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I-Share OPAC Team Minutes
Tuesday, June 19, 2007 2:00 pm
Minutes taken by Jon Gorman
Present: Hilary Kraus, Skip Burhans, Kathy Chang, Tom Goetz , Jon Gorman, Amanda Pippitt, Cason Snow, Jan Sung, Paige Weston, Stephen Wright
The minutes of the May 17, 2007 meeting were approved.
Thanks – Hilary
Hilary wanted to extend her thanks as a chair to those who have served on this committee, especially those who will not be joining us on the committee again next year for the hard work done by the committee.
Report on the IUG meeting
Hilary reports that there seems to be a desire to foster a culture of usability from IUG. How to achieve this hasn’t yet been determined.
Paige mentions that the current thinking is to establish a pilot body for support of usability. IUG will create a charge for this group. The idea would be to coordinate and act as a clearinghouse of testing and usability in individual libraries.
Tom added that the discussions started getting too broad so there’s been an effort to find a narrower focus initially to help get the body working with the possibility of expansion later. The initial focus would be on I-Share. Right now forming the new group doesn’t require approval from the board, IUG has the power to create it themselves.
Hilary gave our annual report to IUG and reports that went well. She mentioned she was impressed by the output of the other committees.
Spell-Check:
Jon is to look over and review the spell-check proposal by Wed. Jun 20. Hilary will send an email to remind him that also contains the latest version of the draft.
No comments on the current draft.
We can submit this proposal to Products and Services Vetting Committee and will notify IUG that this proposal has been submitted.
Accessibility
Jon & Paige were at a teleconference call along with Ex Libris staff and DRES staff. The goal of the teleconference was to work out an arrangement to help ensure that the next version of the WebVoyage will be more accessible. Discussions lead to a compromise between DRES and Ex Libris staff as follows: Hadi Rangin of DRES and Paige will travel to Chicago later in November to consult on the system.
Jon will be working with Hadi to attempt to determine the nature of the timeout bug and what exactly is causing the browser to crash.
Other enhancements:
Paige reports that CARLI will be working on developing a wizard for customizing the OPAC instances similar to what was done with the New Titles customization wizard. Paige needs to get more programmer support before the project can proceed.
Google maps mashup showing the address of where an item is located has generated some discussions at CARLI, but no definite plans are in place yet.
Bibliographic Formatting code mapping:
The essential problem is that in previous versions of Voyager multiple format codes could be mapped to the same display name. Newer versions no longer allow this. Newer I-Share libraries already have unmapped codes and so their displays are incomplete, and out of sync with other I-Share libraries'.
Discussion lead to several possible solutions:
- Assign a format display string to the most popular material of a certain type, leaving the rest blank
- Pro: somewhat easier to do
- Con: for infrequently used item it makes it difficult to visually see what an format an item is in. This could lead to confusion
- Try variations with the name, such as changing cases or appending underscores
- Pro: each bib format will have a descriptive label
- Con: Confusing and would look odd
- Con: means more work
- Take out format (if did icons)
- Do a mix of icon and labels
The drawback with icons is that it’s impossible to get as specific as patrons want or even to be really useful in sorting out materials. WebVoyage is near the end of its life-cycle and the investment of time and person-hours to add these icons outweighs the return. The committee stood by an earlier decision not to include format icons in WebVoyage due to these reasons.
Any solution to the issue of bib format codes is likely to be difficult as it needs to be replicated across 72 databases.
Paige will speak with data services to try to get an idea of how many items are in each bib format and of the “main” ones. The goal will be to make sure the major formats (monograph, serials) will make sense.
This may also be an issue for some of the libraries that will be joining I Share in the future.
Welcoming the new members and the July meeting
We’ll attempt to make the July meeting an in-person meeting. Hilary will send out an email welcoming the new members soon and we will communicate via email to setup a time in July to meet for a day in-person meeting.
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