As an outcome of the New York State Resource Sharing Summit June 5-6, 2007, the summit participants identified the need to establish working groups made up of representatives from various library segments and sizes to study the issues of Discovery and Delivery. The following charges to those working groups were drafted by Nylink based upon the Directors’ Roundtable discussion and revised at the first Discovery Working Group meeting on December 4, 2007. The Discovery Working Group will advise interested members of the New York library community of the issues and challenges in providing statewide user-friendly discovery tool(s) that know where a user is coming from and the content delivery/resource sharing options available to that person.

1. Develop a statement of guiding principles for the work of the group, focused on the end-user perspective.

a. Consult “Rethinking Resource Sharing Manifesto” at http://www.rethinkingresourcesharing.org/manifesto.html.

b. Consider behavioral documents such as the IDS contract.

Volunteers: Julie Cunningham, Susan Currie. Timeframe: draft by ALA Midwinter

2. Research the need for and feasibility of a statewide discovery tool or tools.

a. Draft a survey, coordinated with the Delivery Working Group. Survey is to be short and targeted, focusing on what the needs are, what libraries are currently using, and what would they be willing to do/give up, for a statewide tool or tools.

Volunteers: Jean Currie, Susan Currie. Timeframe: draft of questions by ALA

b. Distribute survey (to be put up in Nylink’s Zoomerang account) on NYLINE and appropriate NYLINE sublists.

Volunteer: Maribeth Krupczak Timeframe: TBD

3. Inventory existing services, processes and tools, and look at peer models in other areas of the country.

a. Toolbars, free enhancements

Volunteer: Julie Cunningham and her staff Timeframe: Ongoing (thanks for first contributions, Julie!)
Volunteers: Maribeth Krupczak, Bart Harloe, Susan Currie, Donna Dixon Timeframe: by ALA midwinter

c. Set up webinars, demos, of commercial and open-source products

Volunteer: Julie Cunningham will be attending CUNY day-long federated search products demo and will report back in late January
Volunteer: Donna Dixon to set up demos as wanted by the group.

d. Review products and prepare report for wiki (spreadsheet?), and for group.

Volunteers: Maribeth Krupczak, Bart Harloe, Susan Currie, Donna Dixon Timeframe: winter/spring following ALA midwinter, and ongoing The group agreed that identifying volunteers and timeframes for the last two charges will be done in subsequent meetings/conference calls.

4. Identify costs and timeline for implementation

5. Provide recommendations for adoption of a discovery tool that provides options for different types of libraries and users
The group will provide a report with any recommendations to the library community via a presentation at the October 23-24, 2008 Resource Sharing Summit, and will provide ongoing updates and information to the community via NYLINE postings, a wiki, and other communication means as needed.