OSL Minutes: Ocean State Library E-Zone, February 14, 2008

The meeting followed the OSL meeting at the Warwick Public Library and began around noon.

Subject Headings on the Web Site?Mattie Gustafson handed out suggestions for subject subdivisions for fiction and non-fiction titles on the OSL E-Zone website. She researched the numbers of titles under each subject heading offered through Overdrive. She developed her list of subdivisions from that list. There was much discussion and consensus on a list of subject headings and subdivisions. The subdivisions under Fiction are:
Mystery & Suspense, Thrillers, Historical Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Children?s, and Young Adult.
The subdivisions under Non-Fiction are:
Biography & Autobiography, Careers & Business, History & Politics, How To, Self-Improvement, Religion & Spirituality, and Travel & Leisure.
Mattie is to contact Laura Crowe and have them instituted as soon as possible.

Movies?It was decided to remove the leased movies from the collection now, rather than waiting until July. The leased movies were provided free of charge for the first year. There is no mechanism to pay for them for next fiscal year. We did not want to purchase cataloguing for movies that would only be available for another few months. The titles were mostly older and not very ?good? anyway.

Survey?At the last meeting it was agreed to prepare a survey to be filled out by those using the downloadable audio and e-books. The objective is to determine how users are utilizing the media, i.e. burning to CD, using on their computers, or downloading to MP3 or other portable electronic devises. The information will be important for future ordering. Chris La Roux agreed to put a survey together and host it on Survey Monkey. Immediately following the meeting Deb Rock sent us sample survey to review.

Available Now subscriptions?The Available Now audio book subscriptions, consisting of two subscriptions containing a total of 100 leased titles, would be expiring in February and March of this year. Since there is no mechanism to pay for renewing these titles through OSL, Providence Public Library agreed to pay for them through their subscription grant, at a cost of $6,000. At the last meeting we asked if PPL would consider paying to extend those subscriptions to June, so that we can ask the OSL membership to include the renewal cost in next year?s OSL budget. PPL agreed and those at this meeting agreed to extend the subscriptions through June 2009, and to ask the OSL membership for the money to maintain the leased titles in the 2010 OSL budget.

The next meeting will be held on May 9 at the OSL office at 10 a.m. The meeting adjourned at 12:45 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Chris La Roux