LSP Governance Committee Co-chairs Update: The LSP project in September 2020
By Jeff Karlsen, Sacramento City College, and Michelle Ohnstad, MiraCosta College, LSP Governance Committee Co-Chairs
Much of the discussion of the LSP over recent weeks and months has been about funding, and rightly so. Needless to say, when the pandemic devastated California’s economy, our hopes for ongoing funding were disappointed. We will continue to advocate for statewide funding, but for now, we move on nonetheless, continuing to develop our shared bibliographic repository, implement policies and best practices, and collaborate on ways to make our shared system work as well as it can for our students and other users.
Below is a brief summary of where our project stands currently.
The CCC Technology Center remains a signatory on the current contract, which expires at the end of December, but otherwise is no longer involved in managing the project. Note that this change does not affect the SSO Gateway, which many institutions have implemented to help with authentication.
The Community College League of California will assume responsibility for centralized project management, coordination and billing. For more on this emerging structure, please see Amy Beadle’s piece elsewhere in this issue.
All LSP work groups have been joined by new members, and some have new leads. Work groups propose system-wide policies, establish best practices, post information to their pages on the LSP wiki, and sometimes hold presentations for the benefit of our system. Note that two work groups, Systems and Professional Development, are no longer active. Faculty appointments to these groups are made by the Academic Senate for one year, and can be renewed by mutual agreement. Classified staff and administrators may also serve.
The LSP Governance Committee meets monthly. This is a voting body with broad representation across our colleges. It considers policies proposed by the work groups, reviews progress, shapes communication and provides recommendations to various other organizations. You can view the committee charter, membership and meeting minutes at the LSP wiki.
The CCL LSP task force continues to meet weekly to monitor emerging issues.
The Council of Chief Librarians has hired an LSP consultant, Israel Yáñez, on a temporary part-time basis. Israel is assisting libraries who are completing their OCLC reclamation, implementing our WorldCat integration, and helping us set up processes for ongoing Network Zone (NZ) management. Jessica Hartwigsen, who served as our NZ manager in Spring 2020, is no longer with the project.
An NZ task force has been formed to carry out NZ maintenance and cleanup tasks. So far this group consists of our LSP consultant Israel Yáñez, Mary Wahl (Pasadena), Jeff Sabol (Long Beach), Stephanie Roach (San Mateo) and Ward Smith (Orange Coast).
The Governance Committee co-chairs and Library Consortium Director meet monthly with Ex Libris customer support to review outstanding issues in our system.
Ex Libris is staging a series of 90-minute “Knowledge Acceleration” webinars specifically for our consortium. With implementation now behind us, these webinars are intended to help us understand how to optimize Alma and Primo VE configuration and workflows.
The CCL LSP Task Force is coordinating a weekly webinar series to help with communication within our consortium about Alma and Primo VE and other topics of interest state-wide. Look for future announcements of topics and ways to provide input.
The LSP-All listserv is available to CCC library personnel for discussion of anything and everything related to the LSP.
With all the change and adversity facing our system and state, it’s important to remember how far we have come in this project. We have implemented a shared LSP across a large and diverse set of institutions. Our libraries are implementing Alma/Primo VE differently in light of differing student populations, IT environments, staffing situations, and library preferences. As we move forward, the experimentation and exploration various libraries have engaged in will help us develop and refine effective strategies and practices.
Let’s do more in the coming months to share our successes with the LSP, build collaborative efforts state-wide, and help each other achieve our end goal of making our collections and services accessible and helpful to our students.