Minutes

 

Prospector Catalog/Reference Committee

July 20, 2000

 

Present: George Machovec, Helen Reed, Bill Garrison, Sandy Arnesen, Carol White, Judith Heck, Joan Beam and Cynthia Colter taking over for Vicki Nichols.  Guest Alan Charnes.

 

1. CARL Load Update.

 

Denver Public Library  DPL is still loading but should be done in a few days. Transactions update will follow since these have been delayed during initial load, and that will take about two weeks. Alliance programmer is working on the document delivery specs. and will be testing with Innovative at the end of July. Tests will be over the patron authentication, the document delivery requests to and fro and how item level holds are processed.  The Alliance must finish programming the staff interface between Carl and III which includes requests lists processing and checkouts. Circulation training for DPL staff trainers might be the third or fourth week of August and will be coordinated by the Prospector Circulation Committee.  Circulation special reports will be archived for later use in statistical reports.

 

Regis  George, Helen, and Joan met with Technical Services and other personnel  on July 14th to review topics related to database creation including the CARL/Prospector interface programming, indexes, record overlay, and record coding. Janet Lee has since sent George the tables needed for in order to map the CARL branch and location codes for use in Prospector. The Committee briefly reviewed this list. Public service staff training will coincide with the load of Regis records.

 

Load Calendar  The DPL primary load will be finished around August 1st.  Once the queued transactions have cycled through the Photodigitization records will be loaded. Updates to the photodigitization collection are not continuous but will be loaded monthly. The Regis load will follow at the end of August with their 200,000 or so records, taking about five days to load.  Training for reference public services staff at Regis will follow.

 

2. netLibrary

 

CU Boulder has received the initial files for netLibrary records as well as 1 update file.  Since some publishers have withdrawn distribution rights for their titles, the files need to be cleaned up before they are loaded otherwise records will appear in the database for titles that are no longer available.  Bill Garrison has the list from netLibrary of records to be deleted. The code mapping is also completed at CUB for the suppression and display codes for Chinook and Prospector.  The netLibrary load will be about 7,000 records and should be in Prospector by August 15th.  The III system at netLibrary is now up and running too.

 

We need to learn more about options from netLibrary regarding loading subsets of their collection in individual library databases, FTP-ing records, lists of Alliance-owned titles on netLibrary (in their intranet now). The Alliance now owns about 5,000 titles but to have holdings in own library database, would have to  pay to have holdings added to OCLC. There are far more records in netLibrary than are cataloged on OCLC in MARC format.  None of the Project Gutenburg public domain records have MARC records for instance. CUB will be adding records as they are cataloged on OCLC to Chinook and uploading to Prospector on continuing basis.

 

ACTION:  Bill will try to set up our next meeting at netLibrary.  The agenda will include discussions about the interface between III and netLibrary, FTP-ing their records, etc. Other guests may wish to attend, especially from CSU which is beta testing the interface between the different III modules and netLibrary. Meeting between CAT/REF Committee, guests, and netLibrary will try to be on August 24th, Sept. 28th or some time in between, when Bill can set it up.

 

3. Endeavor Update

 

The University of Wyoming is working on extracting their database from CARL.  Once that is complete Endeavor will take a week or so to massage the data before the library tests and approves the data conversion.  The Wyoming Endeavor system should be available to the public in August with OPAC and Circulation functionality. It will not be live for cataloging or acquisitions.  George has been talking to Endeavor about the link to Prospector(Inn-Reach). In September/October discussions will start regarding  the programming for the interface to Inn-Reach. Endeavor also does state-wide union catalogs similar to Inn-Reach systems although without the item level status attached to each bibliographic record as in Prospector. In most union catalogs, 60% of records are uniquely held, so Endeavor uses a call-back system to the owning library for item status. We hope to have the functionality going by Spring. We also need to also have to check on the courier status between Colorado and Wyoming.

 

4. DPL Training

 

Training for Denver Public Library staff is Aug. 10 and 16 from 8:30 am-10 am at the Central Library. The Regis staff will also be invited to attend these sessions. Several members of the Catalog/Reference Committee will be at DPL to assist in the training and answer their questions.  The agenda will include:

 

Overview of Prospector; demonstration of Prospector PAC; indexes in Prospector and how they work; CARL integration processes; the Colorado Virtual Library/Prospector relationship; a demonstration of the request function; and how Prospector relates to the CARL Web.  The use of the Prospector system as a reference tool will be emphasized as will some of the special features in Prospector such as the journal title index and search limiting.

 

George, Alan and Judith will be presenting CARL on Prospector to the DPL Library Commissioners on Aug. 17th.  George would like to demo a live search and request on Prospector then.

 

5. Other

 

UNC Laboratory School Library  The Laboratory School at UNC is now a charter school and will be moving off-campus.  Thus, that collection will be moved to main library in next year.  All records will be updated to the new locations which will then reflect in Prospector.

 

Fitzsimmons Storage Facility  CUB and other Denver libraries will be sending materials to the Fitzsimmons Storage facility soon.  All items sent to storage will need location changes in their local catalog which will then be reflected in Prospector. Materials in storage will still be requestable. All materials will also need new barcodes to match the revised shelving procedures.

 

001 Overlay  We have not heard back from Ann Rakes about the duplicate record problems in Prospector but it is being worked on by Rakes and Westall at III. They may come out with an overlay fix.

 

Record Matching Algorithm  The new algorithm for matching records(reported in minutes of the PCatRef Minutes of June 15) in Inn-Reach systems could cause problems. Sandy Arnesen will do some testing to see if changing the title in a currently overlaid record will force a split and actually create a duplicate record in Prospector where none exists now. Sandy will also test to see if the first three words for the title match are all from the subfield a or if when there is only one word in subfield a, whether the matching then goes to the subfield b.

 

Submitted by Joan Beam with updates and additions by George Machovec and Helen Reed