Sage Council Annual Meeting Minutes

May 29, 2026

Recording Link: https://vimeo.com/1196845009

Attendees:

* Dea Nowell (Umatilla Co. Special Lib. Dist.) [via Zoom]

* Kristin Williams (BMCC Lib.) ~

Maura O’Daniel (Pendleton PL) ~

Beth Ross (Sage Lib. System)

* Perry Stokes (Baker Co. Lib. Dist.) ~

Kathy Street (Oregon Trail Lib. Dist.) ~

Heather Estrada (Umatilla Co. Special Lib. Dist.)

* Mary Reser (Gilliam Co. Lib.) [via Zoom] ~

Patricia Holliday (KCC Lib.) [via Zoom] ~

Susie Hansen (Umatilla PL) [via Zoom] ~

Darci Hanning (State Lib. of Oregon) [via Zoom]

* Carrie Bushman (Cook Memorial Lib.) [via Zoom] ~

Stephanie Partida (Athena PL) ~

Jon Georg (Sage Lib. System) [via Zoom]

Amy Bendtsen (Arlington PL) [via Zoom] ~

Dustin Schock (Ukiah P/SL) [via Zoom] ~

Heather Culley (Weston PL) [via Zoom] ~

Lisa Hauner (Oregon Trail Lib. Dist.) [via Zoom]

Amanda Hespel (Adams PL) ~

* Rachael Fox (Hood River Lib. Dist.) [via Zoom] ~

notations above:
* denotes Council Member (6 present)
~ denotes Member Library (14 present)

Verification of quorum:

The count of total members is 49 [listed below as 50 as one member was mentioned twice], and 14 were present exceeding the requirement of 25%. Regarding council members, 6 were present also meeting quorum requirements.

Request for agenda items:

No new items.

Minutes

The minutes for March were ready for approval and were sent a couple weeks prior to the meeting. Kristin moved to have the minutes accepted and Mary seconded it. No one opposed.

Sage Library System Status

Beth included a document highlighting Sage. 

The document breaks down membership by type, lists the statistics of total records and items in the system, total circulations, and courier statistics. E-books are not included since they are temporary records. It then lists out MessageBee SMS usage thus far, and that we need to purchase an additional block of SMS messages since we had no way to known in advance how many would be needed consortia-wide. MessageBee is currently used for courtesy notices, hold pickup and overdue notices after three days. We will also be adding emails to MessageBee which do not have any limitations, so we will be able to reduce SMS message usage by using emails instead.

A question was raised regarding auto-renewals which Beth will investigate. Beth also explained how the text messages are generic and do not list titles, etc., to avoid messages overlapping to multiple text messages per notice.

Anubis has been installed and overall bot attacks have been reduced. Anubis is the reason users will see a brief image of a gear when they log in, verifying that you’re not a bot.

Equinox is our support vendor again, and we are now using Backstage as our authority control vendor because the prior vendor went out of business. Authority updates are happening monthly, and new records are sent out to them every month or two for processing.

We’ve started a reports workgroup and restarted the circulation workgroup meetings. They’re both currently meeting monthly.

Cover images are being provided by LibraryOne since Baker & Taylor went out of business – we had been using ContentCafe through them for those images. We did have a glitch in the system where cover images were missing, and it was resolved, although they did not tell us what the issue was that caused it.

The Sage Evergreen app is being updated quarterly for both iPhone and Android.

Some libraries have also added more subscriptions that provide more content and we work with those on a library by library basis.

Regarding future plans, we will be continuing to clean up the database whether that is patrons, bibliographic records, or items. A report to check for empty bib records was recently created and those items removed.

We would like to review library settings and key elements of the system, as that needs to be done periodically. The circulation workgroup is going to start looking at library settings soon. For example, they recently looked into hold groups which is useful for book clubs. We also want to supply more documentation on library circulation and hold policies for staff, as well as more tutorials and training on Niche Academy.

Currently we’re hoping to upgrade Evergreen late this summer.

