The Finance committee will meet to discuss the recommendation of an ILS Vendor on Monday, November 11 and the topic will be on the November 21 agenda for the Commission. Once a decision is approved by the Commission, the Library will begin negotiating a contract with the vendor. Be sure to read the MLC Finance packet because in it is information on how we arrived at the decision on which ILS vendor to recommend for MLS.
We continue to finalize the RFP for our proposed Integrated Library System. Anne Fischer expects to have the document finalized by the week of August 12th. Venders will have approximately 3 weeks to respond to the RFP, and then MLS will take several weeks to review the proposals. We believe that we will get proposals from 3 vendors. During the month of October we will have scripted interviews and demo for additional staff.
On April 21 - April 24, the ILS task force embarked on a 2 state, 3 library system tour of potential ILS vendors. The facilities toured have been recommended by library vendors we are considering for our system. The tour included meetings with staff and seeing how the public access catalog and customer service functions work in real time and space as well as seeing how the cataloging, processing, acquisitions and other ‘back of the house’ functions worked and how it all comes together. These are the systems and locations we visited:
On April 21 - April 24, the ILS task force will embark on a 2 state, 3 library system tour of potential ILS vendors. The facilities we will be touring have been recommended by library vendors we are considering for our system. The tour includes meeting with staff and seeing how the public access catalog and customer service functions work in real time and space as well as seeing how the cataloging, processing, acquisitions and other ‘back of the house’ functions work and how it all comes together. These are the systems and locations we will be seeing:
We received 5 responses to the RFI sent to potential ILS vendors. The task force will be reviewing these as to the vendor’s response to information and their ability to do the required tasks in preparation for the request for proposals and bid process.
Our Internal task force, Lloyd Lovely, Donna Morris, Karen Marriott, Kay Bauman and Anne Fischer have worked on identifying prospective vendors for a new ILS system throughout the fall as previously mentioned in the September Executive Director’s report to the commission. We met with 4 vendors and viewed demonstrations and had Q & A sessions with each one, and had a couple of follow up sessions with one or two vendors. We reviewed Requests for Information that had been used by other library systems and prepared one for MLS.
