Meeting Summary for Sage User Council

July 21, 2026

Recording Link: https://vimeo.com/1211782227

Attendees:

Dea Nowell (Umatilla Co. Special Lib. Dist.)

Beth Ross (Sage Lib. System)

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

* Patricia Holliday (KCC Lib.)

Susie Hansen (Umatilla PL)

Jon Georg (Sage Lib. System)

Dustin Schock (Ukiah P/SL)

* Rachael Fox (Hood River Lib. Dist.)
Marsha Richmond (Lake)

Amy Velho (BMCC)

notations above:
* denotes Council Member (3 present)

Verification of quorum:

Quorum was not met. 6 members have to be present. Due to lack of a quorum, no votes can be held. A reminder that under the new bylaws, members are required to attend or nominate someone to stand in for them. We will be skipping nominations for chair and vice chair as well. Dea will stay as temporary chair until someone else is voted in.

Request for agenda items:

No new items. Dea sent out an updated agenda, and Beth sent out an email about MessageBee.

Minutes

The minutes for May were ready for approval, however no vote could be made due to lack of a quorum, so this was tabled for today. No edits to the minutes were mentioned.

Updates

All council candidates were approved via email vote. The web site will be updated with those names.

Cataloging Work-group

The group met at the beginning of June. The discussion centered around material type custom icons for the OPAC. They had been removed during one of the upgrades. Beth was able to restore them, however there were still some material types that were lacking custom icons, such as Wonderbooks or preloaded audiobooks. Graphics for those will need to be obtained or created.

Concerns about authority control and the subfield v for Juvenile Fiction were also discussed. Beth received confirmation from Backstage that they will not eliminate those fields within our records.

Circulation work-group
Circulation work-group did not meet in July, but did in June. We discussed reviewing the Sage circulation policy. Perry had shared a policy they were using and we were going to compare it to Sage’s to see if there were some improvements that could be made to Sage’s policy.

Additionally, we talked about circulation modifiers and patron types and whether any changes needed to be made to either of them. It was a continuation of the ongoing discussion about how we can adjust our settings to improve usage of the system. The next meeting will be the second Tuesday of August.

At the end of the meeting, it was brought up that a topic that will need brought up at the next circulation meeting is that there needs to be a minimum standard for labeling and stamping of library materials. There had been some recent issues with staff being unable to verify if items were ILL items or donation items. There was also feedback about genre labels that some libraries are placing on their materials. They’re allowed to do so, but the feedback was that some patrons were against it.

Reports Group

The reports group is continuing to meet monthly on the fourth Tuesday of the month. We go through creating or modifying a report to help staff become accustomed to the process and answer any questions staff may have. The sessions are recorded as well.

Sage Library System Status

Jon did not have any updated system information, other than some staff are still occasionally having browser issues. The Zen browser was discussed. It still suffers from the blank page issue that all of the other browsers seem to return on occasion when services need to be restarted. It was discussed that it does seem to recover better than some of the other browsers though. We still do not know the exact cause as to why browsers are occasionally having issues with Evergreen. Perry mentioned that using Incognito mode in Chrome or Brave when the blank page issues crop up was working for him to resolve the issue. Jon is going to run some tests on that and draft some staff instructions. Doing this does require you to re-register your workstation, which some staff have issues with. The instructions will need to clarify that they should, but are not required to, use the same workstation name for simplicity’s sake.

Regarding the system upgrade. Beth is still waiting to hear from Equinox. We’re currently hoping for late October, but it is going to depend on Equinox’s schedule. When we asked them about whether we needed to upgrade our hardware as well, they responded with a quote to test our systems, which wasn’t what we asked for. Beth clarified the question and is waiting on a response.

MessageBee

Beth had sent out an email asking for input regarding the planned use of email notifications via MessageBee and how we want them to be consistent for staff and patrons. She also included a document with the statistics regarding SMS Text notifications via MessageBee over the past six months. When we first signed up with MessageBee, we bought a block of 100k messages, since that is how text message usage is charged and we did not know how many messages the system would be sending out. That block essentially lasted 6 months, and we’ve just purchased a block of 200k messages.

The courtesy notices were the biggest portion of the messages sent at 68k. In order to reduce that number, Beth is proposing to change the timing on the notices. Since quite a few libraries within Sage are using auto renewal, which is currently set to 24 hours prior to the due date, and the courtesy notices were going out 3 days prior, the suggestion is to change the auto renewal to two days prior and then send the courtesy notices out the day before so that no notices are being sent for things that auto renewed. Consensus was that this was a good idea.

Additionally, the one day overdue default grace period was also briefly discussed, and it was mentioned that some libraries have a longer grace period and that if it becomes an issue we can adjust the Sage default grace period.

Regarding eliminating excessive Sage overdue text messages, it was discussed whether both an email and a text should be retained or not. Some patrons likely prefer both, some not. The biggest complaint regarding the overdue texts is how generic they have to be due to their nature. If more data were to be included they would roll over to multiple texts and thereby use up our block of available texts more rapidly. Email overdue notices are not limited to those same requirements and can therefore include more information about what specific items are overdue.

It was suggested that the text message be altered to say something akin to reference your email for more details. The text overdue notifications are currently going out at 3 days, whereas the email notifications are going out at 7 and 14 days. The suggestion was to make the text and email overdue notifications both go out at 3 days for clarity’s sake. We’ll need staff to verify patron contact information. The old Evergreen email method was unreliable so many staff have not been bothering to verify if that information was correct. Notification to staff will need to be sent out. Jon mentioned that cleanup of the database may be needed, as fake or no-reply email addresses were occasionally mistakenly input into patron accounts. In order to address the jump in notices from 3 days to 14, we’re going to adjust them to 3, 10 and 21 for the final notice. There is variation between libraries regarding when items are marked lost. Some are set to 21 days, some to 90, so we will need to bring this up at the circulation work-group meeting. The plan is make the changes to notices starting August 3rd, since it’s the first weekday of the month.

Strategic Planning Process

Darci Hanning was not able to attend our meeting today. It was discussed about how we want to start this process, and whether we apportion part of the council meeting for discussion on this topic or if we should have separate meetings on the topic. Additionally, we’ll need to know how to keep staff in the loop on everything and how they can provide feedback.

For patrons it was suggested that we use surveys, as we’ve had good responses to that. There was a discussion about focus groups, as well as how those who are invested tend to make themselves heard, but the patrons who are not invested or have opposing views generally did not respond at all when asked. This was specifically mentioned in regard to funding that came up to an actual election vote, so we will want to try to reach as many patrons as possible to try to avoid that. It was mentioned that incentivizing people to participate through participation in some sort of drawing might increase responses.

A request was made that since no decisions can be made now due to lack of quorum, that those present think of the top items they want the plan to address. Additionally, we will continue to look for examples of Strategic Plans from other libraries. A few were submitted, but none of them are a perfect fit for our use case.

Preliminary Year-End Financial Report

Perry shared the updated year-end financial report in chat. We’re in a good financial position. Cash carryover is projected to be 280k. The preliminary balance was 291k, and bills are still coming in.

Governance Planning
We need to form a governance planning committee. The last one was when Sage was converted from an MOU to an Intergovernmental agreement. The governance planning committee is basically open to anyone within Sage; the only committee limited to council members is the nominating committee.

Meeting adjourned at 11:05am Pacific Time.

Next Meeting will be September 15th