PROSPECTOR CATALOGING REFERENCE COMMITTEE MEETING

September 15, 2005

 

PRESENT:  Cynthia Wilson (chair), Barbara Allen, Wendy Baia, Dawn Bastian, Pam Blome, Mary Beth Chambers, Gene Gardner, Gwen Gregory, Virginia Inness, Florence Jones, George Machovec, Betty Meagher, Helen Reed, Janet Ryan,

 

 

 

  1. ANNOUNCEMENTS:

A.     Colorado State Publications Library: George welcomed Virginia Inness, representing the Colorado State Publications Library, to the meeting. The State Publications Library will soon be moving from the CARL system to III. Afterwards, they will join Prospector as a “lending only” library. They asked to be at the top of the lending queue for the materials they own. The Alliance expects to load the Library’s records into Prospector in late fall, about 21 thousand records total. Likely it will be a one-day load.  George expects the State Publications Library to go live in Prospector in early 2006.

B.     University of Wyoming: Within the next couple of weeks, Wyoming will push a few hundred records into Prospector for everyone to review.  If all goes well, they will begin the load of approximately 1.3 million bibliographic records into the system.  It will take an entire month to load all the records.  They expect to test circulation by the end of fall and to go live in Prospector by the end of the year. Wyoming will probably send a representative to the committee meetings, but George does not know who that will be.

C.     Marmot and Mesa County System libraries: George and Alan Charnes from the Alliance are going to Grand Junction soon to talk with representatives at Marmot and Mesa County System libraries because these libraries are interested in becoming Prospector members. Joining Prospector fits well with the libraries’ plans to build a good “town and gown” sense of community in their area. 

D.    University of New Mexico:  George will go to Albuquerque in October to talk to representatives at the University of New Mexico about joining Prospector. Albuquerque Public is interested in joining too. The courier used by the Alliance is already traveling to Raton and Farmington and is willing to add Albuquerque to the route, however UNM would have to pick up the cost.  There is a cluster of other New Mexico libraries interested in joining Prospector including Santa Fe Public and New Mexico Tech, but UNM is the lynchpin. George said that if UNM comes on board, it would be a “long-term thing” happening no sooner than summer 2006. 

 

  1. Release 2005: George had planned to put off loading of Release 2005, but he learned that Release 2005 will fix a problem that is occurring in the system--right now if you sort a search result set in Prospector and then click on a brief record to get to the full record, the system takes you to the wrong record. The committee agreed that it is a good idea to fix the problem as soon as possible.  George will consult the release notes and check with III to make sure there are no bugs to worry about.  He will shoot for Friday, October 7 to make the upgrade starting around 7 a.m., right after the system back-up finishes. It will take about 4 hours to complete the upgrade.  Prospector will be unavailable during that time.

 

  1. Prospector/RAPID: George announced that CSU is making good progress in building the Prospector RAPID database. Julie Wessling at CSU is in charge of the project. CSU is working with Prospector/RAPID phase one libraries (CSU, Mines, Regis, UNC, DU, CC, and Auraria) to collect sample sets or complete sets of their journal holdings. They will stage a Prospector RAPID test in port 2082. CSU and the Alliance hope to have the test system operational by October 17th and have the system go live during the first week of November. George noted that according to CSU the best data set received so far came from DU. Betty (from DU) offered assistance to any phase one library on how to extract and present holdings data to CSU. Once RAPID goes live, a new button will appear in Prospector--Request an Article.  Users who request an article will select their participating library from a drop-down list. Prospector will then send the user to the local library’s link resolver.  If the journal article is not available through the local library, the request will go to RAPID. George will be contacting libraries that are not participating in RAPID to find out where they want their users to be sent--for example, an ILL page or to ILLIAD.  If they have no page, George will create a generic page that refers users to ILL at their library.

 

  1. Web Re-Design:  The redesigned Prospector Web site is receiving positive and negative reactions. George distributed copies of an email correspondence from Tova Aragon at Fort Collins Public that provides feedback on the new design from Fort Collins staff.  Cynthia accessed the site so all could view and discuss the areas in question. George said some things can be changed, but some things are set by the system.  After some discussion of the possibilities for changes, Helen suggested a usability study might be in order. The group agreed.  George will ask Joan Beam to reconvene the Web Redesign Committee to consider usability testing and appropriate guidelines for testing. 

 

George told the group that the broken children’s subject search was fixed.

 

The committee discussed the idea of displaying book jacket images in Prospector records. It might be something to consider in the future.

 

Wendy noticed that when online versions are available for a work, the note that used to warn users that access may vary by institution no longer appears.  George will check on the correct wording and have the note reinstated.

 

George noted that the Alliance ordered 4 additional concurrent users for Prospector adding to the 71 they had already.  Peak time for Prospector is 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

  1. Serials Solutions and MARCit Records: CSU and Auraria are loading MARCit and Serials Solutions bibliographic records for their online journals. Some duplicate records are created in the process.  This occurs because the match point for these records is the 022 field, the ISSN field.  Because these records all have unique 001 fields, they will never match on the 001. Duplicate records are created in the system when the ISSN for a title is in subfield “y” of the 022 field rather than subfield “a.”  The system does not look for matching subfield “y’s.”  Furthermore, a match on 022 subfield “a” will cause records to merge.  This means there are instances where print and electronic holdings are displayed on the same record in Prospector. The system is behaving the way it is designed to behave. George suggested that we might consider a future enhancement request concerning match points to ease the problem, but it would have to be thought out very carefully. Georgia Briscoe at DU-Law was concerned about the duplicate records created by MARCit and Serials Solutions records. Florence agreed to explain the situation to her.

 

  1. NetLibrary: Selected publishers still need to be cancelled. George will follow-up on this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Submitted by Mary Beth Chambers 9/20/05