Minutes Circulation Committee May 16, 2005
Present: Melissa Feiden, Joe Hankins (minutes), Georgiana McReynolds (chair), Irene Mazor, Denise O’Malley, Pat Page, Dan Pribble, Kevin Sheehan, Ginny Such
Agenda
1. Updates
2. Designated Borrower Form
3. RSC Name Change
4. ALEPH Upgrading
5. Changes to Circulation Policies
Agenda
1. Updates
a. Ginny Such and Jim Eggleston will set up PDF's of all library routing slips for downloading.
b. Kevin Sheehan indicated that it would be very useful to place the barcode field before the ALEPH ID field, to eliminate the potential of swiping the user’s barcode in the wrong field. Some Circulation Committee members would like to make this a priority as an enhancement request.
c. Pat Page announced that Greg Padilla accepted the Evening and Weekends Circulation Assistant position at Hayden Circulation.
d. Irene Mazor mentioned that Christine Moulen noticed that not all notices went out on May 16. She was able to monitor this and resend the notices.
e. Rotation schedule update: June through December courtesy notice rotation schedule was presented. Joe Hankins said he’d contact the Branch Managers (BMG) about handling July notices, to ensure vacation coverage was not a problem. Rotation schedule is posted at: http://libstaff.mit.edu/circ/Cspace/bouncednotices.html#schedule
Update: The Branches agreed to cover July courtesy notices.
f. In version 16 Your Account provides a verifier to allow users to change their password. Users will have 4 or 5 topic choices but should only answer one question. If they have trouble with this feature they should go to a circulation desk. The new feature may make it possible to stop monitoring the Your Account password problem email list.
2. Designated Borrower Form
A Designated Borrower web form will be available so users do not have to go into a library to get the form, bring it back to their office to fill it out, and return to a library. Circulation Committee will have to monitor and process electronic submissions. This form will go to the same list as the courtesy notices, circulation@mit.edu. Circulation Committee will monitor traffic to see if a separate list is needed but our preference is to only have one rotation list. Some members of the Circulation Committee suggested that there should be three form links: new, renewal, and canceling added borrower.
3. RSC Name Change
RSC’s new name is Library Storage Annex (LSA). Melissa explained that on the technical processing and cataloging side work needs to happen. We should stop referring to remote storage as Harvard Depository. This confuses our users who think Harvard owns our materials. We should say off campus or remote storage. Dan Pribble asked about a guarantee to P-card users for rush requests and was told that this is still okay.
4. ALEPH Upgrading
Timeline is planned to go live during the middle of July. There will be two periods of downtime over two weekends: one in June and the other late June or early July. Circulation desks might want to use the offline client. Georgiana will test to see if it works. If staff are unsure about using the client they can use their Excel downtime sheets. One suggestion was to consider using both systems to verify the offline client really works.
Nina Davis-Millis sent a plea to heads of the divisional libraries asking for more trainers. Each divisional unit will add a trainer (Dewey will add 2). Kevin Sheehan indicated that Justin Scherma will assist with training. Circulation staff will be trained first, then public services staff who work at information desks and other units. Timeline for the start of this training is possibly the second or third weeks of June. The committee was encouraged to listen to the two pre-recorded ExLibris trainings found in the Aleph documentation folder on Turnpike.
Pat Page asked about the interface for barcoding journals in version 16 since Hayden Circulation has been barcoding older bound journals. Melissa Feiden suggested using processing’s documentation for adding items. Ginny Such asked if new reserve items will migrate and show up as migrated. We’ll know after we’re live.
5. Changes to Circulation Policies
The committee discussed term loan start and end dates as well as making specific patron statuses, sublibraries, and item statuses as default conditions when applied to term loans. After the meeting Georgiana outlined the results of the discussion (see below). Dan wondered if P-Card holders will find books to borrow with the proposed term loan defaults in place.
Next discussion of circulation policies: Bookpage within a library.
Changes to Circulation Policies on Term Loans
The Circulation Committee proposes several changes take place starting Fall 2005 around the policy of Term Loans. The suggestions are made to help ensure that the research needs of faculty and graduate students are facilitated by our loan periods.
Proposal A
Proposal B
Proposal C