Governance / Reports & Meeting Minutes / Discovery Primo VE Committee: October 4, 2023

Discovery Primo VE Committee: October 4, 2023

Members attending: Andrew Belongea (COL), Marlee Graser (SIUE), Colin Koteles (COD), Matthew Short (NIU), Lindsey Skaggs (ISU), Laura Spradlin (IWU), Nathan Thebarge (TIU), Aimee Walker (JOL)

Staff attending: Jessica Gibson, Amy Maroso, Annie Serrano, Amy Enberg-Aravena

Taking Minutes: Matthew Short

  • Previous minutes were approved (September 6, 2023 meeting minutes)
  • Ongoing Work updates
    • Springshare A-Z list integration
      • Lindsey resolved the problem with A-Z normalization rule in instructions, but they are otherwise ready to go. Will have finalized instructions finished today. Presentation during Office Hours will go through instructions and demo in Alma configs.
    • Webinars/Usability
      • Will reschedule webinar for December 12.
      • Shortened webinar from 90 minutes to an hour (11 AM-12PM)
      • Committee settled on collection discovery as a topic
        • Andrew will present on initial activation and workflow for adding new items.
        • Lindsey will discuss workflow for scanning in physical books for exhibits/displays and how to promote.
        • Laura will discuss how to resolve indexing bug.
    • Local resource types
      • Jessica will move forward with adding “Government Documents”
        • Government Documents will be secondary resource type on all other resource types.
        • Do we need to exclude music? Committee decided no.
        • This change will be distributed to all IZs
      • Have a solution for adding “Anatomical display” as a resource type, which can also be pushed out to IZs. May encompass other types of model, like puppets, but Committee felt that was ok. Will be deployed in the NZ.
      • To accommodate Wheaton’s request for accurate article types, type mapping for Articles would need to be changed, which may have unintended consequences. Andrew and Nathan offered to investigate and test, but there seems to be general agreement that this may be a very narrow use case that doesn’t require a network-wide solution.
      • CARLI staff still working on A/V cleanup in the NZ before implementing A/V resource types.
    • Local fields
      • Jessica set up all Bib-defined fields into the NZ
      • Matt and Marlee have completed review and update of documentation, Allan is also going to give it a pass
    • Dedup/FRBR
      • Should we try the SUNY solution for the Bible?
        • Andrew suggested trying 130 uniform title first, because it is the main cause of most problems. If there’s still a need after, we can try 630 and 600 fields, but they probably aren’t necessary off the bat.
        • Nathan volunteered to test in sandbox.
      • What is next after Bible? Maybe Shakespeare? Committee should work on putting together a list.
    • Idea Exchange
      • During webinar, attendees will be encouraged to register and will be pointed to specific ideas to vote for and comment on.
      • Allan will put together an idea proposal before the next meeting.
  • Today’s new discussion topic: Search Ranking
    • Colin: few advantages to boosting “My Institution;” if you’re searching in I-Share, it’s usually because your institution doesn’t have the resource.
    • Andrew: Primo was over-matching on “Description,” which is free-text, so he buried Description, which helped. Also did the same thing with TOC. Also boosted books, because they were being buried in Everything results.
    • Lindsey boosted institution by 20, so library results show first in Everything. Use case: anything with “Wall Street” journal in the 130, e.g. indexes, showing before the main record to the Wall Street journal in the 245. Also tried boosting publication date to prioritize recent but saw a negative effect: made Wall Street Journal problem worse. Will send doc to list with observations about changing rankings.
    • Laura: unsure whether the problem is defaulting to Everything or with what is boosted
    • Allan: if adding too many boosts, what else will in effect or break? Agrees the issue may be with Everything.
    • Colin: proposed a future roundtable webinar to share our experiences with ranking in a larger forum.
    • Jessica: reach out to our Reference staff for use cases and pain points and come back to compare notes
  • New business
    • View upcoming Ex Libris webinar for implementing new collections and test in a sandbox or test view
    • Will continue discussion about Search Ranking next time
  • Adjourn