Barton Advisory Group

Barton Advisory Group
Minutes, 8/14/2003, 9:30am

Present: Nina Davis-Millis, Tracy Gabridge (minutes), Kim Maxwell, Georgiana McReynolds, Christine Moulen (chair), Elke Piontek-Ma, Beth Siers, Rich Wenger

1. Welcome to Georgiana, our newest member representing Circulation. Thanks to Elke for representing Processing during Stephanie's trip.

Training:
Anita has been handling GUI OPAC training for the past 2 years and it's time to transition it to BAG. What is the model that would work best? Quarterly may not meet the needs for timeliness for staff. One idea is to cultivate a list of trainers and schedule them as needed, mostly for one-on-one training of new staff. Also, we could get a contact for Gui OPAC training added to new hire checklist. Nina will pursue getting help to cultivate a list of trainers and moving this process forward.

Reports:
Kim gave an update on Collection Services reports: 43 on the To Do list, 36 done, a few others fell off the list entirely, mostly because they were duplicates or could be combined with other listings. We will review both lists at the next meeting. The Circ Committee will be going through their list soon. BAG can revisit it once the list has been reviewed. Elke gave an update for Processing. Some new reports have been added to their list. When Stephanie gets back the list can be reviewed.

Indexing:
We need to reindex in order to make some changes so that we will be able to search into a heading by 70 characters rather than our current 35. The whole process takes about 30 days. The public OPAC will be affected in three ways:

1. 8 hours at the beginning while the main indexing is done. No browse searching will be available
2. After this point, regular OPAC functions are back, except: browse lists won't be alphabetized beyond 70 characters, there will be no links to authority records, and browsing of small logical bases will be slow. From the time that 8 hours starts, all the logical base counters will be turned off. Browsing in the smaller bases will be slow, and could even time out. This state goes on for a couple of weeks, while the alphabetizing and bib-authority linking happen.
3. 18 hours at the end, browse searching will be down in the smaller logical bases (does not include the full catalog, journals, theses) while the logical base counters are rebuilt.

We will aim for mid to late September because by January we want to be working on testing the new version of ALEPH. Cataloging will be affected more drastically than public services. It would be good for cataloging if some loading could happen between steps. It would be helpful to get started after the major push in cataloging to take care of the backlog. Planning back from Columbus Day weekend might help with determining the start date.

Announcements/Updates:

New student data is available and will be loaded tonight with an update the first week of September.

The Circ Committee wants to know if it is possible to give people an option to do recalls through the web OPAC. Christine will look into documentation to see if we can change the system wide default. This may mean that the system would always default to placing a recall in the web OPAC. Georgiana will check with the Circ Committee to see if that is desirable.

Can we have a "Forgot your Password" form that would send an email to a circ group? Perhaps it could go to youraccount-feedback@mit.edu. Tracy will ask Nicole about the creation of a password form. Christine mentioned that version 15.2 has a forgotten password feature. We don't know at this point if it would