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2024-01-09 Focus Group Meeting notes

2024-01-09 Focus Group Meeting notes

 Date

Jan 9, 2024

 Participants

  • @Adam Murray

  • Cecilia LaFrance; Jamie LaRue; Jeff Bullington; Jon Solomon; Paul Paladino; Sarah Landeryou; Sharon Nemechek; Stephanie Ralph; Tiffany Wick

 Discussion topics

Item

Notes

Item

Notes

Fee Restructuring: Directors Winter Presentation

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?

Service Portfolios

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

  • 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?

  • 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?

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

    • Resource sharing

    • IT Services

    • Statistics & assessment services

    • Preservation services

    • Consultations and special projects

    • Computer equipment acquisitions

Data Types discussion

  • Data Types Straw Poll

  • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ckr9Zbw-pe56tR_f1giHyUS7pO-1ZSx6XZkAPGA8xLw/edit?usp=sharing

  • 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

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

      •  

  • 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

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

    •  

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

    • wifi sessions

    • gigabytes of internet usage

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

Fee types discussion

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

 

  • survey link

Next steps

  • February: Synthesize focus group data

  • February/Spring: Identify most preferred types of data for sizing; build out more detailed models using this type of data for different types and sizes of library

  • June: Presentation at Council for final round of feedback

  • Summer: Approval by Marmot Executive Board

  • September: Member notifications

  • January 2025: Effective date

 Action items

 Decisions

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