Minutes

Prospector Catalog Reference Committee Meeting

March 16, 2006

 

Present: Mary Beth Chambers (chair), Barbara Allen, Joan Beam, Pam Blome (recorder), Gene Gardner, Janet Lee, George Machovec, Betty Meagher, Rose Nelson, Helen Reed (via speakerphone), Janet Ryan, Mary Sacoman, Jina Wakimoto, and Cynthia Wilson.

 

  1. Announcements:

 

    1. The firewall upgrade at the Alliance should be done on Friday afternoon and will probably take around 3 hours, beginning at 5:00 p.m.
    2. All of the University of Wyoming records have been loaded into Prospector. Until Endeavor solves some circulation glitches, Wyo. will not be borrowing or lending through Prospector. The status of their holdings will remain, “Local use only.”
    3. U. of New Mexico libraries are discussing their options about joining Prospector.
    4. NetLibrary still has not submitted their final group of bib records.
    5. CU Boulder’s business library will be closed next week and will cancel all Prospector requests.
    6. The Desert States Law Library Consortium is discussing the option of joining Prospector. They could be a sub-group within the system. The libraries involved include: New Mexico, CU, DU, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, BYU, and UNLV.  Not all of these libraries are Innovative libraries. If they joined, the “box” might be the answer. This is the box which would help non-Triple I libraries to interface with the system.

 

  1. Committee members agreed that the recorder will submit a draft of the minutes to the members via email.  Committee members will then have about one week to make suggestions for changes or revisions via email.  Once the review period is over, George will post the final version on the Prospector staff Website.

 

  1. Most have received positive feedback in regard to the new Title Browse display which shows $n information in the list of records retrieved. This is most important with media, which may be indistinguishable, otherwise.

 

  1. All were in favor of using the URL alternate wording, “Online access may vary by institution” currently displayed in the test server as opposed to “Click on the following to” that appears in the live system.  George will make the change in the live system.

 

  1.  Mark Shelstad from the U. of Wyo. emailed with suggestions about the “No copies available for request” message. While a big change would probable not work, it was suggested that we add: “Contact your library” to the display, so that patrons would realize that they might have other options, without making a specific recommendation, such as ILL, which wouldn’t work for all libraries.  The message will then read, “Sorry, no copies available for requests. Contact your library.”

 

  1. There was more discussion on the Boulder E-Book overlay problem. Besides the addition of the item record, it would be necessary to look at the 001 field. If the record is NOT an OCLC bib record, the 001 should be coded with a unique prefix, which would prevent the overlay problem.  A record should NOT be submitted with NO 001. This led into the discussion that there should be a Best Practices, posted on the Prospector Website for bulk loading of records, and for E-books in particular. These Best Practices would be guidelines which would help prevent these types of problems. A sub-committee was formed with Betty, Jina, Cynthia and hopefully Dawn Bastian to look into writing up these Best Practices for future discussion. If there would continue to be overlay/merging problems with these types of records, there was some discussion that this could be reported to III for either a fix or as a Bug. Betty (DU) and Jina (CUB) will hook up to look into the record for “Africans in Colonial Louisiana” to correct this record which is an electronic record blended with a print record. If the investigation determines that INN-Reach merges data from different records to form a master record, this should be reported to III for either as a fix or as an enhancement.

 

  1. George passed out the documentation regarding the matching algorithm and explained how it works. He also explained that when some of the original CARL records were converted to III, the fixed fields may have been stripped from the records. These records can be found in the Prospector system as “orphans” often functional, but unfixable.

 

  1. Mary Beth suggested that we need to look at ALL of our basic documentation. This is what any new members to Prospector need when they join. For example, the document Record Loading Checklist for Prospector Participants was last updated in 2002 and should be reviewed again. There was a suggestion also, that perhaps an FAQ could be added. The task force set up to look into this was: Mary Beth, Helen, Cynthia, Rose and George.

 

  1. It was also suggested that we write up a Best Practices for multipart media, such as DVDs for TV shows. Overlay problems can occur when libraries choose to catalog parts of media sets individually. To avoid overlay problems with the ISBN number, for example, Jeffco puts the set ISBN number in the 020 $z so that it does not overlay with the record for the complete set created by DPL.  This is related to the reason why the $n was so important in the display of these records.  There will be further discussion on this.

 

  1. IUG enhancements. The meeting will be here in Denver and both George and Mary Beth are planning on going. When we receive the list of enhancements from III, George will post it to the discussion list, since the timing of our meetings does not mesh with the III schedule. This should be next week. They will then be discussed at IUG and voted on in early June.

 

  1.  The next meeting is scheduled for May 18.

 

 

Minutes submitted by Pam Blome 3/20/06; revised and posted to the web 3/24/2006