Coordinating Committees

CUWL Library Technology Coordinating Committee

Minutes - February 10, 2009

Present:  Bolthouse, Brunsting, Doering, Jewell, Knight, Lowrey, Lundquist, Muraski, Musselman, Nordgren, Olle-LaJoie

Reminder:  the conference calls are the 2nd Tuesday of every month at 9:00 AM. We’ll check again in June to see if this time slot still works for people.

1. Update from February CUWL Meeting (Marlys/Deb)

Voyager Upgrade – Lisa received an email from Maureen regarding scheduling the Voyager upgrade this summer and to ask ExLibris if they will send trainers to Wisconsin to do 2-3 days of training for SFX, ML, and Voyager 7 customizations. Lisa will follow-up with Maureen.

Assisting Other Campuses With Automation Needs – the CUWL meeting was behind schedule, so there wasn’t much time for discussion.  Ewa agreed that we should work with Lisa to see about training for 2-3 days from ExLibris. Kathy Schneider said they are thinking of providing ILLiad training for WiLS members. Her staff  think it should be face-to-face and perhaps an annual event. They want to know would the audience be the LAMs?  Response was No, other staff from Access Services would be interested as well.  Many campuses have new staff who need basic training.  Do we think most campuses would participate?  Marlys will contact Al Wenzel to see what they have in mind and how to proceed.

Library Management System Exploratory Task Force – there was no comment from CUWL on the plan, perhaps because all the CUWL reports were sent out late and there wasn’t time to gather feedback from staff. We will have a little more time to draft our preliminary report--1 week prior to the April CUWL meeting.

D2L and Library Integration –  there was one comment from CUWL – perhaps we don’t always need to standardize what we do at all the campuses. This could be one of those best practices sort of things. Marlys is waiting to hear from the Chairs/Liaisons group for a clarification on whether or not we can actually drop this at this point.

General Records Schedule – Retention of Server Files -  Joshua Ranger said the final schedule is on the general counsel’s web site (http://www.uwsa.edu/gc-off/records/schedules/UW.System.Library.Schedule.pdf). There is one correction he sent to Laura Dunek that has not been incorporated, but it has no effect on what we are doing--determining destruction dates for circulation records, etc. We will pass this information on the the LAMs via the cuwltech list and include a reminder that campuses should be cognizant of the patron history retention setting since this is the area where we are most likely to be exposed if we receive national security letter requests for circ data.

Simulsearch Types – there were no comments on this at the CUWL meeting, but at the Chairs meeting yesterday Richard Reeb said that Mary Rieder told him she thought we misunderstood the suggestion to make the searches the same. Mary is planning to talk to Edie about it. Mitch volunteered to follow-up with Mary and Edie.

User Services Coordinating Committee – Resource Discovery Exploratory Task Force – 1) this group is meeting every other week, 2 meetings so far; they may revisit the scope of their charge. Mitch said they have posted minutes and a list of products and sites on the wiki.  2)  Steve Frye submitted the final report of the MetaLib working group, but there wasn’t time to discuss.  It will be on the next CUWL agenda.

2. Plan of action for the Library Management System Exploratory Task Force

a. The Charge--develop a vision for a new LMS; provide an environmental scan of options currently available and on the horizon; review the initiatives of other libraries and library systems; consider options that can connect to other computer applications
b. Divide and Conquer!
c. Identify what’s available--look at the literature, blogs; post this on the CUWL wiki
d. Divide up the products and each person will research what it does.
e. Create a list of questions:

i. Product
ii. # of libraries using it in production
iii. # of vendors who can host/migrate/develop it
iv. List all the working modules it has and those currently in development (serials, acquisitions, media scheduling…)
v. Does it have an active users group (for development, for Q&A)
vi Does it tie into other campus programs (D2L, campus financials, portal)?
vii. Does it scale to a database of Madison’s size?
viii. Financial status of the company

f. Plug this all into a grid
g. Look at what other library systems are doing.  Can we join them?
h. Present our findings via conference call/webinar
i. Narrow down the list to those products that we want to evaluate in more depth (now or later)

Next steps:  we will create a list of links to blogs, articles, etc. that are relevant (e.g. Marshall Breeding’s annual list of automation systems). We will also create a list of products to research and finalize our questions in the next  2 weeks. This will go on the wiki.

3. Voyager OPAC counts (Lisa)
Lisa suggests we have a conference call with LAMS and Brian to answer questions. There are some concerns that the numbers are low and what happens if we go over the limits. She will contact the LAMs and Brian to schedule a conference call within the next 2 weeks.

4. SFX Webinar Update (Jon Mark)
Jon Mark has received a list of questions from several people. He will setup an SFX webinar in the form of a conversation about best practices. Sue Dentinger has agreed to talk about how to handle the monthly reports. He will poll the campuses to see what time we can meet. If only one person can be a presenter, Marlys volunteered to share her desktop, if that would be helpful.

5. Other business

a. UB Requests – Jon Mark said they have been getting more and more UB books from the comprehensives that were meant for local patrons requesting local books--i.e., the patron doesn’t choose the pickup location and it defaults to Choose Pickup Location (which routes the book to Fond du Lac). This only happens if a campus allows pickups from the holding library. Since this was a directive from CUWL to allow this, the volume has increased.  Marlys and Jon Mark will do some further testing.
b. ALS survey – Marlys ran the e-books query from Bill, but Green Bay has been counting them differently than La Crosse. She will post her query to the list.