Meeting Summary for Sage User Council

July 15, 2025

Recording Link: https://vimeo.com/1120480501

Attendees: Beth Ross (Sage), Dea Nowell (UCSLD, Chair), Jon Georg (Sage), Perry Stokes (Baker, Vice-chair), Rachael Fox (Hood River), Kirsten Wells (The Dalles), Susan Lewis (CGCC), Carrie Bushman (Cook Memorial), Marsha Richmond (Lake), Mary Reser (Gilliam), Cheryl Hancock (Harney), Kathy Street (OTLD), Maura O’Daniel (Pendleton)

Request for agenda items:

Beth

• Support Options
• How to handle non-payment of membership fees

Perry

• Preliminary Year End Financial Report for Fiscal Year 2024-25

Approval of minutes – The minutes for March 18th, April 7th and June 4th are ready for approval.

The motion to accept as presented the minutes for March was brought forward by Cheryl and seconded by Perry. None opposed.

Kirsten motioned to accept the summary of the Emergency April meeting submitted by Perry. Carrie seconded the motion. None opposed.

Perry motioned to accept the June minutes with a minor alteration to the bottom of page 4 as pointed out by Dea. Carrie seconded the motion. None opposed.

All minutes have been approved.

Committee Reports

No new committee meetings since June 4th.

Preliminary Year End Financial Report for Fiscal Year 2024-25

Perry shared an updated budget sheet with adjustments for overages and underages. Overall the totals are on target with total income. One membership payment was pending, as were reimbursements for things like CatExpress. The LSTA grant was fully funded. Total expenses were under budget at about 78.8% or 319,000 vs 450,000 budgeted.

Sage personnel is at 78.3% of budget largely due to Beth being on a different health insurance plan. Materials and services overall are at 89.2% of budget. Courier is at 79.4%.

Dues and subscriptions are over budget at 124%, so that needs reviewed. Postage and freight are over budget as well. Contracted services for Jon are on target, as is technology capital outlay.

Contingency funds haven’t really been used as net income was higher than budgeted.

Nomination for Chair and Vice Chair

Dea offered to continue as Chair, as long as someone was willing to be a backup for her. Kirsten offered to be Vice Chair.

Perry posted a document tracking chair history back to 2010.

Perry nominated Dea as Chair and Kirsten as Vice Chair. Cheryl seconded the motion. No one opposed.

Rachael was approved to serve another term as a Council Member. There is still one seat open which will be discussed later under representative apportionment among the classifications.

Systems Update

Beth was currently working on state library statistics.

Bots

Jon briefly discussed how he’s been blocking AI bots, including using some python scripts to assist with that process. The system has been more stable, and the daily log files which had grown to upwards of 30gb are back down under 10gb.

A question was raised on whether Anubis – an open-source reverse captcha used to block bots – would be able to free up Jon’s time or not. At this point we don’t know. Jon had been talking with Josh Stompro at Lake Agassiz Regional Library in Minnesota. They exchanged block lists. Josh’s was largely international addresses. While that has largely been handled by Tim at EOU at the firewall level, we are still getting some international traffic so Jon added them for redundancy to the app servers.

Josh was able to get Anubis to work with Evergreen. Jon still needs to verify if it will work with the bad bot blocker currently being used to block domestic bots. We’re waiting on Adam to get that installed on the test server so we can test it before deploying it on the app servers.

Jon mentioned that he has been using a combination of WhoIs and Netify to look up IP addresses to help identify which addresses are bots and which aren’t. Netify is a $40 per month subscription. At this point we don’t know how long that will be needed, he will need to submit that for reimbursement. No one had issue with him doing so.

The Evergreen development team is also working on some methods to reduce bot activity with how they interact with Evergreen starting with the 3.14 version. A lot of bot inquiries are basically incomplete web queries, and it takes a while for the server to purge them since it has to wait for them to time out. The changes they’re looking at is to essentially block those.

Otherwise, everything is up to date. The App servers were updated to the latest versions. This was actually a requirement from EOU for the insurance aspect of their data center where the Sage servers are housed. It also helped remove exploits that the bots were using.

