Barton Advisory Group

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Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 15:09:03 -0500
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From: Kim Maxwell <kmaxwell@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Barton Advisory Group Minutes 11/15/2001
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The Barton Advisory Group meeting was held 9:30-11:00 in the Hayden Conference Room on Thursday November 15, 2001.

Present: Moulen, Kajosalo, Finigan, Hartman, Follett, Siers, Maxwell (minutes)

1. Updates

Erja (OPAC)
Having a longer deadline for the no-frames OPAC has given the group more time to work. Their new target date is the end of July 2001. They are working on Your Account in the frames version, but they are making few other changes to the frames version (except those that could be easily transferred to the no-frames version).

Michael (Circulation)
* Emailed hold notices were working fine until yesterday. Might be that the batch key isn't running? Christine will investigate. (The problem has since been fixed, as of later that day.)
* Circulation folk are looking at all Aleph generated notices and editing for use.
* Holiday and winter hours are finally set up properly.
* Trying to get a sensible subject line for emailed notices so patrons don't think they are getting junk mail (currently, it says something like printd69.~82)
* There are still some outstanding problems Ex Libris needs to fix.
* Account Receivable (for the Institute) is investigating a way to have stations across campus where staff and other non-student library users could pay their fines (among other kinds of charges on their Institute accounts).

Stephanie (Processing)
Not much new to note...

Charlene (Acquisitions)
* Charlene and Macrina Rizzo, Financial Administrator, have finished their last scheduled round of training.
* Charlene continues to work with Joan on reports, including revising the purchase order form again.
* The BASACQ group will give a report to Marilyn McSweeney and Sarah Mitchell this afternoon (11/15/01). The group would like to start testing importing OCLC bibliographic records at the point of ordering.

Beth (Cataloging and Database Maintenance)
* Still working on the loaders. About 9,200 records have been loaded, representing a good portion of our downtime work. There are about 2,500 records left to load, mostly for pieces where there is both a brief bib and an item record to overlay. Beth continues to test with Ex Libris.
* Erja asked a question about the display of diacritics in the Web OPAC (they still look odd). Your computer needs to have a font installed that can display Unicode, and your web browser needs to be configured to display it. Erja will add something to the Help menu in the web OPAC to assist users who might be seeing strange characters.

Kim (Serials Acquisitions)
* Big push to pay a huge backlog of invoices.
* Will work on title change and SERM workflow next.

Christine (Systems)
* Dealt with 3-4 crashes of the system in the past 10 days. Oracle keeps shutting itself down, but Aleph isn't. It's unclear why this is happening, but it has forced us to do some cross-training in Systems.
* We still need to rebuild the logical bases and finish alphabetizing long headings. This work could be done over Thanksgiving.

2. Critical Priorities
The group met with Library Council on November 7 to work through our list of priorities. With that group, we sorted out all our "High" priorities into "Critical" and "High." We are currently dealing with the Critical priorities.

Erja had questions about placing holds in Your Account, as well as requesting items from RSC. There seem to be some unresolved issues around both topics, which we will explore when we get the test database in December.

3. Item processing statuses
Christine had given us all a list of the Item Processing Statuses and asked us to provide descriptions for them (what do they mean, how would a user or public service staff know what that means, and how would anyone follow up on them and with whom?). We debated a few of them (notably, Received/Not Yet Available) but didn't reach any firm conclusions. We will work on this for our next meeting.

4. Schedule for coming meetings
We will meet again on the following at the regular time (9:30)

Thu 12/6
Thu 1/3 [meeting for 1/3 may be postponed due to holidays; we will decide at the 12/6 meeting]

and then resume our regular schedule.