Prospector Cataloging/Reference Committee

Minutes of February 20, 2001

 

 

The Prospector Cataloging/Reference Committee met at the Alliance on Tuesday February 20th from 1 p.m. to 4:p.m.  Present were: Helen Reed, Florence Jones, Carol White, Lois Jones, Judith Heck, Cynthia (Colter)Wilson, Sandy Arnesen, Joan Beam, George Machovec, and Bill Garrison.  Amrita McKinney participated via conference phone from Durango.

 

1.            Announcements – Joan Beam was thanked for taking meeting minutes for the last year.  Cynthia (Colter) Wilson was congratulated on her February 9th marriage.

 

2.            Minutes - Committee minutes will be posted to the Prospector Web site.  Minutes of the January 18th meeting were distributed and approved.

 

3.         CS Direct – Helen reminded committee members never to share the CS Direct password or any III handouts.  The posting of the CS Direct password on a listserv brought down the Web site until new security measures could be implemented.

 

4.            Endeavor Update – Endeavor is waiting to get an III letter of confidentiality to sign before they can receive the III specs to begin work.  Once the letter is signed, a timetable for completion of work necessary for Endeavor libraries to go up on Prospector will be negotiated with both Innovative Interfaces and Endeavor.

 

5.            Enhancement Process – Helen and George will coordinate sending INN-Reach enhancements to the Innovative Interfaces User Group.  We have a March 30 deadline for enhancement submission to IUG.  We will review suggested enhancements at the March 22nd meeting.  The deadline for getting them to George for consideration is March 15th.  George will announce this on the Alliance List as well as the Circulation and Cat/Ref Lists.

 

6.         URL Checker and Item Records – The URL checker is now working on item records.  Contact III if it does not work on your system.  CU Boulder will be doing a full URL check on their entire database sometime in March.

 

7.         URL Checking as a Factor in the Overlay Precedence Table – Discussion was held to see if the committee wanted to adjust the overlay precedence table, based on the frequency a library's URLs are checked.  III, working with CSU, is going to turn on the item level URLs temporarily so we can see how this feature will work.  The committee will be informed about when this will take place.

 

8.            NetLibrary – Bill received another file of netLibrary records from OCLC.  The file contains between 12,000 and 14,000 records.  They will not load the records until Boulder can perform system backups again. 

 

NetLibrary records are available to Alliance member libraries free of charge.  Details must be worked out about exactly how the libraries can get the records –either direct FTP from netLibrary or working through INN-Reach and getting the records from Prospector. 

 

Bill Garrison announced that netLibrary did a training session at their library that answered many of their questions. 

 

George is monitoring the budget side of netLibrary.  The bill jumped in October from approximately $2,000 per month to $8,000; it went up to $18,000 in November and was $17,000 in December.  The bill dropped back to $7,800 in January.  The average cost per book is $60 plus a $20 access fee.  The large increase in use of netLibrary is based on Boulder having loaded netLibrary records into their catalog and having them display in Prospector as an Alliance resource.

 

George will try to schedule netLibrary training for Prospector committee members on either March 21st or 22nd.

 

9.         Record Overlay/Match Algorithm – Georgia Briscoe sent Helen Reed an e-mail discussing problems with record overlay in Prospector.  Helen distributed MARC records for three problem titles: Based on some of the non-matching records, George Machovec will ask Anne Rakes at III to run a duplicate 001 or 001/019 list for us. In addition to the non-matching records with the same OCLC number there are also many other records that fail to match because of varying cataloging practices.  In December Anne Rakes ran a program to clean up existing ISBN/ISSN problems.  Florence Jones shared other examples of overlay problems with the committee.  Bill and Lois will look for examples of current problems, and before the next meeting they will sample 250 records to document the current 001 problem.  Lois Jones will also look at records without an 001 and check the ISBN/ISSN title match.  It was surmised that the overlay program does not look far enough if one record contains an OCLC number and one record does not. 

 

10.        001 Prefixes – Best Practice.  The committee needs to find out what prefixes currently exist in each Prospector library's catalog.  That information should be posted to the Web to ensure that new prefixes a library may be considering are not already in use at another library.

 

11.            PASCAL update and possible Prospector Issues – Discussion was tabled until the March meeting.

 

12.            Material type mapping – We should submit an INN-Reach enhancement request to limit by material type in PROSPECTOR.

 

13.        AVS (Advanced Searching) – The cost for AVS for the Prospector system will be approximately $20,000.  Discussion about when individual libraries should begin migrating to AVS was tabled until the next meeting.

 

14.            Electronic Resources Cataloging – Some libraries are adding 856 fields to print records and some are cataloging online records separately.  The committee discussed the merits of each method, but is not ready to make a recommendation on the "best practice."

 

The next Prospector meeting will be March 22nd at the Alliance Offices at 1:00 p.m.

 

 

 

Submitted by

Sandy Arnesen

Denison Library

University of Colorado Health Sciences Center

Denver, CO  80262-0003

sandy.arnesen@uchsc.edu

Phone: 303-315-8649

February 26, 2001