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OPAC Team Meeting Minutes 8-12-08 In attendance: Susan Singleton, Paige Weston, Amanda Pippitt, Gregory Morrison, Keith Eitan, Jonathan Gorman, Karen Becker, Paula Dempsey
By phone: Nancy Bohm, Susan Prokopeak
Karen Becker volunteered to take notes today. Jon and Amanda agreed to serve as co-chairs. Relationship between WebVoyage and VuFind was added as a bullet point to point 5 of the agenda. No other changes to the agenda were made. Susan S. gave an update on what’s been happening in CARLI. Highlighted below: - I-Share Users Group is reviewing its charge/purpose. This will take place over the next 6 months. There has been concern that the correct input is not being given. In the next few months other groups may be asked to review as well.
- eXtensible Catalog project is moving ahead, but NCIP is not yet in place.
- CARLI is working on getting new servers. A large server is in the process of being moved and has caused some interruptions. Data on the reports server will now be closer to in-sync with data on the production server.
- WorldCat Local should be up by early Fall. This is a pilot project involving 5 colleges and the Illinois State Library.
- Universal Catalog rebuild is complete, with 5 new schools joining I-Share.
- Tutorial Interest Group is a new interest group that is developing. Amanda gave a brief update of what was discussed at that meeting. CARLI can provide limited support, but is not in a position to take on additional projects.
Paige made a brief report about the status of WebVoyage. Highlights of that update are below: - Customization standards document exists. It has evolved over the past several years. It’s a document that the OPAC Committee has been responsible for maintaining.
- WebVoyage is nearing its end. Since the merger with Ex Libris, version 7.0 has been released. The very earliest 7.0 can be implemented is next summer. No official date has been set for the upgrade. It looks different (similar to Google), but it pretty much operates the same. Upgrading to 7.0 will be a big charge for this committee.
- Ex Libris intends to support WebVoyage for several years. However they are working in an environment where they know other products will be brought in (ie: VuFind).
- Customization training has not been offered for several years. This has left a number of libraries in the lurch. Paige has approached this lack of training on a case-by-case basis, having worked up some informal procedures. This seems to be working. Presently 15 libraries have done some of their own customization. With 7.0 libraries will have more control over customization.
- Historically the OPAC team has maintained the guidelines for customization. The committee will be looking for new ideas and/or how Voyager has been implemented elsewhere. What makes sense for I-Share.
The question of who is in charge of the look of VuFind was raised. The OPAC committee should have a role. But what that role is is yet to be decided. The committee viewed a slide presentation on and demo of VuFind and a discussion ensued about a variety of features. Broke for lunch at 12:15. Reconvened at 12:45. Paige distributed a list of VuFind-related items that have been suggested as projects for CARLI. She reported on where CARLI staff is on these projects. This document can be found on the CARLI site under “ABOUT VuFIND” The group viewed the “What’s New in Voyager 7.0” webinar. Agenda was re-arranged to integrate pending issues with high priority/future documents Talked about future projects, including - Staying abreast of Voyager 7.0 changes
- Try moving ahead with VuFind
- Possibly creating a VuFind FAQ for end users. (We pretty much agreed that creating the FAQ for patrons was not a high priority. We would like to maintain an FAQ for librarians.)
Pending issues discussed include: - Does the output format for Endnote/RefWorks import work? Jon doesn’t think that many people use this. Jon and Nancy agreed to work on this, beginning in November.
- In Voyager 7.0 the session IDs won’t be in place, among other changes to the URL syntax. And as a result the persistent/stable URLs will break. This will cause the canned links to break as well. Since the links will break, how much time to we want to spend trying to maintain the current set up?
- Very Simple Search Form. How much time do we spend promoting this and developing canned searches? See above. There are some old instructions on the CARLI website that can be sent out. Paige is getting requests from libraries about putting up a search box in Blackboard, Angel and Facebook. She reminded us that all of the literature available indicated that we should be making access readily available to users, in their environment. She has created a simple search box with easy code. We will publicize what is already available. In the meantime Amanda is going to pass around a document she has worked on. Greg is going to send Paige the link to what is being done at Wheaton College. Paige is going to look through some old tickets to see what libraries are actually requesting.
- Text Me this Call Number is currently available through SIU-Carbondale. Is this something we want to implement in I-Share? We had a discussion on how much customization do we allow? Do we allow libraries the option of turning the feature off? Do libraries opt in or out of the services, and settled on opt in. What would the potential for abuse be? Who would use this feature?
- Syndetics (book jackets and enriched content), along with GoogleBooks feature were discussed. What buttons and images do we want to appear in the catalog? Currently the link for Syndetics is not prominent—how do we make it more prominent? Does it really matter? Paige is going to ask Syndetics if they have a logo that we can use. Nancy has volunteered to create/adapt a logo for the Syndetics link. A new field will be created that incorporates a logo for both Google and Syndetics.
Future meetings will be by phone conference at 10AM on the second Tuesday of the Month. Jon will sent out an e-mail with those dates and times. Meeting adjourned at 3:00
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