CATALOGERS GROUP MINUTES
YRL
Present: John Riemer, Gia Aivazian, Elie Chammou, Beth Feinberg, Renée McBride, Janice Matthiesen, Luiz Mendes, Jeff Morehead, Nancy Norris, Paul Priebe, Louise Ratliff, Angela Riggio, Rita Stumps, Valerie Bross (recorder)
I. Information on the OTNG site visits & upcoming report
Before
going on the site visits, OTNG received over 300 responses to the vendor
demos. The questions staff felt were not
answered were collected & sent to the vendors. Endeavor & Sirsi
have replied; ExLibris didn’t get around to it yet.
All
of the sites visited have had their current system for several years and seem
generally satisfied with it.
ACCM’s
gathering was informal and no official minutes are planned. Terry wants a preliminary report by end of
this week since she’s got a meeting with the teaching faculty early next
week. The full report is due by April
15.
Terry
reportedly has asked that OTNG’s report highlight
what she calls the “discriminators.” Then
ExComm can assess those along the lines of what would
be a good fit here. “Discriminators” are
defined as things that differ among the systems and that are significant. Examples of things not counted as
“discriminators” include
--report
writing: if all the systems provide reports that are relatively easy to
generate as claimed during demos, then report writing is not a discriminator
--the
cataloging interface was different in each system, but Sara felt the benefits
and drawbacks of each canceled each other out, so that cat client editing is
not a “discriminator.”
Examples
of things that are discriminators:
Documentation:
particularly lacking for ExLibris. Sara noted ExLibris
often cannot definitively answer how the system is supposed to work or whether
it can do X. (With the other 2 systems,
staff at the sites thought it was poor but getting better.)
Searching
by limits alone: Voyager cannot do this.
Sirsi & ExLibris
can search by search limits alone, e.g. “show me the Hungarian serials we
have.”
Sara’s
preview of what the “discriminators” are likely to be:
--Vendor
development style
--Vendor
communication style
--System
configurability
--Structure
of the bib/hldgs/item records
--Data
integrity
--Indexing
process
--Unicode
--APIs
(application protocol interfaces)
--Non-roman
characters
--Headings
search display results
It
was difficult to get a sense of which system each of these would cut in favor
of. It should be noted that the
presenters were providing just personal opinion, not formal, final OTNG
conclusions. All of OTNG feels there is
no clear frontrunner system that inspired them to say, “Oh, this is the one!”
After
the demos here, Sirsi looked like a clear frontrunner
for Circ functions. Circ is the weakest
part of ExLibris but it is getting better. The integrated view of collection-development
related info (circ stats, acquisitions data, etc.) presented by Sirsi was quite attractive.
Sirsi has a single staff client; the others
had multiple staff clients or “modules.”
Voyager’s presentation of this type of data was the least
integrated. While reports can be written
to gather the desired info, it is nice to go get it directly in the system. YRL Acquisitions’ impression is that Sirsi would be easiest to use, but the others are “usable.”
At
the ALCTS Metadata Institute in San Diego, in early March, a speaker noted that
Sirsi does not handle EDI (electronic data
interchange) invoicing properly and that Sirsi will
not be able to provide cross-database searching for a year or two.
Sara
acknowledges Voyager can handle bound-withs, but the
method used is non-standard and would impossible to migrate to another system
in our future. Sara thought the Unicode
tool we have now is better than what any of the 3 systems offer. Voyager and Sirsi
give you virtually no control over hit-list display data.
Comments
from Catalogers Group participants:
Regarding
Sara’s comment about Unicode, at least one of the systems could use the local
Unicode tool for diacritics (Rita)
II. Update from CMC (netLibrary, upcoming meeting on OCLC costs)
Yesterday
at CMC Mike Kollas came to talk about a new selection
tool for netLibrary books, called Title Select. This Web-based tool makes it easier to select
& order titles, compared to the current method of sending them an Excel
spreadsheet.
Prior
to the OCLC purchase, libraries had to order a minimum of 500 titles. Throughout the 6 months of uncertainty when
the company declined from 450 to 120 employees, netLibrary
continued to acquire rights to hundreds of new titles. Beginning in May they expect to be offering
1000-1500 new titles every month.
Selectors on a campus can establish individual profiles by such
parameters as 082 or 650 fields and receive a URL in an email message sending
them to a list of titles to consider. In the near future, netLibrary
will be exploring multiple simultaneous usage, based on titles from one
publisher.
With
OCLC’s taking over the company, MARC records for the
titles will now be free and supplied automatically. The shipment of records can be batched at
every 2 or 4 weeks, as some catalogers have told them during feedback sessions
at Texas & Berkeley. However, given
dual use we could make of them (download to Classic and load into Orion) we
expressed interest in the option of shipping us the records at same time as
acquisition of the books. The records
are still not coming from OCLC, so CLU holdings symbol will not be set. A reason given for not using OCLC as source
of records is lack of timely availability.
Reportedly,
netLibrary intends to process our January list of
canceled titles any day now.
The
rep told us 77% of our 500+ netLibrary titles got
used during the 1-yr test period. (So,
that’s at least one type of e-resource patrons can find in the OPAC.) Management and College (for Cliff notes) were
especially interested in netLibrary titles.
Soaring
OCLC searching costs is likely to be a CMC agenda topic in May.
III.
Update on Sheet Music OAI meeting Mar. 28-29 at
Several
libraries are interested in working together to provide access to sheet music
collections. Brown, Duke,
Prior
to this meeting, five YRL Cataloging Department volunteers worked with John Riemer to develop a set of Dublin Core qualified data
elements: Sharon Benamou, Joan LoPear,
Janice Matthiesen, Nancy Norris, and Louise Ratliff. The DC element set met certain conditions specific
to the UCLA project. A single “digital
object” for the UCLA project includes (1) one version of the score for a song;
and (2) variant versions of the cover. UCLA intended to also include a sound
file for the song as part of the digital object. (See handout for details
regarding definitions for a collection-level DC record.)
At
the meeting, John learned about other approaches that libraries are taking. Johns Hopkins is using a program to convert
the scores to
The
desired goal of the individual efforts is an OAI (Open Archives Initiative)
database; records for LC’s sheet music would be
available to us for this project. So
far, 50 organizations have created (or have declared an intent to create) OAI
databases; but there have been only six data providers. A Music OAI would take
OAI development in a new direction.
Conclusion:
Three task subgroups will look at issues related to a sheet music OAI. Of the three subgroups, John Riemer and Stephen Davison both signed up for one on
metadata. The subgroup will develop a DC
unqualified element set. If ready by
fall, a demonstration database could be presented at Johns Hopkins; if more
time is required, this could occur before or after
FRONTERA:
New
IV.
Announcements
A. Scores enhance: Kudos to Renée McBride &
Joan LoPear! UCLA
has been accepted as an OCLC Scores Enhance library.
B. Dreamweaver
software: A copy for Cataloging Department use is now installed on the PC that Bic Tran used to use.
Save work to your H-drive.
C. Steering by Standards Videoconference: A video
for the Mar. 26 videoconference, on the Open Archives Initiative, will be
available soon.
To come: Apr. 19,
D. April 18’s
Catalogers Group meeting will include reports from Music Library Association’s
meeting and the joint ARLIS/NA-Visual Resources Association meeting. John will ask Curtis Fornadley
if he can repeat for Catalogers Group the OAI overview he gave March 28 in