PROSPECTOR+ CATALOG/REFERENCE COMMITTEE

MEETING

AUGUST 19, 2004, 12:30-3:30 PM

I. MINUTES: June 17 minutes were not distributed in time for this meeting. George will post them at www.coalliance.org/prospector. Send additions or corrections to Cynthia.

II. ANNOUNCEMENTS:

1. Access to DU/DU-LAW will be out from 5:00 pm, August 19, to Monday August 23 while the University’s Technology Services department moves into its new building. Phones, Internet and e-mail will be down. George will turn off Prospector lending to/borrowing from DU/DU-LAW for that period, and the e-reserves server that Regis shares with DU is also down during that time.

2. Colorado School of Mines came up live on Prospector as of 2-3 hours ago. There are a few problems on the Endeavor side, with some serials statuses not appearing correctly. Laura @ CSM should be able to identify, fix and resend.

3. U of Wyoming will run on its own server and has split from the server they shared with CSM. Wyoming will upgrade to Endeavor’s Unicode version in the next month. Once on Unicode they will be compatible with INN-Reach, and may start loading records on Prospector by December.

4. The new Sun server was installed at the Alliance office a couple months ago. Issues of load rebalancing were tweaked and fixed. While testing the new server, they discovered that one of the functions – MARC record download to disk – was not working. The problem was reported to III.

5. George is planning to upgrade to the Silver release in a month or two, but will notify all Prospector libraries before proceeding.

6. George passed out the July 2004 Prospector database statistics issued quarterly by III. In the five years of Prospector’s existence the database has grown to over 5 million unique master records and over 17 million item records.

7. George distributed a report from the Prospector Document Delivery Committee with borrowing/lending statistics from Jan. 1-Aug. 13, 2004. Arapahoe Library District is now the biggest lender because of DVD lending; DPL is in 3rd place and their fulfillment rate is now up to 90%, the same as other libraries. To even out lending between these two, George proposes that ALD change its DVD circulation policy to 1 week and that DPL resumes its lending of DVDs via Prospector. With the addition of the PLUS libraries, circulation has nearly doubled over the latest 6 months, from 67,001 to 129,038 items.

8. A memorandum of agreement was signed between the Alliance and the Center for Research Libraries in July. CRL is now filling out profiling documents. George will load some sample records for libraries to check before loading all ¾ million CRL MARC records. These records have OCLC numbers, and will merge with records already in the system if the OCLC number matches. If the CRL record is unique it will become the master record. George will get the names of contacts at CRL to report any problems/issues that we find. Committee members should bring to the Sept. meeting suggestions for the wording of a global note that can be set system wide for libraries who will not be participating in CRL borrowing: “This item is not available …, etc., etc.”

III. WEB RE-DESIGN TASK FORCE REPORT

Colors have been selected with tans/browns predominating. The TF is now reviewing buttons/tabs. They will wait until Silver is loaded by Prospector before scheduling another meeting to look at cascading style sheet designs. Silver will make it easier to manipulate options. The testpac staging area is still available for viewing and comments, and changes frequently.

IV. REVIEW BEST PRACTICES FOR ELECTRONIC RESOURCES DOCUMENT

Joan presented a report from CSU library faculty recommending that two separate records be used when a library has both the print and electronic format of a serial title, but a single online record be used to represent multiple aggregator versions of an electronic serial. Recognizing that libraries may be starting to change their cataloging policies in the direction outlined by CONSER standards and the CSU report, the Committee still determined that cataloging decisions should remain local and cannot be imposed at the consortial level. Florence Jones agreed to update the language in the first couple paragraphs of the “Best Practices” document to bring it more into line with current thinking.

V. DISPLAY OF ON-ORDER RECORDS IN PROSPECTOR

Alliance libraries have begun a pilot project with Yankee Book Peddler to coordinate book selection within the Alliance. Using YBP software that will compare Prospector holdings against their profile of 55,000 available titles, Yankee is able to generate a list of titles “not bought” by any library within the group. Then libraries can then decide whether or not to go back and purchase. George will coordinate with YBP to figure out the best/easiest way to set this up. In order for this project to obtain the best results, the Shared Collection Development Task Force asked member libraries to display their order records on the public side of Prospector. About half of the libraries already do this. Since there are no item records attached, on order books can’t be requested in Prospector. Ordering information appears in the staff telnet version, and is accessible now for those who really need to know who is ordering a particular title. There is no staff web version in INN-Reach (a possible enhancement request!). A BCode 3 value to “suppress locally/display globally” would be a solution for those libraries who don’t want order records to appear in their local catalog, but no such value presently exists. Members were unsure whether a new bcode value could be added or another system option developed. The Committee ultimately recommended leaving the decision to display order records to each local library, but encouraged members to try it and see how it works. Send George your final decision: 1) Will post on Prospector Public; 2) Will post on Prospector Staff; 3) Won’t post on either. He will compile and distribute our decisions to the Task Force and this Committee.

VI. NETLIBRARY

As of June 2004, NetLibrary expenditures have totaled $138,457.45, above the $120,000.00 minimum and below the $217,000.00 maximum set by the NetLibrary Group Purchase libraries for this contract year. In November, the group will meet to make several decisions: 1) whether or not to continue with the patron-driven model of title selection or move to some other model; 2) whether to refine the list of publishers from the original profile to reduce potential encumbrances and remove publishers who will not sell to consortia to reduce confusion; 3) what cut off point to pick for removing records for titles that have not been bought (blow away all records loaded in 2003 or some other date); 4) how to determine the best/easiest and most accurate way of removing records for titles that were not purchased; and 5) whether to change the minimum/maximum amounts allowed under the model for the next contract period. These are decisions that involve not only deans and directors, but also collection development and technical services librarians. For this Committee’s next meeting in September, NetLibrary Group members should be prepared to discuss their recommendations on the points listed above as well as ideas/suggestions on how to participate in the process. George will contact NetLibrary to see when we can expect a new file of records. The last load was 2 quarters worth, and this last report demonstrated the value of keeping new materials flowing into the catalog as the rise in June purchasing made clear.