Page Comparison

Expense Structure

• do the three cost centers of support and innovation, licensing, and infrastructure make sense to you?

• does the description of what is included in each cost center seem appropriate?

• Are there any cost centers, or types of expenses that you don’t see reflected in the slide?

• Are there changes in where any type of expense should be located between the cost centers?

• none; everyone seemed comfortable with the new expense structure and what was included in each cost center

Service Portfolios

• Do you have any reservations about the more formal establishment of an Associate Membership fee, or the definition of associate membership as having a la carte access to certain Marmot services?

• Does the concept of service portfolios make sense to you?

  • they like spelling out the differences between voting and associate

• Voting membership has been defined as a set of services, benefits, and memberships that are only available through full Marmot membership. Is there anything in this list that you think doesn’t belong? Anything that should be included but isn’t?

  • like the idea of the voting membership for libraries who want to join Marmot and take advantage of voting member benefits, but can’t necessarily join the ILS. (example: a library that wishes to be a Voting Member and only use IT Services)

  • Where does ETS and walk throughs fit in this model?

• Do you have any thoughts, concerns, revisions to suggest for the service portfolios?

  • discussion about how libraries would know how many staff sessions they would have

  • Need to ask how many staff sessions libraries might need in order to make sure we have enough

  • Some concern about the difference between paying only for services used vs. paying into the consortium’s overall cost

  • MLN2 libraries (on Front Range Downloadable) and Delta (on ACDC) would have the option to be grandfathered out of joining Marmot’s Overdrive collection, but they would not be able to use the Digital Resources Librarian services or Marmot’s eResources stats program. Alternatively, Westminster could join Marmot as an Associate Member for the Digital Collections only, allowing for a possible merger of Marmot Overdrive and FRDL.

  • Will need to see cost data to be able to fully judge the service portfolios concept.

• Clearly specify where ETS and walkthroughs fit

• Get a clear number of how many staff sessions Marmot would need on the Innovative contract if libraries aren’t limited by the number of sessions they can have.

• The question of FRDL and Marmot Overdrive will need a lot of exploration and detail, if the FRDL libraries would be interested.

Data types

• Are there other data elements you can think of that might be more appropriate?

• What stands out to you in the straw poll results?

  • physical collection size does not seem like an appropriate measure for scalability

  • for resort towns, there may be more registered borrowers than LSA

  • circulation seems to be fair; the more my circulation goes up the more I benefit from being in the consortium

  • many of the other data types are decisions made at the local level and don’t necessarily work fairly

  • Jamie argues against the use of formulae, because people forget what the formula is quickly. keeping data directly attributable to a reflection of demand.

  • could mean that we need one model for publics and a separate for academics that is equitable

    • supports by-type models because there are different needs

  • directors are used to using adjusted population because of vendors using it

  • adjusted population is helpful for communities that are growing, but haven’t seen growth yet in library users

• Why did the highest ranked item get selected?

  • expenditures per and circ per make more sense than other items

  • collection use is a reflection of demand

  • per capita evens things out across the consortium

  • using registered borrowers can be variable depending on how clean libraries keep their patron database

  • materials expenditures per population is a more robust way to gauge the size of an organization

  • separate models for public vs. academic: people might be ok with that

    • Alliance has a base fee plus a formula driven amount

• Why did the lowest ranked items get ranked that way?

  • hours open, materials expenditures per population count

  • a lot of the other ones have more outside variables

• Are there data elements that might be appropriate only for specific service portfolios? What are they?

  • wifi sessions

  • gigabytes of internet usage

Fee types

• Is there any benefit to using pricing or sizing tiers?

  • would be ok with tiers as long as tiers are composed of more than one data point; otherwise prefer a cost per structure

• Tiers preferred

  • tiers provide regularity and can see the change coming in advance

  • talk themselves in and out of both tiers vs. no tiers. nice to predict tipping into a different tier, but also nice to have gradual changes take place constantly rather than all at once.