Coordinating Committees

Progress Report to CUWL – July 22, 2008

Library Technology Coordinating Committee

  • Voyager upgrade – The upgrades are proceeding as planned.  Campuses will upgrade to version 6.5.4 in July and August.  Stout will upgrade early due to their need to be up and running before textbook checkout begins.  They will have to be cut off from Universal Borrowing one week before their upgrade until all upgrades are completed.   The renewal bug is fixed, but still in testing—due to be released any day now.  Information is being added to the wiki as we know more.
  • ILLiad upgrade – The upgrade in June went smoothly, but there were some issues with security of accounts in the User Manager section.  Jon Mark Bolthouse (Colleges) sent out some guidelines regarding who should have access to what.  After campuses do some cleanup of user accounts, old accounts will be removed.

  • Review of Voyager invoicing and licenses – there was a conference call between Ex Libris staffer Dave Dempsey and Brian Wilson, Anne Schilling and Mitch Lundquist.  The way Ex Libris calculates the licensing is “fuzzy math” but we believe it will be to our advantage when calculating costs.  Brian, Mitch and Lisa are working on collecting the data from our servers and will work with Ex Libris to determine the costs.
  • D2L and Library Integration –  Pat Fellowes has been on leave and then working part-time since June, but will return to her full-time schedule in about a week.  She and Marlys will discuss a plan for sharing UW-Colleges scripts and expertise with interested libraries.  This is likely to take more time than originally anticipated since she is the key player since Marc Boucher left his position at the Colleges.
  • Assisting others with automation questions

    • Bill Doering presented his electronic resource management Access database at the summer conference.  Attendance was good.  He has put this on his web site and linked to it from the CUWL wiki.  Parkside is already using it.  We also had the session on technology where Marlys demo-ed Google Analytics to collect OPAC usage statistics; Jim Lowrey talked about how they use it at Milwaukee.  Mitch talked about Madison’s project to deliver OPAC info to mobile devices.  People also had the opportunity to question Brian Wilson about various hub and technical issues, so it was a productive session.

    • Jon Mark Bolthouse is coordinating some webinars on various topics.  Possibilities include EDI, PromptCat and using Google Analytics to track OPAC usage data.  He will try to figure out the audience and then line up presenters.

    • Sharing access queries – Marlys will be working with Bill Doering to get this project started—probably in the next few months.  We will run Voyager Access queries and compare the results to the data we submitted for the ALS survey.
  • Ex Libris/UWS strategic planning meeting May 8 – The LTCC met with Ex Libris key staff in Madison in May to see a demo of Primo and talk about future directions.  While most of the discussion focused on Primo we also covered some other topics.  The company strategy is to move to more modularized products.  Aleph and Voyager are being developed in tandem.  They are working with vendors to get more XML gateways open so that we can specify more search fields in MetaLib.  They are also working on an algorithm to allow limiting to peer-reviewed content.  They were very happy to be invited to present at our summer conference.
  • Review options for a new OPAC – committee members will read the full report of the Madison Resource Exploratory Discovery Task Force and plan to discuss it in the next several months. 
  • UB Working Group Report – we held a conference call with the LAMs to review the settings in the document prepared by Edie Dixon for the UB Working Group.  This document specifies the many settings in Voyager System Administration that control how UB and simultaneous searching work.  Lots of good questions were raised and answered; we also discussed how we might move toward similar search types for UB.  This wasn’t resolved during the call, but Marlys will be collecting information from all the campuses to see all of the different searches we use, then discuss whether we might agree on one set.  This would ensure that the same search retrieves the same results from any of our OPACs.
  • Oracle Access Manager – this was purchased for UWS to deal with authentication issues.  Lisa Jewell is the libraries contact person.  More information will come later.
  • Feedback on new committee structure -  there is some concern that LAMS should meet more often or even participate in the monthly LTCC conference calls.  Newer LAMs who are not on the LTCC would have a harder time keeping up with the issues.  The mailing list has also not been as effective as we hoped at generating discussions.

Submitted by Marlys Brunsting, LTCC Chair
LTCC Members:  Jon Mark Bolthouse (Colleges), Bill Doering (La Crosse), Sharon Knight (Whitewater), Jim Lowrey (Milwaukee), Mitch Lundquist (Madison), Terri Muraski (Stevens Point), Jon Musselman (Platteville), Maureen Olle-LaJoie, (River Falls), Leanne Hansen (CUWL), Lisa Jewell (UWSA)