Discovery Primo VE Committee: June 14, 2023

Members present: Andrew Belongea (COL), Allan Berry (UIC), Colin Koteles (COD), Matt Short (NIU), Lindsey Skaggs (ISU), Rachelle Stivers (HRT), Aimee Walker (JOL)

Members absent: Marlee Graser (SIE)

CARLI Staff Present: Jessica Gibson, Amy Maroso

1. Discussed reorganization of group Google Drive.

• Subgroups folders renamed to begin with “Subgroup”
• Some documents moved to new archive folder
  • Includes FY22 Task Force folder
• Folders for agendas, minutes will now contain FY subfolders

2. Review and approve previous minutes

• Minutes approved

3. Annual report submitted to CARLI Governance Board

• in Google Drive

Jessica reported we were a little late but did get into the Board’s June 16th agenda.

4. Sub-Committee Reports

• Dedup/FRBR
  • Work on Dedup/FRBR has been tabled for further discussion in FY24
• Local fields
  • Matt reported that the subcommittee has not met since our last full Committee meeting
• Local resource types
  • The subcommittee has decided to delay RT implementation because so many records require cleanup and we didn’t want to introduce problems with the update.
  • Andrew met with Jessica Gibson, Ted Schwitzner, and Jen Masciardrelli to discuss cleanup and next steps. The CARLI cataloging group will assist with cleanup of records in the NZ so that the new resource types will be applied accurately to items.
  • Andrew shared the indication rules he’s written to identify problem, records, which individual institutions will need to use to cleanup their local records.
  • Ideally, cleanup and RT implementation will be completed by the end of 2023.
• Usability
  • The usability subcommittee is hosting a webinar on July 11th called Primo VE Usability: Perspectives on Pain Points
  • Christina Norton from Bradley University will be joining us to talk about her experiences with usability testing
  • During the webinar, we will be discussing three pain points identified through usability testing at Bradley and ISU and provide solutions and documentation for addressing them
  • This will be an interactive webinar and we hope to facilitate discussion with attendees and learn about other pain points they’d like to address in future forums
  • The subcommittee will meet at the end of June to finalize preparations for July 11
• These are also in Google Drive; consider next year?
  • Collections
    • During the Task Force days, a group met to learn more about how to use the Collections feature. Librarians from Gettsyburg College (PA) joined us to share about their experiences using the feature. In the future, the committee might want to host a one-off event or provide documentation about how to use it. At the time, we determined it wasn’t worth focusing on so early into our Primo VE implementation.
  • Primo VE Showcase
    • This was completed during the FY22 Task Force

5. Ex Libris Idea Exchange

• any updates?
  • Lindsey shared items #1, #2, and #2 from our Idea Exchange Primo VE Items list with the Instruction and Technical Service listservs. They were also previously shared with the Primo VE Interest Group listserv, which resulted in some voting.
  • The group discussed sharing some other Ideas for voting– what should
    we send out next? The next items on the list pertained to Browse
    features. Lindsey shared they aren’t used or promoted at ISU, and others
    agreed it wasn’t a popular feature, so we continued to other items.
  • Allan will share out email asking folks to vote on #7 and #9
    • #7 would be very beneficial to our consortium. There are situations where member institutions can’t share their IZ records with the NZ (like Illinois College of Optometry) and situations where we might want to suppress certain records (like equipment)
    • #9 would let us only activate certain resource types from collections, which would be cool

6. Select committee chairs for 2023-24

• Colin Koteles volunteered to be chair for the 2023-24 cycle. Thank you, Colin!

7. Any new initiatives for next year?
Allan asked what the Committee would like to work on in the future, and for any reflections on the last year’s work. Lindsey shared that having a Committee Chair rather than Co-Chairs will likely be beneficial– sometimes she and Allan didn’t plan well to ensure agendas were sent out in advance. This was our first year as a Committee, so we can add more structure next year to ensure we’re making advances. We may also want to do more planning upfront next year – in the usability subcommittee, we knew we wanted to host professional development events but were spinning our wheels a bit to figure out what we wanted to do. If the Pain Points webinar goes well in July, we might be able to use that model moving forward to engage our consortial members in conversation about issues and share solutions and documentation. Then, we could spend more time in Committee meetings addressing issues we find at our own institutions and identifying solutions for the whole consortium.

The group discussed that it would be beneficial to have less subcommittee work and more full committee work in the coming year. Matt shared that it could be hard to make two meetings per month. The group agreed that a longer (90 minute) full committee meeting would be easier to schedule. When the group was a task force, it made more sense to “divide and conquer,” but now it would be better to work out problems as a whole group. 

Aimee remarked that many of us have “end-user” experience/roles rather than technical roles. Because of this, we might need to realign our focus more on UX or have more collaboration with other committees, like the Technical Services Committee. We may also want to recruit more TS folks to join the Committee in the future. Due to time constraints, we had to end the meeting, but left with an understanding that we will restructure how we work on various tasks in the coming year. We can also start using our committee email list to interact more asynchronously. There is still work to be done with local resource types and local fields next year, but we will begin addressing that in the larger forum.