Authority Control from Backstage

Beth was delaying sending out new records for authority work as she wanted to work on statistics and MessageBee. Additionally, she wanted to ensure that we didn’t run into diacritics issues again.

MessageBee

Configuring MessageBee to our system is still in process. Emerald Data doesn’t have any experience with it, and MessageBee is used to a support vendor handling the integration so it’s been slower than expected.

Review of representative apportionment among classifications

The bylaws say that it needs done annually. Dea shared a document outlining how the voting representatives are apportioned. A question is about what to do regarding the circulating schools representative from Hood River, Valley High School because they have not been present at any meetings this year. That terms runs the rest of this year and next year. It was discussed that, that seat may need to be reapportioned elsewhere and/or that school representatives may not have the time needed to serve in that role. Beth will be reaching out to that representative to see why they haven’t attended and if they need to turn that seat over to another person.

The bylaws state that there should be three representatives for public libraries serving less than 5,000 people and we have two there, and then it says we should have two serving for public libraries serving over 15,000 people where there are actually three serving. This raised the question if we were having trouble keeping representatives from smaller libraries attending. More research needs done, as no one could remember if the cause had been looked into or not. Perry said he’d look into that.

Dea asked if Beth knew the number of libraries in Sage- seventy six including branches. Perry noted that there are 54 total members, not including branches.

There was a brief discussion about possibly having an alternative position for when one of the voting representatives doesn’t show.

This discussion was then tabled until the next meeting.

Non-payment of membership fees

Vale Public Library has not yet paid their membership fee. Reminders have been sent to the librarian who then forwarded them to the city. Beth had tried contacting the city bookkeeper and the city manager by both email and phone but has not had any response so far.

No one knows if there is an issue with a shortage of funds with the city or what since there hasn’t been a response. Normally, we’d be discussing terminating access, but without a response it’s more difficult to know where to draw the line.

Perry suggested drafting a letter of intent to terminate services due to non-payment and to probably send a copy to both the library and city. To determine what the termination date needs to be, Beth was going to refer to the MOU.

Grant Library

Grant County Library may end up closing if they continue with the city council / city commissioner’s proposal to defund their library. They’re having a couple of public hearings this month and next to make that decision.

Lake County Library

A question was raised about Lake County having funding issues, however that was just in context to courier fundraising when we were not sure if the LSTA funds were going to come through or not. They’re also fundraising for a partial roof replacement at the moment.

Server Replacement

The conversation about replacing the servers is being tabled. It was brought up mainly so that people were thinking about it, rather than actually making plans already.

Courier

Discussing how to make the Courier self-sustaining was also tabled for now. LSTA funding for next year is supposedly secure, but we won’t know for certain until later.

Support Vendor

We will be moving back to Equinox as our Evergreen support vendor. We’d moved away from them due to communication issues, but our most recent upgrade was a lot more problematic than usual, and we still have some outstanding issues that have not been resolved.

While getting a quote from Equinox, Beth was going to ask about them hosting Sage, just so we know what that number looks like. We’re expecting it to be out of our budget, but with upcoming hardware costs for server replacement it’s worth asking what that number looks like.

Evergreen issue with creating a new account

An issue was raised where staff had run into an issue with creating a new account. Neither Beth nor Jon were aware of this being an issue, as this seems to be the first report of that issue. Therefore, we do not know if it was a glitch or an actual issue with Evergreen.

OLA, and other upcoming conferences

There was a brief mention that OLA conference committees are looking for volunteers for next year. It’ll be a joint Oregon Library Association and Pacific Northwest Library Association conference in April in Vancouver, Washington. OTLD will be in charge of the registration desk.

The discussion also briefly touched on the New Mexico ARSL conference coming up as well as Digipalooza for OverDrive, and how we needed to push the September council meeting back to the third week of September.

A motion to adjourn the meeting was entertained by Dea. Perry moved to adjourn and Rachael seconded.

Meeting adjourned at 11:53 am Pacific Time.

Next Meeting will be September 23rd