Barton Advisory Group

Barton Advisory Group, July 27, 2005

Attending: Elke Piontek-Ma, Beth Siers, Nina Davis-Millis, Kim Maxwell, Christine Moulen, Charlene Follett, Lisa Harrington, Darcy Duke, Rich Wenger (minutes)

Upgrade issues

Beth:
Loaders:
- first fix that was supposed to be in the service pack doesn't work. We will script around it.
- holdings-items fix is on the test server
- 'Hayden Library' is displaying in item history instead of 'HUM/SCI'.

Rich:
- Landscape printing of reports still not working. Rich working on this.
- cash reports not picking up any data. (this has been fixed)

Kim:
- reports printing problems from 2 separate machines: gets xml instead.
- When trying to pay serials invoices, Aleph reports no budgets available
- Item records created with material type of Issues or Issues Bound default to bogus issue dates and arrival dates.
- switching from Serials module to Cataloging module often crashes the first time.
- Kim suggests devoting an August meeting to reviewing list of Aleph priorities.

Charlene:
- EDI vendor claims not working; Christine testing a fix.
- z3950 qateway to OCLC doesn't reset as it should.

Christine:
- format of circ notices contains html and text: people using Athena command-line nmh mail complaining that they can't view
their notices. Should the notices be text-only? How many people are still using Athena email? Christine will try to find out how many people still use nmh.

- Ex Libris will not support different names on the GUI client vs the web; e.g. Hayden/Science etc. This capability was purposefully not brought forward from v14.

- Access to v14: A few people have needed to check things, but for the most part it is not needed. Christine will leave it down for now, and start it on demand.

- Data Warehouse is now displaying current v16 data.

Darcy:
- Posed the question of whether we could have anticipated the OPAC breakage on the upgrade. Some things didn't copy correctly; some weren't tested enough; some things were fixed in dev but not moved to eng. A clear procedure for how fixes move from dev to eng, and walter to grammy is needed.

- Darcy will meet with Christine and Austin to develop a schedule of priorities for OPAC changes.

Nina:
- Nina will schedule a meeting to develop a master plan for OPAC changes.

Elke:
- reports that the staff client gets progressively slower during the afternoon; often very slow by 4:00 pm.

Conference reports - NAAUG/ALA:

NAAUG attendees reported on areas of interest at the conference:
- (Beth) improvements in authorities
- (Lisa) Serials patterns; Patty Hatch made suggestions about how to present request for changes to ExL
Macros - standardization, use for reducing mousing,
- (Christine) Acquisitions discussion group
EDI invoicing, John Rothman from U. of Michigan writing his own tools, willing to share them
- (Rich) Aleph monitor
- (Nina) Changes to NAAUG:
- roll all groups into one, that covers all tools
- 1 conference with parallel tracks
- a way to keep Ex. Libris devoting some dev. time to Aleph, rather than marginalizing it in favor of SFX, Verde, etc.

Next meeting: August 24, 1:30, Cubespace E25-131
Minutes: Duke