With the day-to-day management of NELINET in the competent hands of Arnold Hirshon and his staff, and with new ideas for NELINET services, products and customer enhancements emerging from our staff on a routine basis, the Board has been free to focus on strategic planning and steps to ensure the long-term health and future of NELINET. This year Board members have devoted considerable energy to reformulating budget practices so as to build a strong fiscal foundation for the network, working with NELINET managers to diversify products and services, and taking steps to improve customer service and mechanisms for feedback.
Building a strong fiscal foundation:
Over the last several years the Board has striven to reduce NELINET's dependence on investment income to balance the operating budget, and has also taken steps to establish a formal fund balance, both to see the network through difficult times and to provide one-time funding for special projects and capital purchases. The Board plans to build an emergency fund equal to approximately twelve months of operating expenditures. The special initiatives fund is modest at the moment and largely committed to the New England Digital Library project, but eventually it will provide a resource through which NELINET will have the flexibility to undertake new initiatives and to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities.
Margot Crist, our able Finance Committee Chair, will be providing more details on this effort in her report.
Diversifying NELINET products and services:
2001/2002 has seen very encouraging expansion in NELINET's education, outreach and staff development programs, with our offerings reaching beyond technical training to include activities like the IFLA Preconference on Library Consortia, attended by over 150 people from 25 nations; seminars on Copyright, Licensing E-Resources, and Intellectual Freedom and Filtering, and the recent BLC/NELINET Institute on "Achieving Excellence in Academic Libraries." NELINET's new headquarters in Southborough made it possible to begin a regular program of seminars and institutes, which opened up an entirely new area for NELINET activity and brought in added income as well. The network is also beginning to establish a reputation in consulting, thanks to active promotion and quality performance by Arnold and the staff. NELINET staff have consulted on everything from strategic planning to methods for migrating to a new library system. Satisfied customers may be found all around the region and again, this is an area where NELINET can advance both by meeting a need for libraries and creating another source of income.
The Board is also excited by the possibilities for NELINET in working with the William B. Meyer Company to develop a commercial storage facility providing member libraries with solutions to their remote storage problems. As many of you know, Meyer will begin site selection and leasing of a facility when a 250,000 volume commitment has been achieved and NELINET will be working with the Meyer Company to meet this goal. Meyer has extensive experience in warehousing and storage and has benefited through collaboration with NELINET in addressing the needs peculiar to libraries. While it is unlikely that any organization got rich providing storage for library collections, we on the NELINET Board believe that this is an area where the network can make an important contribution to our region by providing libraries with secure, accessible and preservation-friendly off-site space for collections that have outgrown their own stacks. The venture will only be successful, however, if libraries that have expressed a need for remote storage take steps to commit collections to the facility; in a sense, this is a moment of truth for NELINET, William B. Meyer and overcrowded New England libraries!
A third area of NELINET diversification endorsed by the Board is in the creation of NELINET Digital Services and New England Collections Online. The program has two complementary components. The first is to offer digitization services such as educational programs, technical recommendations, best practices, consulting, and vendor partnerships to our members. The second part of the effort will be directed toward creating New England Collections Online, a virtual union catalog of digitized materials that relate to New England, contributed by libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other institutions in New England. A high-powered advisory committee from our member institutions has already been formed and worked with Amy Benson on a IMLS planning grant that was submitted on February 1. The grant would facilitate the development of NECOL by providing support for one or more "proof of concept" digitization projects, as well as by building community digitization efforts among libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives in New England. We believe that NELINET, with its multi-type, regional membership and the remarkable collections represented among them, is the logical entity to build a true digital library of materials relevant to New England history and culture - for the benefit of the nation.
Customer Service and Communication
The Board has supported NELINET staff in a variety of steps to improve customer service, from improvements to the NELINET Website to the installation of new billing and course registration systems. NELINET staff continue their site visits to member institutions and are conscientious in bringing input back to management and, if warranted, the Board. We urge you, however, not to hang back from contacting NELINET management or Board members if you have an issue that concerns you; as I sometimes say to Brown University faculty, if you have a complaint, concern or suggestion for us, we'd much rather have you expressing it to us than fuming to one another - if you contact a NELINET staff member or talk to someone on the Board, we promise that your concern will be listened to and that we'll make every effort to address it productively.
Discussions on OCLC Governance Structure
In the Fall, the OCLC Board of Directors appointed an Ad Hoc Membership Committee to recommend a new membership structure and formula for allocating delegates to Members Council among the regional networks and OCLC service centers. At the Board meeting in January, the NELINET Board met with the NELINET Members Council delegation, Mary-Alice Lynch, (Ad Hoc Committee Chair), and William Crowe (Chair, OCLC Board). The NELINET representatives expressed three primary major concerns about the draft committee recommendations and protocols: (1) we recommended that the unweighted formula be replaced by one that gives greater weight to "intellectual or resource sharing" transactions than to "purchase or use-based" transactions; (2) the contributing member and participating member categories are extremely problematic, and should be eliminated; and (3) only representatives from full-member libraries should qualify for seats as delegates on Members Council. The Members Council made its recommendations to the OCLC Board in February, and the results concerning the NELINET concerns were mixed. A weighted formula was adopted, but the contributing and participating membership categories were maintained, and non-full-members will still qualify to run as delegates. The OCLC Board has drafted changes to the OCLC bylaws, which will be considered and voted upon by the Members Council at their last meeting of the year later this month.
NELINET Bylaws
The NELINET Bylaws have been largely unchanged since they were first formulated, but there have been a number of changes in the nature of NELINET and the way in which our world communicates today. The Board asked Ken Wiggin to chair a Bylaws Committee to complete a comprehensive review of the bylaws. A number of changes were recommended, which will be voted on a little later at this business meeting. These changes would: clarify the voting processes for changes in dues, fees, and program/service rates; delineate the powers of the Executive Director vis-á-vis the Board and establish a process for delegation of Executive Director duties; and clarify Board member term limits and the nominations process.
All in all, it has been a year of many changes. Although this is a challenging time in which to run a library, a consortium, or a network, we believe that NELINET has both the vision and the leadership to carry its mission successfully forward into the 21st Century. I'm honored to have spent these last years on the NELINET Board, and I look forward to the terrific things we'll see from NELINET in the future, for the greater good of our users.