| November 29 2007 Council Meeting Minutes |
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Advisory Council Minutes 11/29/07
Present: Chris Bell, Perrin Damon, Chane Griggs, Sandra Allen, Kathy Riddell,Jim Scheppke, Kate McGann, Robert Hulshof-Schmidt, Arlene Weible, and Crystal Knapp
Facilitating: Chris Bell, Minutes: Crystal Knapp
Welcome, introductions, adopt minutes - CHRIS
Chane made a motion to approve the minutes as written, which Chris seconded.
Overview of the State Library Board and Budget process - ROBERT
Robert gave the council a background of the State Library budget process. The State Library Board has a board retreat (planning meeting) on 12/13/07 and regular board meeting on 12/14/07. Any changes to the assessment have to happen before January. We’re nearly finished planning the assessment, but we still have two policy packages to get approved at the board retreat. We’re anticipating a modest increase in the assessment amount (around 13%, assuming everything is approved). Our typical assessment has been around 8%, so this is higher than normal but not as high the 2005-07 biennium, which saw an increase of 24%.
Robert also gave a quick overview of the State Library’s assessment model. The State Library assesses all agencies except higher education. The assessment formula is statutory and is based 2/3 on FTE and 1/3 on actual usage in the previous biennium.
Proposed changes to GRES Mission Statement - ARLENE
Arlene gave a background of why GRES wants to change our mission statement. GRES wants the mission statement to properly reflect what the entire team does. The new mission statement incorporates the work that we do for the public and other libraries, which indirectly benefits state agencies, in addition to work that we do for state agencies.
The group referred back to the mission statement for the entire State Library. Also some concern was expressed that the statement was too wordy.
Chane Griggs motioned to endorse the mission statement as-is, with the recognition that further editorial changes may occur at the Board level. Sandy Allen seconded the motion.
Ask Oregon Service proposal - ROBERT with SCOTT SMITH, DAS E-Government
Robert Hulshof-Schmidt introduced the Ask Oregon service proposal. Scott Smith gave a context for the Ask Oregon portal. The Ask Oregon portal would serve as a single place for citizens to find information and participate in finding information. Ask Oregon would combine the search concept with the ability to browse and other information-discovery tools.
Ask Oregon would utilize “Right Now” or a similar software package to provide a knowledge base (“How do I?”) and a dynamic FAQ list. The initial “How Do I” list could be pre-seeded using a list of the top searches from the Oregon.gov search engine, which the State Library already maintains. Additional features of Ask Oregon include: question-answering through email or chat, an automated FAQ phone operator, and collaboration tools like forums and discussion lists.
EGovernment would provide the software platform and technical support. The State Library would provide the staff to administer the service and serve as a first-tier to answers questions, referring questions to other agency staff as necessary.
Scott Smith estimates that about ¼ of all state websites have chat, 3 or 4 have the automatically-managed FAQ, and none of them have forums. The features included in Ask Oregon would put Oregon in the forefront of EGovernment services they provide to their citizens.
Sandy Allen brought up a potential issue that the Oregon Democratic Party just launched a website called “Ask Oregon.” Perrin Damon offered for Brand Oregon to help give the library and Egovernment advice on what to call the portal and how to brand it. Scott Smith has temporarily replaced the “Ask Oregon ” wording with “Ask the Pioneer.”
Pricing of the software is unclear because it charges based the number of views.
The Council recommended bringing a prototype to PIOs and then CIOs.
The council approved the idea unanimously; it will move forward to the OSL Board.
Training Options Survey - KATE
Kate gave a background on GRES’s new Instruction Assessment Survey. The Survey went out October 9-16th to registered library users. There were 989 responses. Kate covered the most popular choices. There was a huge amount of qualitative free-form responses, several regarding DAS STEPS training which takes place in the library but is not run by the library staff.
We also got responses that we need to do more regional training and several that we should do a book club.
Review of Informational Survey - CHRIS and ROBERT
GRES plans to do a customer satisfaction survey and a needs assessment and will use the responses from this survey to guide them in creating questions for the needs assessment.
The survey brought to light the large number of people who aren’t familiar with our services, in addition to the large percentage of satisfied customers among our users.
