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When you look at your invoices from Marmot, is there anything on it you find confusing? | Costs are clearly described in quarterly invoices; for pass-through costs keep them clear and simple time frame being listed is helpful; term start and stop dates is appreciated Marmot is a single line item in the budget for Board review, but the Board doesn’t see the line items question about the reasons for six month billing the “direct services and IT administration” line item is probably the most confusing School librarians don’t actually see the bill
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Think back to a budget meeting. Were there any items from Marmot that stood out as problematic in discussing your library’s budget? | |
Are there Marmot fees that draw the (negative) attention of your Board or school/university administrators? Which ones, and what are the concerns expressed? | |
Have you had any new projects or expansions of existing services that have been held back by a Marmot fee that was prohibitive? Please describe, and identify the prohibitive fee. | Digital archive: continuing to expand. Looking to add more staff to scan in materials. Planning to scan in more collections and materials. The storage fee is problematic because it can be unpredictable. Has no frame of reference for guessing or estimating the storage requirement for new collections. Even adding another school, there was no issue with adding new staff sessions. do bounce between 5-6 sessions because of the cost; whatever they feel like they can afford and manage. multiple places have to find workarounds for specific needs. could there be a way to have temporary staff sessions? or staff sessions for a limited amount of time. Alysa remembered years ago trying to maintain a pool of staff sessions that are available for anyone to use, and every library contributes toward the maintenance of that pool.
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Are there components of Marmot’s existing fees that you feel are “just right” and should be left as they are? | simply cost of doing business, so the libraries just look at what is affordable happy with what they are getting for the cost of the service, and expect that the cost will go up. appreciate being able to be part of a conversation like this. as long as the costs we charge enable Marmot to accomplish goals, which are the goals of the libraries, then they are where they need to be.
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When you think of the services your library receives from Marmot, are there any that you notice are not reflected on your invoice? | Research and development all the behind the scenes work to push forward innovative new services investigation of open source ILS don’t necessarily want to see a bill for R&D, but it needs to be accounted for
question - do we have an implementation fee for large-scale, out of the ordinary projects that require a lot of research? Pika and the software development team Modules of Sierra - individual libraries having instances of things like the ACQ module
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Do you understand the categories of all the services Marmot provides your library? | |
As we talk about restructuring Marmot’s fees, are there any anxieties you feel about the outcome? What are they, and what would help alleviate those anxieties? | if there was something that the library didn’t realize they used a lot and the realignment would make them have to pay significantly more could we send quotes before sending the new invoice? making the option available for library directors to review new invoice structure.
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Marmot staff have outlined specific problems they have observed with Marmot’s current fees. Do you have anything to add to these that this project should address? | |