10/12/2005SFX Verde Meeting 10/12/05 1. Announcements Ellen invited the group to attend any parts of the Verde training on the 24th and 25th in which they have interest. 2. LITA Conference Nicole gave the group an overview of the LITA conference. She mentioned seeing one database cross-search implementation that had librarians predefine databases by topic. Nicole also heard someone confirm that a benefit of using the Xserver technology is a reduction of Aleph work during an upgrade. Nicole talked about Rochester's implementation of SFX where instead of showing SFX menu - a program runs behind the scenes to search all choices for full text and takes user to the article directly. 3. Visit from Nettie and Jenny from ExLibris The ExLibris folks announced a couple tidbits: " Planning a MetaLib update on 3/14/06 but it will not have same
flexibility of Xserver. They are starting with SFX and Verde integration, working on making end user data is available through SFX menu. They are including license information in a popup (sending target service id via soap and returned in xlm bundle via soap). ExLibris is working on making the wording more user friendly but may fall largely on Verde librarian. They will probably allow us to customize display order of licensing information in SFX popup. We will be able to have "site down" message display directly on SFX window (don't need to click anything) and the hyperlinking in title is disabled and "go" button disappears. Verde pushes the "down" message to SFX when Verde is updated. Ellen said we would prefer to keep hyperlink active since the database may be available before we have a chance to change the status in Verde. This would not be available before January according to Nettie and even that's not likely. We also talked about having control over grouping, order, display names, selected fields, and logic. We talked about what should appear on main screen with direct call. Nettie was worried about calling automatically for everything due to slowing down the generation of menus. According to Jenny it will "probably be a year" before Verde and SFX knowledge bases are merged - by end of 2006. We will have much more flexibility if we design our own A to Z list rather than using SFX or Metalib. Xserver will give much more flexibility in displaying Verde data. Action item: we will give ExLibris feedback on "I" button display including selected fields, grouping, order, and display names and logic if time. Also look at "push" list of things we want to show automatically on menu. - Ellen, Tracy and Millicent will work on this task. 4. MIT Computing Environment update Nicole and Ellen reported back on their investigation so far. The academic portal is not far enough along to consider at this time. However, Stellar may be an arena for us to have a presence. They will brainstorm with William about OCW and RSS collaboration. We are expecting to get a copy of the report on state of educational technology at MIT on Oct 18th. Ellen and Nicole will also talk to Stefano about Simile - focusing on faceted browse and cross-domain searching and results gathering. They will also look at library survey results to see what would be of value to our task. 5. Exposing Data Through RSS Nicole showed the group some examples of how RSS feeds are being used to present information in other places. |
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