates around 40k itself in the budget to the courier. It is estimated that the cost of running all sites 2 days a week would run 43-53k, so Sage could potentially offset the majority of that cost. However, reducing services to two days would cause a massive backlog of materials, unless the amount of items patrons could request were also drastically cut. Jon proposed potentially charging for ILL items or fundraising, but it was pointed out that charging for items is antithetical to Sage’s mission, so we want to avoid that if at all possible.

It was suggested that everyone should reach out to their representatives, specifically Cliff Bentz- who is Oregon's 2nd congressional district representative, to strongly encourage them to retain funding through IMLS, so that patrons can continue to enjoy the services we’ve been providing; this included a letter from the Baker County Library’s Friends of the Library group along those same lines.

Perry shared his experiences traveling to Washington DC with a delegation of staff from the Oregon State Library. At this time, we’re all just waiting to hear what the result is going to be and whether funding will continue at prior levels or if it will not so we can plan accordingly.

Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee needs to be formed. Typically we have our Annual Meeting in April or May, and we have the nominations for open positions presented at that time. In accordance with our bylaws, the nominating committee must be composed of at least two outgoing representatives of the user council. Those two people would be Delia Fields and Rachael Fox. Both agreed to be on the committee. A date has not been set for the Annual Meeting though, nor has a decision been made if it would be in-person or online.

Sage Website Privacy Policy

Jon wanted to verify that the council had no issues with the Privacy Policy which was on the SageLib.org site and had been provided by Streamline. Everyone was fine with it as is, since it’s pretty clear and open-ended.

The next meeting is scheduled for May 20th, but there may be some discussion about changing that to an in-person meeting.

Meeting adjourned at 10:53 am Pacific Time.

Next Meeting will be May 20th