Barton Advisory Group

Barton Advisory Group
Minutes, 12/15/2004

Attendees: Charlene Follett, Tracy Gabridge, Kim Maxwell (minutes), Georgiana McReynolds, Christine Moulen (chair), Elke Piontek-Ma, Beth Siers; Guests: Jonah Jenkins, Maria Rodrigues

1. Training for Aleph 16
Jonah Jenkins and Maria Rodrigues have agreed to be the Training Coordinators. We discussed what kind of data testing might be needed (which BAG members will coordinate) and then what kind of orientation / training of staff will be needed. Some initial thoughts:

a. There will now be 4 clients only: Circulation, Cataloging, Acquisitions/Serials, and ILL. OPAC searching and item record manipulation will now be available in all four clients. Task Manager functions will be present as appropriate in the four clients. Budgets and currencies will be in the Acq/Ser module.

b. Ex Libris has made printed training materials available (as they did for 14.2) as well as some recorded audio and video sessions in InterWise. They will not be sending staff here to train our staff; it will be up to us to learn Version 16 on our own, train our own trainers, and train our staff.

c. Since all clients will change, EVERYONE on the Libraries staff who uses Aleph at all will need some kind of training. Training should happen as close to the changeover to the new version as possible; we should plan for April and May.

d. Not as much appears to have changed with the Web OPAC, so perhaps we don't need much training there.

e. Whenever possible, we should do actual *training* with our own data and our own configuration files. Otherwise, it's confusing.

f. We could do demos of what Version 16 looks like (not hands on, just a chance to look and see what's coming). These should be scheduled for mid to late February.

Jonah and Maria had lots of great questions and gave Barton Advisory Group lots to think about. They will join us again at our January 19 meeting.

2. Progress of Version 16 Upgrade
The test server is ready to go. Fernando has installed the demo libraries. Upgrade Express and the data will be run by the end of January, so that by the end of January we expect to have a 14.2.5 version of Barton on Walter (with data and configuration tables from December 1, 2004), and a 16.02 version of Barton on Walter (with data and configuration tables from December 1, 2004). The idea is that when we will use this 16.02 version for our data testing and training purposes. When we do our ultimate migration some time in June, the data will be current and the configuration files will be from December 1, 2004; if we make any config changes, we'll have to change them ourselves. Also, there are a handful of tables that we've customized so much that we'll have to update those manually ourselves anyway. Tracy is taking a proposal tomorrow to PSMG on how to upgrade the Web OPAC to version 16.

3. Downtime to Upgrade the Operating System on Grammy (Barton's production server)
Downtime is scheduled for the weekend of January 8-9, 2005. We expect Barton to be down all day Saturday and most of Sunday. If there are any problems, the downtime may spill into Monday Jan 10, so staff should be prepared to do work outside of Barton that day. Christine will send a message to all-lib about this next week, and a reminder on Monday 1/3.

4. ICAU Voting
We expressed our opinions on the 23 enhancement requests on the ICAU list. There were five or six we thought were worth it, and Christine will cast our votes accordingly.

5. Meeting Schedule
We agreed that our January meetings will remain from 3:00-4:30 on 1/5 and 1/19. Beginning in February, the meeting time will change to 1:30-3:00, and we may move the meeting location to the new STS office.

Next meeting: Wednesday January 5, 2005, 3:00, Hayden Conference Room