Resource Discovery Meeting Minutes

1. Welcome, Apologies for Absence and Membership Update

Present: William Marsterson (Chair - WM), Gavin Beattie (GB), John Gilby (JG), Robert Hall (RH), Georgina Parsons (GPa), Gurdish Sandhu (GS), Maureen Wade (MWa), Marcus Woolley (MWo).

Apologies:  Stewart Brownrigg (SB), Sarah Crofts (SC)

SB had stood down from the group and the members recorded their thanks for his input over past years. WM welcomed GPa to the group and also welcomed Andrew Amato, M25 Web Services Project Officer, who was in attendance for this meeting.

2. Approval of Previous Meeting Minutes

The minutes from 10 February 2009 were approved.

3. Action Update and Matters Arising

Progress on actions from the previous meeting held on 10 February 2009 and earlier meetings are summarised below.

Previous meeting:

• Action 4.1 JG to obtain more images for the development version of Find-a-library and advertise service once live - Action ongoing.
• Action 4.2 JG to arrange new RDWG contact for the WAM25 Project Steering Group - complete - RH agreed to be the contact.
• Action 5.1 JG to contact M25 Treasurer regarding appropriate financial procedure to follow for InforM25 Review - complete recommended that LSHTM's procedure is followed.
• Action 5.2 MWa, JG & GB to forward final draft InforM25 Review specification by 20 March 2009 - see under Item 5 below.

Actions from earlier meetings:

• JG to do further work on usage statistics - Group agreed that 'visits' were the most useful data to demonstrate that the services were being used. JG to add suitable graph or image to an InforM25 web page and pass to the group for comments, Action continues.

4. M25 Support Team Manager's Report

JG had previously circulated a report in line with "M25 Support Team InforM25 Tasks" document. Issues arising from the report included:

• Recent review of Find-a-library had resulted in 46 responses (out of a possible 59), the highest ever, and 26 of these replies led to updates in their data.
• Some work is underway to convert Visit-a-library from Postgres to MySQL, the datatbase type used by the CMS for the m25lib.ac.uk and cpd25.ac.uk websites. This work will also address some minor bugs and software changes.
• RCN have been completely removed from InforM25 as they are no longer members of the Consortium.
• Programmer secondment has continued but due to various reasons, there has been little progress over the reporting period and it is hoped that better progress will be made in May/June.

WAM25 Update

For the benefit of new group members, JG outlined the WAM25 Project and gave a summary of the current funding situation. HEFCE had made an offer of a grant considerably below the full cost of the project. The Consortium and the LSE had agreed to part fund the shortfall in the form of project manager/director 'effort' and additional external bodies were being approached for the balance of the required funds.

MWo commented that Bedfordshire now only have a very small number of databases without a walk-in clause.

5. External Review of InforM25

MWa, JG and GB had distributed the finalised review specification and this was agreed by the group. Following discussion on the next steps, the following points were agreed by the group:

• Consultants interview panel to be MWa, JG, GB and the M25 Treasurer
• Three potential consultants were identified and a mail would be sent to the SCONUL list to seek others.
• It was anticipated that the appointed consultants should be able to give a presentation of preliminary findings to the group in late July, thus it was agreed to cancel the June meeting and re-arrange it for w/c 20 July 2009.

6. Report from May 2009 M25 Steering Group Meeting

WM reported on the March 2009 Steering Group Planning Day and summarised thoughts on reviewing the group's remit and possibility of changing the group's name. MWa added to this by reporting discussions held at the May 2009 Steering Group meeting that a new chair would also be sought from M25 Directors.

One suggestion was to 'stand down' the group in its current form and to begin a new group but invite existing group members to join. The aim would be to put more emphasis on developments but also to include the operation of existing services. The group agreed that: it needed to be clear how the online services would be managed in future; that detailed reports on the services are still necessary; that further detail of what the development remit was; and whether there were any Support Team/programmer workload issues.

An update would be given at the July 2009 meeting including further discussions as appropriate.

7. AOB

MWa explained that Glyn Price (Technical Services Manager, LSE Library) will be joining the group as there are structural changes at the LSE and JG will report to Glyn from August 2009 onwards.

Minutes by JG