WAM25 Steering Group Meeting Minutes

1. Welcome, Apologies for Absence, Introduction to New Steering Group Structure & Remit

MW welcomed everyone to the re-formed WAM25 Steering Group. Following individual introductions, MW explained that this was a key meeting to determine the future of the project. The earlier group membership consisted of project partner staff members more at practitioner level which was appropriate for the feasibility study. The project was now moving onto its second stage and the remit of the group would be to steer the project's direction and thus group membership consisted of more senior members of partner libraries.

JF introduced CB who had recently joined JISC and would be taking over responsibilities from JF.

2. Action Update and Matters Arising from Last Meeting

All actions had been completed from the previous meeting on 19 June 2008. There were no matters arising.

3. WAM25 Funding Options

MW & JG summarised the activities to date on the project, namely

• Delivery of the Final Outcome Report (bid for Stage 2 funding) to HEFCE on time in June 2008
• Periodic chasing for funding decision
• Various presentations about the project at conferences and individual's support for what it was trying to achieve
• Reduced offer from HEFCE in early December 2008

JF explained the reasons behind the HEFCE offer. JG noted that if full external funding for Stage 2 was not available, then the group need to consider the rolling out of the service across the M25 Consortium and whether the necessary external funding for this third stage would be available, and if not, what the implications may be.

The following summarises some of the key points from the discussion:

• Thorough evaluation of the project's Stage 2 (build and operate a pilot service) is essential to feed into and justify the final stage of rolling out the service across the Consortium.
• Blueprint or toolkit outputs from Stage 2 would be of interest to other regions of the UK and therefore of interest to national organisations.
• It was noted that London libraries are used extensively by researchers so implementing WAM25 would benefit users acrosss the UK not just within M25.
• There may be interest in using WAM25 from the NHS sector.
• The group agreed that there should be no reduction in the non-staffing element of the bid.
• The group agreed that the scope and timescales of the original bid should be maintained and that additional funding be sought to make up the shortfall arising from the offer from HEFCE. A number of potential organisations to approach for this funding were identified. It was also agreed to be benificial to operate the pilot service for a 12 month period to get qualitative usage data across all times of the academic year.
• Members agreed that effort planned for evaluations, dissemination and documentation must not be reduced as this forms a key activity for the next stage of the service/project.
• It was agreed that there should be no reduction in planned programming costs as the original figure was considered to be quite modest.

Actions

Action 3.1 MW to seek confirmation from HEFCE of their grant offer in writing to the project and also to confirm temporal arrangements.

Action 3.2 JG to re-work WAM25 budget in accordance with HEFCE confirmed offer plus other funding options and send to the WAM25 Steering Group, if possible prior to the next meeting of the M25 Steering Group.

Action 3.3 MW & JG to contact other potential funding sources as appropriate and keep WAM25 Steering Group informed of progress.

4. AOB

There was none.

5. Future Steering Group Arrangements

MW confirmed future WAM25 Steering Group arrangements, subject to successful funding arrangements.

Action 5.1 JG to revise WAM25 JISCmail list to reflect current group membership.

Action 5.2 JG to contact RH regarding him being the contact between the group and RDWG.

Minutes by J Gilby