Meeting Minutes: November 10, 2011
InfoEyes Meeting Minutes
Location:
Via Online Meeting Room Provided by Accessible World
Attendees:
Herrick Heitman, Julie Strange, Catherine Durivage, Linda Rossman
Catherine reported on the statistics and changes since July. It was noted that there had been a dramatic increase in questions since our partnership with Accessible World. Bob Acosta's press release has definitely helped spread the word about our service. Some of the questions we are receiving lately also have been more substantive reference questions. We won't be too surprised if usage may decline slightly, during the upcoming holiday season.
The InfoEyes listserv through Google Groups is now up and running and seems to be working quite well. The members expressed their appreciation that this is going smoothly and happened quickly. Catherine suggested that it would be a good idea for each member to be sure to check their individual Questionpoint account on their "desk day" to be sure no questions are missed. She will send out a test question through Questionpoint sometime next week to see if that question actually gets forwarded to the list.
Users need to accept the invitation to both lists separately. One of the listservs is for the general InfoEyes community, and the other is for people working on the questions. Members should also email Catherine if they want to add any new staff to either of the InfoEyes Listservs. We have now updated the calendar to include the most current desk schedule, since we now only have 4 libraries participating.
You can see the new schedule at the Yahoo! Calendar.
Since we only have 4 libraries now, Wednesdays will now be covered jointly by Massachusetts and Minnesota as back up. Two other staff members from Massachusetts (besides Linda), James Gleason and Johanna Umana, will help to field these questions.
Some states are no longer participating in InfoEyes due to budget cuts, staffing, and other issues. The current participants are: Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington State. (a small but "select" group!) We will continue to encourage other states to join our efforts. One of Catherine's IT staff (Dan Malosh) will be taking over the updating of the InfoEyes website in the near future as there is a lot of updating that is needed!
Linda reported that Perkins will now become the fiscal agent.
Linda will communicate again with Loretta Broomfield from Illinois. Illinois is going to take care of the final Infobahn bill (for website hosting). Linda will send invoices when the switchover has been accomplished. As fiscal agent, Perkins has a policy of a very small administrative fee, but the total cost for each member state will remain quite low (due to Maryland's hosting us for OCLC!) Also Perkins and Minnesota are both contributing to the yearly cost of the online chat room used for administrative meeting through Accessible World. Perkins will be sending out invoices to each member state for $78.75 to each member state in the near future when the switchover is complete.
The next quarterly meeting is planned for the usual 3rd Thursday in February on February 16th.
Minutes submitted by Linda Rossman.