PROSPECTOR CATALOGING REFERENCE COMMITTEE MEETING

August 18, 2005

PRESENT: Cynthia Wilson (chair), Barbara Allen, Wendy Baia, Dawn Bastian, Joan Beam, Pam Blome, Mary Beth Chambers, Gene Gardner, Gwen Gregory, Florence Jones, Lois Jones, Janet Lee, Terri Lewis, Kay Lowell, George Machovec, Janet Ryan, Mary Sacoman

1. ANNOUNCEMENTS:

A. Lois Jones: This will be Lois’s last Prospector meeting. She is retiring from her position at the University of Denver. Cynthia presented Lois with a bouquet of bright yellow roses in recognition of and thanks for her many years of service to Prospector. Betty Meagher at DU will take Lois’s place on the Committee.

B. Quarterly database statistics: George distributed quarterly Prospector database statistics for July 2005 (Handout). As of this report, there are over 6.15 million unique titles and over 19 million item records in Prospector.

C. RAPID: George announced that CSU has created a Prospector RAPID pod. Phase one libraries’ holdings will be loaded into Prospector sometime this fall. These “early adopters” are CUB, CSU, Mines, Regis, UNC, DU, CC, Auraria, and maybe DPL. George assigned technical contacts at each site to help facilitate the process. Janet Lee asked if an individual library’s serials holdings format is a concern for CSU who will be extracting the data--some libraries use MARC 21 holdings format, but others do not. George said that CSU programmers likely can work with a variety of formats.

D. University of Wyoming: Loading of Wyoming’s records was put on hold while the Head of Library Systems there, Steve Boss, recovered from a car accident. Steve is back to work now. Steve, George, and Laura Guy, Computer Services Librarian at the School of Mines, will meet on September 9 to discuss ways, learned by Mines, to avoid Endeavor pitfalls. The Alliance is ready to load Wyoming’s records whenever Wyoming is ready.

E. Release 2005: Release 2005 is out. However, George has no plans to rush to load it. Release notes do not indicate much change for INN-Reach sites. There is new functionality to better distinguish INN-Reach libraries’ holdings (a Prospector enhancement request), but George does not know yet what it looks like or how it works.

F. Institutional Holdings Display: Cynthia noted that III is talking about putting Institutional holdings in a MARC 945 display by treating it as a bug rather than an enhancement.

G. New Prospector Library: The Colorado State Publications Library is going out of the CARL system in 2006. They will be joining Prospector sometime afterwards. They will be a lending library only, and they want to be at the top of the lending queue for materials that they own.

Mesa County Library in Grand Junction and the University of New Mexico also expressed interest in joining Prospector, but they have made no commitments to join.

2. NEW PROSPECTOR WEB INTERFACE: Joan announced that the new Web interface is ready to go. The Alliance plans to release it on Tuesday, August 23. There are a few small changes yet to be made: the red text on the brown background must be changed so that the text can be seen. The group agreed that the information on the help screens should be changed so that help categories are in the following order: Searching, Keyword searching, General buttons, Saving & Exporting. Some committee members noticed that Web addresses for their institutions are incorrect on the page that lists Prospector members. George will get them fixed. If anyone needs to make changes they can notify George via email. George said the Prospector News page will be a place for end users to learn interesting things about Prospector. There was some discussion again (also discussed at the May 19 meeting) about displaying the geographic region served by Prospector, but because the geographic area served may be changing, the idea was put on hold for now.

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3. OPAC MESSAGE DISPLAY FROM LOCAL ITEM RECORDS: Florence asked about the possibility of OPAC messages (OPACMSG) from local item records appearing in Prospector. The group agreed that it would be a nice feature, but we would have to be careful how it is accomplished since individual libraries use the OPAC message in a variety of ways. Some local OPAC messages may be inappropriate in Prospector. Cynthia noted this as a future enhancement request. It will be worded to indicate that the OPAC message display must be optional for local III INN-Reach libraries.

4. NON-MATCHES: Florence brought up the issue of “non-matches” in Prospector--records that should match with another in Prospector, but do not. It happens for a variety of reasons. Libraries should try suppressing and un-suppressing records locally when this happens to see if that will fix the problem. Non-III libraries might try changing (e.g. misspelling) an indexed term in a record and then change it back to see if re-indexing will create a fix. Also local libraries should be careful to use the correct encoding level in their local records. Encoding level blank, for example, has the highest priority. If a minimal record goes in with encoding level blank, it will become the master record for a given title even if a fuller record with a different encoding level is used by another III library. In situations where records do not match properly and there seems to be no apparent reason for it, III libraries should call the III Help Desk for assistance since many times these records can only be fixed at the local level.

George also discussed the issue of “Ghost records” in Prospector. These are records from non-III libraries that were deleted from local catalogs, but the delete did not go through for Prospector. III has to go in and delete them. Many were deleted by III, but there are still some in the database (Old Regis has 35). It is not cost effective at this point to try to remove remaining ghost records.

5. ISBN 13: Janet Lee inquired about the issue of ISBN 13 and its impact on Prospector. (Also discussed at the March 17 meeting) Janet said Regis was advised by III that purchase of EDIFACT for online ordering with vendors solves the ISBN13 problem in local systems. BISAC does not support ISBN13. Cynthia said that as far as she knows the 13-digit ISBN will not impact INN-Reach systems until Release 2006. Cynthia referred members of the group to CSDirect for more information regarding this matter.

6. NetLibrary: George said there are three issues with the NetLibrary records at this time: publisher deletion, list of titles not available, not working titles.

Regarding publisher deletion—odd types of materials are appearing in the loads, for example, single issues of periodicals. The question is--Are the publishers of these materials on the approved list of publishers, or is NetLibrary slipping in unapproved publishers? George will take a look at the recent load and compare it with the original signed contract to check for unapproved publishers. In the mean time the NetLibrary representatives at the meeting identified WorldWide Video Text as a publisher that needs to be removed from the list of publishers. Also, Collegio (publisher of foreign language materials) and ICON (publisher of technical materials) might potentially be removed from the list after further evaluation of their materials in NetLibrary.

Regarding titles not available—George told the group that NetLibrary sent the Alliance a spreadsheet of deleted titles. This situation is “not supposed to happen,” so it’s something that the NetLibrary group needs to keep an eye on.

Regarding not working titles—Members of the NetLibrary group have encountered records for titles that do not work. George said there is no good way to handle this situation except on a case-by-case basis. When people encounter titles that do not work, they should send the information to George. He will try to determine if this is a systematic problem or just a fluke.

The NetLibrary group wants to go back to quarterly loads instead of monthly loads. George will ask NetLibrary about this.

The next purge of NetLibrary records will occur after the end of the calendar year. All 2005 titles not purchased will be deactivated. The idea is to “keep it tight.” The NetLibrary group agreed that moving the wall each year by clearing out all not-purchased titles for the previous year is a good idea.

Submitted by Mary Beth Chambers 8/19/05