NMRLS Executive Board Meeting Summary
Thursday, January 17, 2008

FY2008 Budget, Revision #2 was approved - Greg Pronevitz, Regional Administrator, provided an overview that highlighted the changes to the FY2008 Budget documents. The region received an additional $68,640 in funding. The revision places $66,640 into Books and Other Library Materials for Electronic Databases and the remaining $2,000 into workshop providers to provide more training for the membership.

FY2009 Budget, Draft Revision #1, Contingency Planning Discussion - Greg reviewed a document that outlined items for review when considering contingency planning in FY2009. He thanked Mary Behrle for preparing a clear description of these discussion items. The document provided a comparison of costs across regional library systems for several services. The Executive Board discussed various aspects of services and their effect on the budget including delivery services, mediated interlibrary loan center contracts, supplementary deposit collection grants to small public libraries, MassCat and the upcoming transition to an open source solution, summer reading program, databases, and office space rental. The discussion touched on potentials for closer cooperation between NMRLS, MVLC, and NOBLE.

Delivery Services Discussion - There have been a number of developments in the area of delivery service operations and planning over recent months. Greg provided an update on the services and issues with delivery services including relations with our vendor, meetings with five vendors of automated materials handling systems at the ALA Conference, the results of a state-wide routing optimization study, and an upcoming project to evaluate sortation efficiency and library workflow analysis and recommendations.