Barton Advisory Group

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Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 16:27:02 -0500
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From: Christine Moulen <orbitee@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Minutes Barton Advisory Group 10/09/2003
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Barton Advisory Group
October 9, 2003

Present: Charlene Follett, Tracy Gabridge, Stephanie Hartman, Kim Maxwell, Georgiana McReynolds, Christine Moulen (minutes), Beth Siers, Rich Wenger

Version 16 upgrade:
We talked briefly about where Ex Libris is with version 16 upgrade planning, and whether it still seems like a reasonable goal to upgrade during Summer 2004.
We will return to this topic next month.

Some considerations:

Ex Libris has suggested we may want to wait until Winter Break of next year for the production upgrade.

Documentation and training are still under development, and we will be getting completely new staff clients.

This could be a year-long upgrade process. That's a long time to have the test database unavailable for non-upgrade-related testing. Rich wondered if we could have 2 test instances on the test server. Christine will look into this.

Need to plan around fiscal year end, as always. Keep in mind that we have not yet tested Aleph year end under the current patch 5 version, which we expect to use this June.

E-resource management is supposed to be coming with version 16.3, sometime next Summer. How should that impact our plans? And, staff who hear about that release date should realize that we will probably not have this in production immediately.

Priorities:
The remainder of the meeting was dedicated to reviewing our priorities list. This will be updated on the web soon at: http://libstaff.mit.edu/barton/priorities.doc Look for an October 2003 date across the top.

Some highlights:

Many things which were waiting on patch 5 have now been completed: BNA Table of Contents loading, No-frames OPAC with patron self-service features.

Other projects which were waiting for patch 5 are well underway: Authorities loading and EDI invoicing for serials should be in production in the next month. Kluwer journals will follow closely behind authorities.

New projects:

Load records into Barton from Safari online books package. We expect to work on this just after the Kluwer records.

Web standards for the OPAC. Tracy and Nicole plan to work on this with the next Aleph upgrade. As we've already implemented no-frames, version 16 should not bring many major changes to the OPAC.

We would also like to have a list of the reports we have created, and where they are available, including those on the server that Christine or Rich run on demand or on a schedule.

Next meeting: Nov. 6

Questions? Contact us at barton-lib@mit.edu.