Notes from  2CUL JSMIN meeting, June 8, 2017

Attending: Adam Chandler, Sarah Elman, Kate Harcourt, Jesse Koennecke, Jim LeBlanc, Mark Wilson

1. We shared our thoughts on the current impact on our operations of Ivy Plus initiatives and the recent proliferation of Ivy Plus working groups, task forces, and proposals for the development of new collaborative tools.  Some observations:

• • There are now a lot of groups, chiefly made up of higher-level staff, with some overlap, lots of meetings, and and quite a bit of administrative work.  Not much is "filtering down" to mid-level staff; definitely not a "middle-out" approach
  • In the Technical Services Group, it seems difficult to "keep things at scale"; discussion about retention statements developed into a debate about OCLC and its pricing model and how other consortia wish to approach OCLC; the more other consortia are brought into the discussion, the more the focus of the group seems to "spin out"
  • The E-Book group has been charged specifically to do environmental scans and to work out specs for a consortial project; the charge is also explicit about bringing others into the conversation
  • Certain tasks are more easily accomplished with smaller partnerships; when there is actual work to be done ("something practical") is the time to bring in experts "on the ground"
  • Could be that the composition of these groups is determining attitudes and approaches to the task at hand, rather than vice versa (i.e. top-down rather middle-out)
  • We have a lot of local activities and priorities that compete with this big picture work; it might be best for the Ivy Plus groups to focus on the latter