Second Focus Groups Summary

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

• clarified that support system licensing was for Help Desk, Knowledge Base, etc.

• questions about what each one means. One director suggested providing examples of each item to share with others in the library

• Provide examples of each item contained within each of the three cost centers.

Service Portfolios

• 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?

  • Would like to see Open Educational Resources reflected here at some point

  • for academics, CAL and Reforma membership may not be as valuable

  • one library director has received negative feedback about attendance at Reforma Colorado

  • Likes the concept of insituttional membership in Reforma

• 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?

  • having this clarity is long overdue

  • offers a lot of flexibility for libraries to pay for what they want to pay for without requiring everyone to be on the same track

  • caveat that Marmot staff don’t get stretched so thin that they can’t offer the same level of service to the members.

  • doesn’t think it seems unfair; it makes sense to become a voting member if you want access to the voting member portfolio

• 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.

  • Digital archive is an essential part of the collection, and nice to see it reflected so clearly and not as a small side project

  • would there be a requirement that libraries contributing to the digital archive to contribute on a regular basis. would there be an increased expectation that contribution would contribute?

  • Director really likes the eResource statistics 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.

• How libraries would be considered as “contributing” to the Digital Archive needs to be spelled out clearly.

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

  • Registered card holders is significantly less than population. Resident card holders is so low compared to population of the city

  • Resort towns have higher registered users than population

  • Library has so many part-time staff, and uses only one login for Sierra. But would like to have more logins so there is greater accountability

  • highest ranked items are materials expenditures per population, total population, adjusted pop, collection use, total expenditures per population count, and circulation per population count

  • leaning toward materials expenditures

  • many of the second tier are how the library is used and more directly how Marmot is used by the community

  • families may only use one card, rather than having a card per member

  • examples of a city library with a large population but a small budget. serving 500k people with a tiny budget. looking at how a library prioritizes its budget internally is a clearer indication of use

  • keep in mind the large difference between physical and electronic materials costs

  • would want to see more information about what it costs to support things other than Sierra to be able to determine if a data type if equitable. example of support time being used to adjust data fields in Sierra and how they interact with Pika, which is not countable by staff sessions.

• 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

  • Collection expenditures per population: collection is small comparatively to other libraries in members

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

  • wifi sessions

  • gigabytes of internet usage

  • likes the idea that different data elements could be used for sizing different service portfolios

• There are a lot of wide-ranging perspectives on these; there was no clear preference that emerged.

• We will need to provide models of several data types for directors to review at Council.

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 would have to be based on breaks in the data

• 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.

  • would probably prefer the tier, because it leaves room for the library to fluctuate their spending without having immediate impact on cost. Likewise, if reducing spending it doesn’t short Marmot unnecessarily.

• Provide sample models with both fee types