Prospector

Alliance staff manage the day to day operations of Prospector including system back ups, reporting problems to III, troubleshooting problems, training new sites, upgrading software, and being a cetnral repsoitory for Prospector documentation and guidelines. The system is hosted on a Unix server which communicates with local servers from each Prospector library.

Prospector committees have played a central role in creating procedures and guidelines for contributing records to Prospector and determining lending and borrowing rules. The Catalog Reference committee was formed to create guidelines for cataloging items that will be contributed to Prospector and to examine matters related to the bibliographic display of records in the catalog.

The Document Delivery committee developed standard loan periods for Prospector items. They also work on the routine issues with borrowing and lending such as packaging Prospector items, checking in and out on local system, load balancing requests, the courier and monitoring member libraries' compliance to policies.