Prospector Catalog/Reference
Committee
April 17, 2003
Present: Veronika Albl, Barbara Allen, Sandy Arnesen, Wendy Baia, Joan Beam, Pam Blome, Mary Beth Chambers, Kim Crowley, Gwen Gregory, Florence Jones, Lois Jones, Janet Lee, George Machovec, Carol White, Cynthia Wilson.
Guests: Lisa Blankenship, Jeff Kuntzman.
Minutes of the February 20, 2003 meeting were approved.
On April 7, 2003, Lois Jones, Jim Farmer and George Machovec visited Mesa State to cover the record contribution guidelines and circulation setups. The proposed timeline is to load their records at the end of May and to have Mesa State participating fully by the end of June. There are some issues due to the complexity of being a scoped site within the Marmot system and some extra tagging and coding will be required. Mesa State will contribute approximately 250,000 bib records and 270,000 item records to Prospector.
The uncertain future of courier services was discussed briefly. Depending on the outcome of state budget discussions, The Alliance may pick up some level of courier service if needed. If this becomes necessary, the Alliance will be looking for cooperation from other organizations to help fill the void.
CMC has expressed some interest in Prospector.
The current quarter’s set of MARC records is available to the 6 participating member libraries. CSU will load the set first since they do not use a proxy rewrite. If CSU is the master record, the generic URL will display. A reminder was given to not contribute item records for electronic resources if they exist in the local system.
Six libraries outside of Colorado have now purchased Gold Rush software. The Alliance is working on upgrades such as adding years of coverage within the link resolver, adding more flexibility and customization capability, as well as adding article-level linking within those services where it is supported such as Ebsco.
Still working on getting records loading properly. Another test load will be conducted soon.
Prospector statistics for April were distributed.
The screen design task force proposed using a hybrid of CU and CSU’s screen design. They suggested using the streamlined language of CU and the box layout from CSU. The Prospector box will stay at the left George proposed creating a mock-up page before implementing the changes.
The entire group agreed to default to the “x” search rather than the “y”. A “y” search defaults to an “or” search as a final step if “phrase” and “and” searches are unsuccessful, which delivers an unusable result set.
Recommendations from the indexing task force were distributed and some corrections were made. George will go ahead and place an order for AVS. Proposed timeline is to implement AVS and the new screen designs over the summer.
Distributed, discussed, and ranked the proposed catalog enhancements for InnReach software to be voted on at the upcoming IUG conference. Lois will cast the votes for our committee.
A request was made to the Alliance that any information related to Prospector that would traditionally be published in Data Link be posted on the Prospector discussion lists. Also, the group was encouraged to use the discussion lists more actively to communicate questions or information.
A proposal to look at a face-lift for the Prospector web design was made. A task force was suggested to take on this task. Lois will distribute a list of other InnReach sites for comparison. Fall was suggested as a timeline to wait until after AVS was implemented.
Use of the volume field as a holder for non-standard data was discussed. Any record that contains data in the volume field will force the patron to choose a specific item when placing a request. This overrides the system load balancing to some extent, so those libraries that are currently using the field for information other than volume information were encouraged to look for other solutions, including transferring the data to a different field in the item record.
Wording in the hotlink box for electronic resources (Click on the following to:) was discussed. Next meeting, bring samples and ideas to discuss the language in this box. The ideal will redirect the searcher to local links when appropriate, but will also allow access to public domain URLs.
Cynthia provided an update on the Interstate test of a new matching algorithm.
Next meeting:
5/15/03 Alliance offices, first floor conference room, 12:30 – 3:30.
Minutes
submitted by Cynthia Wilson