Dear Grant Partners:

We thought about holding a call in February, but I couldn’t visualize how to make the conference call format effective, so I’m trying a letter this month.  If any of you have questions or would like a direct update via phone, drop me a line and we’ll set something up.

Going to keep things simple this month.  Its easiest for me if we are always working from a simple common story.  I have two requests of you:

1)      Visit www.rscel.org .  Sign up on the site (which requires you to confirm your email address before you get all your privileges).  Start blogging about your open source projects by using the links on the Member Stories page.  Keep it simple and fun.  We’ll build a great resource, one idea and posting at a time.

There are a variety of entries there from KCLS if you would like examples.  Debbie from OCPL also recently wrote a great background piece for their project, which was just posted today.  Contact me, Lori, or Matt if you have questions about how to navigate the site or if you have ideas for additions to the site that would be helpful to you or interesting to others.

Our overall grant objective remains simple.  We all convert to Evergreen over time.  We tell our stories on the site.  We post and publish resources that are helpful to us that may help others that follow after us.  We use grant resources to help us accomplish this.  We evangelize to other libraries and bring them aboard in our wake.  So that leads into item number two.

2)      Start keeping a journal, mental or otherwise, of the ways that grant resources can be applied to help you convert to Evergreen and achieve our goals.  Bring that and be prepared to talk about it at our meeting at PLA in Portland in March.

That is our primary focus in Portland.  Our goal is to leave with a good plan for how to apply grant funds to our projects.  Do we need additional development?  Do we need to hire a project manager for some of our projects?  Do we need other types of technical support? 

So start contributing to the RSCEL site and start thinking about our plan to apply grant resources to our conversion projects.  Please get back to me if you have other ideas as to how to focus our priorities. 

September is fast approaching.  The KCLS project is very big and complex, but we seem to be on track, and our goals continue to be a September go live.

Best to all of you.

Jed