Barton Advisory Group

Minutes: Barton Advisory Group 9/5/2002
Present: Michael Finigan, Charlene Follett, Stephanie Hartman, Kim Maxwell, Christine Moulen (chair/minutes), Beth Siers
Guest: Nina Davis-Millis

1. Patch testing update: For the most part, testing of patch 4 and 5 is complete and anticipated fixes are working. A handful of problems have been reported to Ex Libris. One major issue has been found in cataloging, a piece of our OCLC loader development seems to be missing. This needs to be fixed before the patch is moved to production.
Ex Libris continues to work on making the no-frames OPAC operational under patch 5.

2. Humanities & Dewey libraries would like to set up new collection codes for special book displays, the Browsery and a new Impulse Borrowing shelf. While a collection code is easy to set up, item statuses (for example) are much more complex to set up and to maintain. Much discussion followed, including briefly with PSMG. In the end we will set up the new collections.

3. Records for the circulating laptop pilot project. The laptops are due to begin circulation in a couple of weeks. Beth will set up 1 bib record, and 2 holdings records. Michael & Christine will set up a new item status, and Michael will create an item record for each laptop. All of this will be suppressed from public view.

4. Getting more bibliographic fields into the Data Warehouse for reporting. Kim & Christine learned of a possible method for extracting additional bibliographic fields from Aleph for Data Warehouse reporting. Fields requested include series and subjects.
There will be a modelling meeting in teh near future. Beth & Erja will attend, along with Christine & Joan (and Georgiana?).

5. Other updates from the past month:
With some help from Ex Libris, Beth learned how to improve the call number sorting for the OPAC. Much progress has been made on the "direct index" in the test database, which can be used for browsing. A couple more corrections need to be tested and this can be moved to production. Building the direct indexes can be done over night in 3-5 hours. A complete fix of the actual browse index takes down the OPAC for a couple of days and would likely need to be done between semesters.

6. Priorities. We began review of our priorities list. The latest version is on our web site at: http://libstaff.mit.edu/barton/ (June updates included changing some deadlines associated with patch 4/5, and moving some things to the completed list.)
We looked at the items with critical priority, and will continue discussion at our next meeting. The web version will be further updated then.
Nina mentioned that Library Council is beginning to review a new projects database maintained by Systems & Technology Services. Once the non-Barton projects there have been prioritized, our list will probably be folded into that database. We may have another joint meeting with Library Council to look at Barton priorities. The meeting last year was helpful to both groups.
Reports:
We will get the most current list of report statuses from Joan & Georgiana, review their priority, then report back to Joan & Georgiana, perhaps inviting them to a future meeting.

Next meeting: Thurs. Sept 19, 9:30 AM, Hayden Conference Room.