Hi all,
I missed this meeting, as I had to take a kid to the doctor's office.
I just wanted to say how impressed I was with the Linksource
subcommittee's report. We've been talking about this for so long -- it
was really great to have some real data available, and it was really
well presented. Great job!
Selene
Donna O'Malley wrote:
> D&D October 29, 2009
> Present: Peter, Dan, Shawn, Robin, Fran, 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
--
Selene Colburn
Asst. to Dean for External Relations
University of Vermont Libraries
Bailey-Howe Library
538 Main St.
Burlington, Vt. 05405
Phone: 802.656.9980
Fax: 802.656.4038
Email: selene.colburn@uvm.edu
