CATALOGERS’ GROUP MINUTES
Cataloging Department Conference Room
Present: John Riemer, Rebecca Aiken, Joan LoPear, Renée McBride, Nancy Norris, Beth Feinberg, Jeff Morehead, Louise Ratliff, Luiz Mendes, Angela, Riggio, Rita Stumps, Gia Aivazian (recorder).
The discussion centered on impressions of the Sirsi demonstration session of the morning of its OPAC and cataloging modules.
GOOD Points:
1. As its single software (Unicorn) serves all functions, all its modules are fully integrated.
2. Has global change capability; even of things not connected with authority.
3. Can display uniform titles.
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5. The sizes of the windows considered nice and easy on the eyes (in Voyager you cannot size windows).
6. Fixed fields are right there and you don’t have to bring them over from some menu.
7. You can build whatever index you want. Every field is indexed. With subfields, you choose which you want indexed.
8. URLs can be inserted into bib records.
9. Whether it is desirable or not, global delete is possible in Sirsi.
10. It is nice that you can suppress a record, say because a book is lost: you keep its
record in shadow and bring it out when the book is replaced.
11. The Z39.50 capability allows one to import bib and authority records, in MARC, in Dublin Core, and from other sources.
BAD Points
1. Too busy, too much clicking and hopping from one box to another. Too many
steps to get a search going.
2. Still not Unicode-compliant.
3. Can display uniform titles but no but no search against both 100 and 240 possible at the moment.
4. No “keyword in heading” search. The closest Sirsi comes is rotating headings around the beginning of each subfield. Example: the subject heading
would also be indexed under History and under Civil War, 1861-1865. This is limited in that a keyword not found at the beginning of a subfield cannot be retrieved. Example: in the authority record
there is not a cross reference from
5. No keyword search was demonstrated that would have, as we suspect, possibly shown that the more results anticipated, the slower the response time.
6. They were evasive about rebuilding the indexes. Perhaps they still have the problem of needing to shut down two weeks per year.
7. Failed to demonstrate basic capabilities. Did not show the consequence of a change: a redisplayed record showed the edited author’s name but that name should have been searched, to show reindexing.
8. Global change is done in batch mode not real time. Doing this in prime time would probably crash the system.
9. There was a sense of “déjà vu” about the setting. Their pitch is still the same. They imply lots of possibilities, but do they work?
10. The shelflist display source was uncertain. Did it come from the bib or holdings records? To achieve filing order, Sirsi preformatted the fields for indexing,
11. The presenter executed a macro within a bib record to insert a 504 field; before doing so, it was necessary for him to create a blank line for it.
12. The editing screen looked clunky. We did not get to see much actual editing and saving of changes. This concerns us and we did not understand.
13. Migrating into Sirsi was anticipated as an unwelcome experience by the group.
Bottom line: Sirsi is slightly better than
Announcements: John pointed out to the group that in a 440 field an initial article is not to be left out of the transcription, in an attempt to get the UNIF search display results (see below) to combine the authority and bib record headings.
Next meeting will take place on Thursday, March 14, in YRL West Media Classroom. The program will include reports on the recent Music Library Association Conference.
Gia Aivazian