Barton Advisory Group

Barton Advisory Group - Meeting April 28, 2004 at Barker conference room

Minutes

Present: Christine Moulen (chair), Beth Siers, Tracy Gabridge, Georgiana McReynolds, Elke Piontek-Ma (minutes), Rich Wenger, Charlene Follett, Kim Maxwell.

1) New item status

Humanities is asking for a new item status for the audio books - a 28 day loan, non-renewable.
After a brief discussion, it was concluded that the status should be added. It is a rather complicated process, about 8 tables need to be updated. A number of questions still have to be answered, Christine will write up a list of all the questions, Elke and Georgiana will work together to provide the answers. Christine will also create a "check-list" for future item status additions.

2) Staff clients v.16.02

The group looked at the Aleph version 16.02 staff client.
- no separate search/OPAC module anymore
- full search functions are available in each module
- copy and pasting is now possible from all (?) windows
- only 5 modules left: Acquisitions/Serials, Circulation, Cataloging, ILL, Aleph/ADM
Kim suggested that it would be good if we could have another meeting to look at the client, but hold it in the DIRC and each person would be able to try out the module they are most interested in. Christine will try to arrange a meeting in the DIRC the next time we have a light agenda.

3) Orphaned items needing some processing help

During the Data Warehouse item load some item records were identified that aren't attached to bib records anymore. The bib records got deleted - possibly a migration issue. Altogether there are 44 bib records, newly created by Beth, with "orphaned item records", many of which appear to be serials. Christine will create a report, containing barcode, library, collection, call #, and item description; Elke will distribute the list and explain to the effected local processing units what needs to happen.

4) Errors in item record load from Aleph to data warehouse

Kim explained that Aleph allows any combination of numbers in the Issue date, expected arrival date and arrival date fields (e.g. 00/00/2000, 04/00/2004 or 09/31/2003), but when the records are loaded into the data warehouse, records with impossible dates are rejected. Kim farmed out the list of affected records for staff members to correct and to find out how these "errors" are happening.

5) New item processing status

Georgiana brought a request from the circulation committee to create a new item processing status IC - improper charge (patron claims he/she never borrowed the item). This new status seems to be analogous to CR (patron claims returned). Because a number of questions remained after some discussion, Christine will add the status to the test database and the status will be tested first.

6) Christine is planning to update the test database in the near future, possibly during the week of May 03.

Next meeting: Wednesday May 12, 3:00 in Barker Conference Room.