PROSPECTOR CATALOGING/REFERENCE COMMITTEE

JUNE 17, 2004 MEETING

 

 

1.       MINUTES:  The minutes of the April 22, 2004 meeting were approved.  Notes of the May 20, 2004 workshop were corrected to read: “If the 001 field matches, the record is considered a match and the institution’s holdings are added.”

2.       ANNOUNCEMENTS:

1.    The Endeavor saga continues. The problem: determining whether testing errors are real errors or just time-outs because of the slow response time of the Prospector server. New Alliance staff member Theresa Mullins will start July 1. She’s responsible for Endeavor and Gold Rush support.

2.    The new Sun server will be installed June 22, starting at 7:00 a.m. and taking anywhere from 4-8 hours to complete. Libraries should plan on Prospector being down all day. Most systems will automatically reconnect, except DPL and perhaps CSM. It should greatly improve record loading, test times and updating transactions.

3.    A proposal to change the Prospector name to Prospector+ will be referred to the directors at their fall meeting. If the change is approved, it was suggested that the new name and web redesign be unveiled at the same time.

4.    Alliance Member Council approved an agreement to join the Center for Research Libraries.  The agreement will be signed at ALA and loading CRL records should begin sometime during the fall academic semester. CRL agreed to fund $16,000 of the $24,000 III loader fee, and Alliance libraries agreed to pick up the remaining $8000.00. Prospector libraries who don’t want to incur CRL borrowing fees will see a customized message referring patrons to traditional ILL.

5.    Several libraries have expressed interest in joining Prospector: Joel Robinson representing Marmot and the Mountain West Conference college libraries (University of New Mexico, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Utah, Air Force, etc.). Because of the $8500 that III charges to load each library, it’s likely that Marmot libraries would come in one at a time rather than as a group. Technical (some MWC libraries use Horizon), delivery, and political issues would have to be resolved before the MWC libraries could be added.

6.    Mary Walsh, CSU-Health Sciences library representative, has accepted a new job at Adams State College.  Jane Gardner will take her place on the Committee.

3.       MAT TYPE MAPPING:

After reading through the answers to the questions compiled for Innovative at April’s meeting, Cynthia asked about the next step. Preference would be to wait until after web redesign was completed.  The committee could begin to work on rules to test especially if the test could occur in a staging area (:2082). George reminded libraries to report their additions or changes in i-types, mat-types, p-types to him so that they can be mapped properly in Prospector.  Circ status codes don’t map, but libraries do need to check against the table on the Prospector website to assign an unused value. 

ENHANCEMENT SUGGESTION 2005: ABILITY TO DISPLAY MULTIPLE FORMATS IN INN-REACH SYSTEMS.

4.       WEB REDESIGN TASK FORCE

The Task Force met April 29.  Portland Community College’s website will be used as a basis for Prospector’s new look.  The TF has started evaluating color schemes, and then will move in stages, working on buttons, tabs, etc.  To look at color schemes, see Prospector’s testpac:

http://www.coalliance.org/prospector/preview/index-1.html

http://www.coalliance.org/prospector/preview/index-3.html

http://www.coalliance.org/prospector/preview/index-4.html. Comments should be sent to George or Joan Beam.  The plan is to bring up the new design by early fall.  

5.       ISSN’s

Committee members were given a draft of Best Practices for Electronic Resources in Prospector (August 2002), and were asked to read and solicit comments from local catalogers and others to bring to the meeting in August.  Are these practices still being followed? Should the “draft” be updated to reflect more current practices? 

6.       DISPLAYING “ON ORDER” RECORDS IN PROSPECTOR

Janet Lee, representing the Shared Collection Development Task Force, asked Committee members to consider displaying their library’s order records in Prospector.  The TF has started developing ways of reducing the numbers of duplicate copies among member libraries in order to stretch budgets and to increase the depth and breadth of Prospector collections. On order items are not checkout-able from Prospector.

ENHANCEMENT SUGGESTION 2005: ABILITY TO PERFORM STAFF SEARCH FUNCTIONS IN INN-REACH SYSTEMS. (Now in staff view in My Millennium?)

7.       NETLIBRARY

The last quarterly shipment (over 4700 bib records) became available about two weeks ago, and CSU loaded the next day. It will be available for 90 days.  Several committee members are raising questions about the quality of the loads as they are finding duplicates from previous loads. And there are concerns about deleting records that have been purchased or ending up with different records appearing at different sites. George is running compares to make sure the group is not being double billed, but the whole process has become a big headache for technical services staffs.  While the books are being used a lot, $15-$20,000/month in purchases, the costs may be too high in staff time. Options to consider: going back to a firm order approach where all titles would be located in the NetLibrary database but only those purchased locally in local catalogs; go with another e-book vendor; or review/refine the list of selected publishers, removing those that no longer apply and fine tune our profile.  By starting to document now the amount of time we’re spending on authority work, duplicate overlay issues, and other problems, the Committee would be ready to make recommendations by November for the next contract renewal period.