Meeting Summary for Sage User Council

September 23, 2025

Recording Link: https://vimeo.com/1121715018

Attendees: Beth Ross (Sage), Dea Nowell (UCSLD, Chair), Jon Georg (Sage), Perry Stokes (Baker), Rachael Fox (Hood River), Kirsten Wells (The Dalles, Vice-chair), Susan Lewis (CGCC), Carrie Bushman (Cook Memorial), Mary Reser (Gilliam), Susie Hansen (Umatilla), Melinda Christensen (Burns HS), Kolle Kahle Riggs (Josephy)

Request for agenda items:

Beth

• Hermiston High School has requested to withdraw from Sage
• Does the council still want a recap of the Cataloging Workgroup meetings?
  • A brief discussion followed, where the consensus was that the council did want a recap of the discussion meetings simply because not everyone sees the emails with the summaries on them or remembers to check the web site for them.

Perry

• Year End Financial Report for Fiscal Year 2024-25
  • Sage Financial Report, Sep 2025
  • The report is still being reviewed by the auditor and won’t be complete until October. The audit report itself will come out in December.

Minutes – The minutes for July 15th are ready for approval, however they weren’t sent out until this morning. A decision was reached to vote by email on approving them so that everyone had a chance to review them. Dea did point out a correction which Jon fixed.

Committee Reports

The Cataloging Workgroup met on August 5th.

The main topics were-

• A conversation on the 500 note ‘editions may vary’ and when to and not to use it.
• A description of how the series index is built and what to look for when checking the record to see if a 800 or 830 needs added.
• A discussion of new language codes that have come out.

A more detailed summary is available on the web site.

The LoT meetings are currently focused on Spanish items and the workgroup is now being referred to as Library Things, rather than Library of Things. Those summaries are on the web site.

We’ve also been encouraging staff to look at Niche Academy and do the cataloging refresher course.

Systems Update
Bots

Jon gave an update regarding the AI blocking that is still being done. There was a peak on the 12th due to a changeover of how the attacks were formulated. He was able to identify new keywords to identify and isolate those addresses. While there was a large influx of traffic that day, it wasn’t enough to bring down the system like it has in the past.

We’re still working with Adam at Emerald Data to get the Test server up so that we can test Anubis before adding it to the production servers. Jon is hoping to be able to use both Anubis and Bad Bot Blocker together since there is a concern that disabling Bad Bot Blocker would allow a sudden influx of previously blocked addresses to take down the system before Anubis is able to block all of them.

Jon added the Browser Reset Instructions to SageLib for staff to access.

Authority Control from Backstage

Beth gave an updated on Authority Control and that the most recent batch did not contain any diacritic errors.

MessageBee

MessageBee is still in process of being implemented. Perry asked if there would be a dashboard of statistics to tell how many messages are sent out. There will be once it’s out of the testing phase. The first step is getting a Sage-wide message configured and then we’ll be able to customize it for individual libraries. There are reports that show where message delivery failed, and there are additional options for patrons on how to opt in or opt out of various text messages.

There was a brief discussion about what to do if a primary number for texts is not defined on the patron account. Do we use the primary number that is stored elsewhere on that patron’s record? Libraries are also going to need to make sure staff are updating that field when interacting with patrons and that patrons are notified of the new options that will be available once MessageBee comes online. Jon suggested making a pamphlet or something so that all libraries are sending out the same basic messaging to patrons and/or so all staff have a help document of some kind that answers the basic questions patrons are likely to ask. Carrie suggested adding information about MessageBee to the library newsletters too.

Non-payment of membership fees

This ended up being a moot point, as the member ended up paying for last year’s and this year’s membership fees before Beth was able to get the letter out to them.

Review of representative apportionment among classifications

The note to the representative for Hood River Valley High School didn’t go out in time for this meeting.

Perry was able to research the number of representatives less than 5,000 and over 15,000 in the bylaws and how that has translated to reality over the years. The bylaws have from nine to thirteen members rather than a fixed number, so we could have an adjustable amount. In the last change to the bylaws the category of ‘over 15,000 people’ had three representatives and was dropped to two representatives, and the category of ‘circulating schools’ was dropped from two representatives to one representative.

There are currently nine representatives in total, but we have one representative for the category of “5,000 to 15,000” and three representatives for the category of “public libraries over 15,000” and according to the bylaws it’s supposed to be two representatives for each of those categories. That raises questions on whether the bylaws need to be adjusted.

Having a representative for Resource Sharing / ILL partners may need to be phased out, because those partners don’t currently have the resources available to have a representative serve on the council. Since Kolle was available and represents one of these libraries she was asked if this sounded like an accurate description of the situation for these libraries. No decision was made at this time, it was instead more of a brainstorming session to work out what might need to be done to fix the current problem.

Beth is going to reach out to Hood River Valley High School to see if she can get an answer why they have not been participating in council meetings.

Jon had asked in chat if it might make sense to send out a poll asking about how the libraries themselves viewed current representation on the council. There was also a discussion about potentially switching over to a regional representation rather than by library size/type.

Courier

The conversation had been started last meeting about how the Sage Courier needs to be made to be self-sustaining in light of the fluctuations that are occurring on the Federal level with funding. On a positive note the Appropriations Committee has allocated funding for IMLS but it still needs to get through the Senate.

Perry had made a presentation of adding a fifth year to the four year plan of gradually increasing membership rates and realigning the membership fees as that seems to be the least punitive approach that presents the smallest amount of hardship to the member libraries.

There was an additional discussion about possibly trying to get local government to help fund Sage and why we need to find a way to be free of Federal funding.

Server Replacement

The need to replace our servers was again brought up so that it could be tabled again. The point is to keep it as something we’re aware of since the time to actually start dealing with it is approaching in the next year.

Support Vendor

Beth discussed that we will be returning to using Equinox as our support vendor. The issue that we ran into is that they want to be our sole Evergreen ILS support vendor. Since we had 10 hours of support left with Emerald Data, the decision was made to ask for a refund of existing hours since we’d exhausted their ability to resolve our outstanding issues.

Hermiston High School

Hermiston High School has requested to withdraw from Sage. Part of this is that the director of their library retired as did their district librarian. Part of their concerns were regarding the learning curve of using Evergreen. There were offers to help train their staff if that is the sole reason they are requesting to withdraw from Sage. They are just a Resource Sharing Partner, so they use Sage for borrowing and lending items, so there would be a courier component they would need to learn as well. It was asked if there is an Intergovernmental Agreement on file with them, and we believe there is one. Since the request was in the manner of an informal email, it’s been requested that they follow the formal structure of the agreement and formally request to withdraw. Jon asked to verify that they understood that withdrawing would remove all entries from Evergreen. Beth mentioned that they actually have their own ILS, and the entries in Evergreen are from an export of their system which is currently out of date. No one objected to them withdrawing, they just wanted to make sure the proper procedure was followed and that it wasn’t simply an issue of needing training in how to use Evergreen.

Dea posted in chat that she was willing to entertain a motion to adjourn. Perry moved to adjourn. Carrie seconded the motion.

Meeting adjourned at 11:15 am Pacific Time.

Next Meeting will be November 18th