User Council’s review & on-going discussions this fiscal year:

Server Replacement-

The Dell service contract expired in March 2026. That means that any hardware failures are no longer covered. We had issues with a component of the RAID system on both servers but Dell took care of that and we have thus far not had any other issues with those servers. A help ticket has been submitted to Equinox to get an idea of what kind of server capacity they recommend when we replace the servers. We do not currently have an estimate for replacement cost, as hardware costs have been fluctuating a lot with all of the AI demand. The original purchase price of the two servers was just over $11,000 in 2021. We have $15k budgeted for their replacements, and can draw down from reserves if necessary.

Vote on the Sage User Council’s proposed changes to the Bylaws-

The majority of the proposed changes were focused on the composition of the User Council due to issues with retaining Council Members from all library categories, or even finding staff who was available to represent their institution. The proposal was to combine resource sharing institutions and special libraries, circulating schools and academic libraries since we do not have many members who fall into those categories. Because the Council can be composed of any odd number of representatives between nine and thirteen we needed to define how those additional members would be distributed to avoid representation becoming unfairly unequal. Additionally, we added a statement of responsibility for the User Council Representatives to more clearly define their duties, primarily that they need to attend the majority of meetings, and allowed that if that were not the case, that they could appoint someone to attend in their place. In addition, it was clarified that if someone leaves, that we will try to replace them with someone from that same category of member. Lastly, we made sure that the circulation and cataloging workgroups were listed as workgroups and not as committees since they don’t fit the definition of committee largely because they’re informal.

Perry motioned to accept the proposed bylaw changes, with Carrie seconding it. No one opposed.

Nomination Committee-

Kristin, Dea, and Carrie were the committee members since they will be going off of the council at the end of June. The nominations are Patricia Holliday from Klamath Community College, Amanda Hespel from Adams Public Library, Kathy Street from Oregon Trail Library District and Carrie Bushman from Cook Memorial Library. The voting will not take place in this meeting, it will be handled electronically which Beth will take care of within the next week or two. There were no other nominations submitted.

Strategic Planning-

The concept of strategic planning has been brought up a few times, but we haven’t really had one done before for Sage. The closest was in 2014 back when Eastern Oregon University was acting as the fiscal agent but they had to remove themselves from our system since they have to be under a different system with the rest of higher education. Darci Hanning from the State of Oregon library is currently attending to observe more about our consortia and has agreed to assist us with strategic planning. The only goal mentioned thus far was financial sustainability, specifically in regard to courier services which are currently funded through the IMLS. She’s happy to help us identify our goals and success criteria.

Patricia Holliday had numerous questions regarding how to advocate for their library, and how to address questions regarding AI and suggestions to move to an entirely virtual collection.

Clearly any strategic planning is going to have to at least address AI. Jon mentioned how the cataloging mentor group has already had discussions about AI materials and MARC records and how their quality has thus far not been up to Sage standards. The current suggestion is to begin discussing strategic planning in more detail come September. There was also a question as to whether the entire membership should meet more often than once a year to provide input.

Essentially the strategic plan process is that we will need to identify the planned goals at a high level, develop those and as each is completed count it as complete for the time being and then revisit them again later on. Darcy will be looking for some examples of consortia level strategic plans. She has moved away from the SWOT method [strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities] to SOAR [strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results] as that tends to be more positive for the staff involved. A staff focused survey will be sent out and then potentially a public one to garner input on the direction Sage needs to go with its future planning.

Budget-

Perry brought up that the assumption that a 3% cost of living increase for staff has proven to be inadequate and will need to be increased to 4%. Kristen moved to accept that change. Dea seconded it, and no one opposed the motion.

Additionally, there is expected to be a larger than budgeted carryover like last year, and adjustment will need to be made to take into account the increased number of technical support hours through Equinox and the purchase of an additional block of SMS messages through MessageBee.

The courier is also expected to rise by 4% which was added to the grant proposal.

Meeting adjourned at 11:12am Pacific Time.

Next Meeting will be July 21st