Barton Advisory Group

Barton Advisory Group
Minutes, 4/13/2005

Attendees: Jonah Jenkins (guest), Kim Maxwell, Rich Wenger, Beth Siers, Elke Piontek-Ma, Maria Rodrigues (guest), Georgiana McReynolds, Tracy Gabridge (minutes)

Training for the upgrade

Plans in Serials:
Tour will happen for processing folks who aren't currently involved in serials testing on 4/27 at DIRC.
Kim's team is planning the training. Plan is to make the training staggered rather than a day and a half "boot camp" session.
She will take care of her own scheduling needs.
Meeting time already adds up to 20 hours for serials people.
All documentation needs to be updated.

Acquisitions:
Charlene has been in touch with Maria and Jonah about training needs. Funds, etc. training for staff will happen over the summer. All of Charlene's staff are involved in testing, so there aren't any other staff training needs.
LTE Training:
Question: Who is taking care of this? (e.g. INI files, other client set up issues)

Circulation:
Three people will do the training. There are at least 22-25 people are circ staff who will need training. There are many others who also need training that work public service desks. There is a feeling that the training shouldn't be local but rather provided system wide. Break the training into smaller sessions, both an introductory module that all desk people will take as well as a more indepth session that will cover advanced topics. Maria and Georgiana will discuss separately. Maria will get a list together.

Cataloging:
Methods for training those who use the cataloging tab are under discussion. Beth and cataloging testers will handle all cataloging training and scheduling. About 15 people total will need this type of training.

Processing:
Training still under discussion.
Maria will be managing the master list of staff to ensure that everyone gets the training they need.

Testing
Browse indexes are reset and are running now to clean up problems and fix normalization issues.
Bib direct indexes are done and are fresh.
Issue with function keys - F4 - F8 are used for ALEPH shortcuts - there may be a need to reconfigure what keys are used for term loan and other macros used in various modules.

Circ testing
Underway. Testers need more time in the day to test. There are currently 8 people testing (all from Circ Committee). Scripts and lists of things to test have been distributed.

Loader testing
Some problems with p_manage_50 that have been reported this morning. This could have major impact if it doesn't work properly.

Serials Acquisitions
Serial orders, problem with paying invoices. There is a problem report on this issue.

OPAC
A problem report has been sent on the Forgot Your Password functionality

Indexing
p_manage_02 being run in a slightly different way, different parameters which should mean we don't have to run p_manage_17. This should mean that the overall indexing process will be shorter.

Communicating down time procedures to staff:
We need to create a variety of downtime plans for changing over to the new release. It is possible that there will be a minimum of 4 days of downtime (in 2 2-day chunks) to a maximum of 3 weeks in the worst case scenario. We need a dated plan like we had during the original migration. Binding and processing will be important stakeholders to involve. This item will be on the next agenda with an output being an outline of downtime dates. This outline can then be put on the BAG web site.

Item Descriptions and Publications schedule changes in version 16
We discussed changes to descriptions in Item records and the implications of the disappearance of pub schedule records. Kim will summarize the changes for the group, paying particular attention to the changes for the Web OPAC. Tracy will include those OPAC changes in later communications about web OPAC changes with version 16.