Robert walked the council through a highlight of the survey results. As a whole, people don’t understand what being registered for the library means. A significant number of people said they weren’t registered but reported using services which require registration.
Perrin suggested adding regular announcements about the library to the Communications Council newsletter about the library. Kate mentioned there have been problems with this in the past.
Another suggestion was to not require state agency employees to have a separate registration username and password for the State Library; they should be able to use the same username and password they use for the GovNet intranet or another username and password that they already have. Also, it would be nice for the library’s website to remember who people are, rather than requiring them to sign in each time. The group agreed to revisit this idea.
Next Steps Discussion - CHRIS
The group discussed the overall objectives: increasing the number of users, increasing the number of users, and catering our services to give state employees what they in a user-friendly way.
Issues raised:
The council posed the question as to why eClips requires registration and is limited to State Agency users. The State Library staff explained that state agencies pay for the staff that provides eClips. Additionally, there could be copyright and scalability issues. However, there is an online version of eClips available on our state employee website.
Another issue was raised as to the level of services we really want to provide the public and whether we would want to duplicate some of what public libraries do. Which services are appropriate to promote to the public?
The question was posed as to whether it would be better to have an enterprise license to survey monkey than to offer an in-house service? We decided we should make improvements to the e-survey product to make it more user-friendly.
The council agreed to keep the needs assessment survey and customer satisfaction/agency performance measure surveys separate. But, to avoid survey fatigue, we can do the performance measure survey in the form of an email response to existing users over a period of a few months.
Questions to answer in a future survey:
- What can we discontinue (in order to provide more services)?
- What do you wish we did?
- Did you know we have …?
- Track issues service
- esurvey
- eclips
- Would you be willing to be a contact for us?
- What are our “killer apps”?
- What do you buy or use that we could purchase and aggregate?
Strategies to pursue:
- Explore using other partnerships
- Communications Council or communications cabinet to explore how to better get the word out
- channels within different agencies (“embedded agents”)
- agency development officers: training for new employees
- getting icons with the State Employee Information Center on desktops of employees in different agencies
- Keeping people from having to remember a unique username and password (use cookies to remember them or explore other password-free authentication, like Bank of America’s site)
- Personalization for page once you’re logged in (hi person’s name)
- Investigate opening more services for the public (eClips)
- Re-think which services need a password
- Promote genealogy resources to the public more
- Promotion in front of agency-heads, including small agencies
- Consider a new employee survey of what they do and how the library might help them
- Look into what other state libraries or legislative libraries similar to us are doing to raise awareness?
- A “stumped” button that links to the library’s site
- Try not branding things as the “library” because people assume that libraries are just about books
- Aggregating enterprise purchases (like journals or videos): and promoting this; Clip Art was one suggestion
- Presentations to staff meetings (unit meetings)
- Send the survey to a larger sample of all state employees, versus a regular sample
Immediate action:
- New employee message: re-tool it to make it come from a specific person who’s assigned to a specific agency
- Delay the new employee message
January meeting, confirm date, agenda ideas – CHRIS
Tuesday, January 15, was confirmed for the meeting date.
Agenda items for January 15 meeting:
- Work with the needs assessment survey
- Go over the first-level of the outreach plan
- Follow-up on new employee email
Updates:
Robert Hulshof-Schmidt mentioned that we’re adding a scanned calendar of WWI propaganda to the Oregon Documents Centennial website.
Perrin Damon mentioned that if you make a contribution to the cultural trust and another arts agency, it’s a 100% tax deduction.
Next Monday, December 3, there is an Oregon Leadership Summit sponsored by the Oregon Business Plan.
Parking lot:
- registration: requiring users to have a unique username/password for the library and to have them use it each time they come to the site
- eClips (growth opportunities)
Action items:
- Robert will send a copy of the “Ask the Pioneer” pre-prototype from Scott to the council
- Kate will send copy of new employee message to the council
- Perrin and Chane’s emails both changed, but they didn’t get a new employee message, so we need to look into why they didn’t get a message.
- Set up the performance measure survey to be included in email research responses to existing customers.
Advisory Council Survey document
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