Coordinating Committees

CUWL Library Technology Coordinating Committee Conference Call
August 21, 2008

Present:  Marlys Brunsting, Bill Doering, Leanne Hansen, Sharon Knight, Jim Lowrey, Mitch Lundquist, Terri Muraski, Jon Musselman, Maureen Olle-LaJoie
Absent:  Jon Mark Bolthouse, Lisa Jewell

1. Voyager upgrade – went very smoothly for all of us.  Should we consider turning on UB one-by-one as schools upgrade?  Although some staff did not like UB down for so long, most LTCC members felt it was easier to administer and less confusing for patrons if we kept UB off until the last school was finished with the upgrade.  The timing of the upgrade also meant that the impact was minimal on patrons.  Even interlibrary loan was not very busy in late July-early August even though people were directed to submit ILL requests when UB was down.  So unless we hear from more staff that this was a problem, we will recommend that we keep the same workflow for the next upgrade.

2. General Records Schedule – retention of server files—do we need to follow-up?
The UWS Library General Records Schedule is posted at:  http://www.uwsa.edu/gc-off/records/schedules/UW.System.Library.Schedule.pdf
The schedule lists minimum retention periods for various files such as employee logins to library software, patron update logs, circulation notices, etc.  Campuses can choose longer retention periods, however.  Brian Wilson has not setup the servers to implement the policy, but is going to work on this after the backups are rearranged.  In order to assist, we will send an email to the LAMs to point them to the policy document and ask them to let Brian know if they want to comply with the policy as written, or if they want to specify different retention periods.

3. ELUNA/Ex Libris strategic plan (Maureen)
Maureen reported on the company strategy as discussed at the ELUNA conference.  Their big new product with be a URM (unified resource manager).  Version 1 of this will be out next year.  Verde will be the first part/stage of the URM.  All new product development will focus on the URM and URD2 (Primo).  They will roll out Voyager 7.1, 8 and 9, but after that they won’t have Voyager development in the pipeline. There is not, however, any plan to end support for Voyager.   The URM will have a web interface for staff work, like Circulation.  It will hook into the Enterprise system for campus financials.  The course reserves will hook into the campus registration system.  There won’t be individual databases of bib records but it will pull them from other places, like WorldCat Local (they are going to talk to OCLC about partnering since they own most of our records).  There are plans for MetaLib 4.3 (Q1 or Q2 2009) and SFX 4 (no date set).  She thinks the ERM will interface with an open source ILS.  Maureen will type up her notes and send them out.

4. UB Settings & search types  (/m1/voyager/xxxdb/etc/webvoyage/search.ini) – please send Marlys your simulsearch types as defined in the search.ini file; she will compile them and the LAMs will proceed with that discussion of possibly standardizing our simulsearch types.

5. Volunteer for conference planning committee – in an effort to distribute the workload, the chairs and CUWL reps decided that creating a summer conference planning committee would be beneficial.  There would be one representative from each coordinating committee, plus Lisa Jewell and probably one person who can deal with local arrangements.  Mitch volunteered to be on this committee as either the local arrangements person or as an LTCC rep.  Terri also volunteered, if another person is needed.

6. Face-to-face meeting in late September – in Madison.  We will discuss goals for the new year, and the future of the OPAC/resource discovery tools.  The date that works for everyone on the call is September 29.  According to Jean Gilbertson, the administrative group that requested the Resource Discovery Task Force report has created a smaller group to look at the big issues like budget, and they will initiate conversations with other people on campus.  That group consists of Ed Van Gemert, Dave Luke, Deb Helleman and Lee Konrad.  Dave Luke is Nolan Pope’s replacement and Mitch’s boss so we will be able to communicate with their group pretty easily.  Also interesting news is that the State Historical Society purchased Endeca.

7. Other business

a. New meeting time – due to schedule conflicts, the monthly conference calls will be changed to the second Tuesday of every month from 9:00-10:00.  The next conference call will be in October.

b. Some completely random linking from Voyager to Google Books, particularly if using a serial title. (Jim) - One of the Milwaukee librarians noticed that some titles go to the correct book in Google Book Search, but others go to something completely different.  Those without ISBNs won’t work at all.  Serials titles are especially odd.  Others have noticed this too.  There doesn’t seem to be any logic as to what it should be doing.  It would be nice if the serial records didn’t show the Google Books info at all. 

c. The apparently unavoidable security message from IE7 w/ Google links, which does not appear in FF.  Apparently Madison does not have this issue since it does not wrap Voyager in https. (Jim)  -  When you link out to Google Books from Milwaukee’s OPAC, you always get the “you are leaving a secure site” message which the user has to click through.  As it turns out, only Milwaukee uses https so only they experience this problem.  Jim will pursue this issue with Brian Wilson.

d. D2L/Library integration –  CUWL was hoping Pat Fellows would give a presentation at the Green Lake ITMC meeting and later assist campuses with setting up the Colleges model.  She might not be going to the ITMC meeting, however.  We may want to consider another way to implement the integration.  We talked before about LibGuides, but as Jim said, that does not have an automatic hook into D2L and that is the big goal, as stated by the D2L/Library Integration Task Force.  The multiple authentication and passwords might still be problematic.  We know UWS has purchased a product to deal with that, but it is years away from being implemented.  We will discuss this further at the September meeting.