SFX System Committee, October 8, 2014

Attendance

Members Present

Xiaotian Chen, Denise Green, Andrea Imre (Chair), Stacey Knight-Davis, Joanna Kolendo (Minutes taker), Jeffrey Matlak, Andrew Meyer, Jim Millhorn, Steve Oberg

Staff Present

Mary Burkee, Paige Weston

Business

1. Updates

   1. The new software release 4.7, which resulted in minor changes to the administrative end, has been applied and Paige has not received any comments or complaints.

   2. Steve reported one issue, not related to the software release, that the general notes added to certain targets were not displaying on menus.  Paige reported that this was the case for about a thousand targets across the instances; the problem has since been resolved.

   3. Personnel news: Denise reported that she will be joining CARLI staff on October 20th, and the committee will need to request a replacement.  She hopes to continue to sit in on the committee meeting as a guest. 

   4. Mary informed the committee that the calendar year database selection system will be opening soon, potentially next week.

2. Election of a Vice Chair: Andrea reported that Steve had been nominated for vice chair.  Andrea asked if anyone else was interested; there were no additional candidates. Steve was elected as the vice chair, chair-elect.  

3. Discussion items

   1. Training webinars planning team:

      Paige informed the committee that she has shared drafts of all of her sessions.  Most recently, she posted lessons on “the Shared Instance” and “What do I need to know about parsers,” and she is awaiting comments and final approval from the committee at which point she will have completed all of her assigned lessons.  Denise will be recording her lesson on “Usage Stats” next week at the CARLI offices.  Other drafts of lessons have also been started.  

      The next big project is creating the pathfinders between the lessons.  There was a discussion about whether to start the pathfinders now or after all the lessons were completed.  It was decided that the pathfinders should be started before all the lessons are completed and the pathfinders should simply state “to be released” next to any unfinished session.

      Andrea informed the committee that she is working on the updates draft and has attempted to discover what version of the update reports was used by SFX administrators.  Andrea will put together what she has and everyone will be able to comment.

   2. Member survey planning team:

      Member survey planning team-survey responses discussion
      It was restated that the survey will be the basis for the upcoming deliverable that needs to be submitted to the CARLI Board by November 1st.  The planning team met yesterday and discussed as well as analyzed the survey results. The survey had a response rate of 63%.  Paige clarified that the Board only requires a proposal, not a full draft, by November 1st.   The survey files were accessed on the SFX Drupal page and reviewed.

      Paige did some follow-up with two survey respondents: one was a respondent who needed assistance with EJS, and the other who reported a poor user experience, potentially stemming from a lack of customization of the SFX button.  This led to a discussion of how the committee could assist libraries with the customization of the SFX button. It was concluded that 16 libraries still have not customized their SFX button.  Steve suggested a resource cooltext.com, an online logo button generator. Stacey proposed that the committee could have a workshop (Paige suggested clinic) geared to assisting libraries with the creation and uploading of a new logo, and she offered to assist with logo creation.  Andrea suggested that the committee might want to provide this type of assistance in an online environment.  A discussion of the logistic for setting up this type of clinic followed.

      A discussion was started about whether it could be inferred that if a library did not customize their button it likely meant that they have not enabled their sources.   Paige stated that this can be ascertained by looking at usage stats.  This also resulted in the suggestion that a new lesson entitled “How to activate a source” be created.

      An idea was presented as a possible deliverable: identifying libraries in need of help and developing training materials specifically focused on addressing issues discovered from the survey such as the customization menu, button, and ILL. Another option was to develop a project plan for assisting the libraries that need help.  It was suggested that usage stats be obtained before the changes and after to judge whether the changes had an impact on usage.   

      Andy presented the idea of personal outreach, calling the libraries to assist them.  This idea was further discussed as a potential pilot project where each member of the committee would assist a library, in a possible mentor/mentee or peer-to-peer model.  It was mentioned that the libraries needing assistance should be identified by October and contacted by December in order to meet the committee’s deliverable deadline; the deliverable being a plan for supplying this assistance.

      Stemming from Question 12 of the survey, a discussion was had about the z39.50 plugin and the speed at which linking occurs from SFX to Voyager.   Jeff discussed his use of notes fields to display holdings, and informed the committee that he is willing to assist others interested in doing the same thing or writing up something about his process.  Paige pointed out that a flow-chart and a decision tree meant to assist with OPAC decisions in SFX is available.  

      Andrea stated that she was interested in obtaining comparative clickthrough statistics/rates.  She was interested in seeing how other universities are faring in comparison to her university’s stats, as she wanted to improve her user experience.  Paige will run a report.  Paige presented the idea of looking at 3 institutions with the highest clickthrough rates and 3 with the lowest and then comparing their menus, etc.  It was suggested that some clickthrough rates might be low because some students might initially use SFX and then once they know a few publications then they use rss feeds in the known sources.

      Andrea will work on a draft of a deliverable for November 1st and the committee should provide feedback by e-mail.

4. Other items: Paige thanked Andrea for her note on sfx-ig about Highwire password management.

Next Meeting: November 12, 2014