Barton Advisory Group

Minutes Barton Advisory Group 9/15/2004

Present: Nina Davis-Millis, Charlene Follett, Tracy Gabridge, Kim Maxwell, Christine Moulen (chair, minutes), Beth Siers, Rich Wenger

New Titles Search
-We discussed how we might make the new New Titles search more useful. Complaints from staff have been that too many results are returned.
-Beth had an idea how we might be able to place different limits on different libraries. However, that still might not be very useful. E.g. With our current 3 month limits, Science is complaining that ~500 records is too much. Dewey has ~2000. If we reduced it to 1 month, Dewey would still have over 500. But going under 1 month, too many of the resulting items are likely to be Received/Not Available.
Tracy is going to ask a group of interested staff to get together and figure out what a useful new titles search would be. Then we can put together a project to implement it within Aleph's capabilities.
-We would also like to see how this might relate to the need for a "new books list" report which librarians want to put into a web page. Nicole Hennig and Joan Kolias are expected to be discussing this soon.

Use of MIT ID vs. username for Your Account
Tracy had a question from a patron about why we use the MIT ID and not the more commonly known username. We wanted to ask Georgiana if there's a standard answer the youraccount-feedback responders are giving to that question, if it comes up along with password requests? And, who should answer this question, should it be referred to youraccount-feedback (aka YAPPERS rotation of circulation staff filling password requests).
We were also unsure whether it might be an option to change to this login. Why do we use the MIT ID? Was this a requirement from IS&T? We definitely do NOT want to encourage patrons to use their Kerberos password for Your Account, as the Barton database is not an acceptably secure place to store such a thing, it should only be on the Kerberos server.

Format type field in the OPAC
Beth told us about a problem with the format setting in Barton such that non-musical sound recording (e.g. audio books) are categorized as Music. This is a hard-coded setting in the system, so we can't just fix it.
There are other options, but it will take some work to use the more configurable one. We will quickly test the simpler alternative, and re-assess at a later meeting where we can also discuss the priority vs. other Barton projects.

Report from the International Consortium of Aleph Users (ICAU) annual meeting.
Nina attended this year's meeting. Here is a brief synopsis.
-The Aleph-related features of the new Verde e-resource management system are set to be released with Aleph version 17 this coming January. We are supposed to beta-test Verde, but had not expected to work with version 17 that soon. How might this impact our planned version 16 upgrade? More information here will certainly be forthcoming.
-There was a very good session on "The Future of the OPAC". Nina may ask Dale Flecker of Harvard to repeat his portion of this talk for MIT staff.
-ICAU's big development request this year will relate to the web OPAC - accessibility and standards. We would like to see Nicole Hennig participate in this project, if possible.
-Aleph monitor is coming soon. This will be a product to monitor the server and database and alert systems staff of potential trouble. We've been looking for something like this and will certainly check this out.
-There were also presentations on OAI, Upgrade Express, and Digitool.

Testing new Kerberos-enabled staff clients
-Christine asked how testing was coming along. Some issues have been reported and are being worked on.
-Christine reported that after discussion with the LTC's, we will plan to roll this out later in the term, possibly as late as IAP, and also after Ex Libris has corrected a bug which can cause the client to crash.

Next meeting: Wednesday 9/29, Hayden Conf. Rm. Agenda may include a review of project priorities.