Present: Peter, Dan, Shawn, Robin, Scott, Lyman, Elizabeth, Donna
1. Criteria Next OPAC
Should next OPAC be able to pull in CDI and Special Collections records
along with Voyager records—yes, and it should look good doing it. Higher
priority.
Should the next OPAC be able to search external databases too?—yes, and
look good doing it. Lower priority. How about CRL?
2. Hathi Trust (260,000 records)
Catalogers' response raised concern about difficulties with leading
articles in titles. Lyman said these could be fixed. Some issues with
data being located in different fields than what we use, but we could
move these if it's a problem for patrons.
Amounts to a 17% increase in size of our database, with old material. If
it turns out that these records drown out records to our original
collection, we'll have to delete them. Loading will take time. Unloading
will take time if we have to do it.
Catalogers are concerned about degrading the indexes in Voyager, which
may refer to authority control. It may be that the Hathi Trust records'
date format will cause them to not sort properly.
Next step is for Lyman to load 1000 records into Voyager and see how
that works.
We'll try it and at our next meeting we'll work on a survey.
3. LinkSource report
Linksource fails to get to the article at all 20% of the time. 19% of
the time you get to the A to Z list and can work your way to the article
with effort. Our theory is that linksource's database has many variant
titles for journals.
Another problem is that we can't successfully prioritize the vendors.
Linksource seems to override this ranking and pushes us to EJS.
Identified problems:
1. Linksource fails (20%), perhaps because database is not clean.
2. Linksource sends you to the A to Z list (19%). This should never happen.
3. Linksource doesn't consistently accept our prioritizing of vendors,
and often sends users to EJS instead of the publisher.
4. Linksource customer service has been unable to fix problems 2 and 3,
and is sometimes slow to correct errors in their databases.
5. Linksource's intermediate page is difficult to customize and make
attractive.
6. We'd like more functionality, for example, we'd like to turn on parts
of Lexis/Nexis and turn of others.
We can send the report on to the Dean's council with a cover letter from
Peter.
4. Commenting in the OPAC
Not used much at other locations
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