D&D minutes 1/7/10

D&D January 7, 2010
Present: Peter, Dan, Daisy, Shawn, Robin, Scott, Lyman, Sibyl, Donna,
Laura, Selene

1. Peter talked to Mara
Next Gen OPAC—don't let the cost factor in to our considerations
Linkresolver—Dean's Council agreed we should go forward, Mara agreed
that a separate group should look at these, as we recommended
Next Gen Rubric—construct this using the plan we suggested, send it to
Dean's Council for final approval.
HathiTrust now contains almost a million records. We will reconsider our
options.

2. Proposed criteria for evaluating nextgen OPAC tools
Selene described the rubric developed by the subgroup for evaluating
existing systems. There are prescreening criteria, high priority
criteria and medium priority criteria. These are all yes/no questions.
There's also a list of qualitative assessment criteria to consider. We
went through the categories.
Selene will mark the criteria items that are new items with an asterisk
or some other symbol.
Scott pointed out that we don't want to include pre-screening criteria
that will eliminate systems that we really do want to consider, so we
have to be especially careful with that list.
Selene will circulate this amongst ourselves. We should look for places
that need more definition.
Peter will check with Diane about when we can schedule an open forum.

D&D minutes 12-10-09

November 12, 2009
Present: Peter, Dan, Shawn, Robin, Fran, Scott, Lyman, Elizabeth, Sibyl,
Donna

1. Linkresolver
Dean's Council is in favor of moving ahead on investigating a new link
resolver. Maybe when we update the new contract with ebsco we should
negotiate a shorter contract so that we're not locked in.

Expand the committee to investigate new link resolvers to include
Albert, because he best understands the options for separating the link
resolver vendor from the rest of our systems. We may also want a cataloger.

2. Hathi Trust
During the download some of the data went into odd fields. Lyman is
addressing this.
Records will always sort to the bottom because the items have no dates.
Several days to load, then several hours for keyword regeneration.
Lyman will load these records. We'll test Voyager afterward and see if
searches are badly mucked up or if there are any surprises.

3. Selecting a new OPAC
Check list of dealbreakers against list of Next Gen Library Catalogs to
make sure all the catalogs pass the dealbreaker test. Invite all the
companies to campus that have catalogs that pass.

What comes first, the linkresolver or the OPAC? Would a different group
be better at evaluating linkresolvers? Peter will check with Mara.

Complete the draft of the Criteria for evaluating completed and send to
all in library. Have an open forum to discuss. Discuss disagreements.
Record disagreements that remain after the open forum and bring to
Dean's Council.

We have some data from usability studies and from LibQual. We can also
look at data from other universities.

11-12-09 D&D meeting minutes

D&D November 12, 2009
Present: Peter, Dan, Shawn, Robin, Fran, Scott, Lyman, Elizabeth, Sibyl,
Donna

1. Criteria Next OPAC
We filled out a form to prioritize criteria for evaluating next gen OPACs.
We can pull out those criteria that the system must have and put them
together so that we can simply eliminate those systems that don't meet
the required curricula—show stoppers
Some things we will not be ranking but will need to gather the info:
e.g. cost and estimated staff time.

We will send out the criteria for feedback from others in the library
after the next revision. We should ask an open-ended question of our
coworkers for now.

Deal breakers:
In production
Supports indexing & importation of records in a variety of metadata formats
Ability to add new indices
Integrates with Voyager ILS
Known item searching
Reliability
Displays library holdings and circ status
Book jackets
Look inside the book
Icons to distinguish one type of material from another
Natural language searching
Spell checking
faceted browsing
create durable URLs
Automatically populate LRA request
Ability to place links in Blackboard
API
Highly customizable

Usability standards and visual appeal need to be added.

Will students ever use the OPAC, no matter how nice we make it?
Maybe we don't want to spend the most money on this system or spend the
most time on it.
OPAC needs to have more online content because most of our users are not
in the building.
Google is really bad at known item searching.

Donna

Re: D&D Minutes 10/29/09

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

D&D Minutes 10/29/09

D&D October 29, 2009
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

Minutes 10/15/2009

Present: Laura Haines, Dan DeSanto, Robin Katz, Lyman Ross, Scott Schaffer, Shawn Biegen, Fran Delwiche, Selene Colburn, Peter Spitzform

• The Linksource subcommittee has finished; a report is forthcoming. Tina mentioned that an EBSCO rep had informed her that a new version of Linksource had been released, and is in use at UVM, with many alleged improvements.
  

• 260,000 HATHI truest records are now available and can be uploaded to Voyager. The records contain minimal cataloging. OCLC is working to create fuller cataloging for these records, but it's unclear what the status of the project is, or what the cost will be. Lyman will upload a sample batch of 100-200 records, and Peter will share these with cataloging librarians. D & D supports the project; we're interested in getting something added to the record, such as [electronic resource] or [electronic book], so that when it comes up as a duplicate in search results, the user will understand the difference in format.
• We looked briefly at some Vu Find implementations, then talked about the process for evaluating and recommending "next generation" solutions. Two subcommittees were formed: one will create a comprehensive list of possible solutions, reporting back in two weeks (Scott, Robin, Peter); a second will create a rubric/list of evaluative criteria (Lyman, Selene, and up to two others -- to be recruited by Peter), reporting back in four weeks.

10/1/09 D&D Minutes

D&D October 1, 2009
Present: Peter, Dan, Shawn, Robin, Laura, Fran, Scott, Daisy, Lyman,
Selene, Donna

1. Linksource sampling
Using the find by citation search feature: 75 citations tested by each
of the 4 testers
If success is defined as: Got to either the article, the issue, or at
least the journal with full citation: Scott found 77% worked. In his
opinion the majority of the problems were non-scholarly things (eg
newspapers) in Lexis-Nexis. Also some problem with Open Access. 40-50%
went to the article level.

Shawn was checking title search, title plus ISSN, full citation search.
Problems found: linksource linking back to the Title on the a to z page.
Lyman and Laura saw that too.

Lyman found that Lexis Nexis and Gale did not work very well.

Laura had 41% that were "successful" as defined above.

Lexis nexis may have improved more recently.

They will be meeting soon to aggregate their findings.

What are we going to compare these percentages against? Is this the
industry standard or could we do better with another vendor? Is there
anything in the literature?

Linksource does provide for a way to skip less reliable vendors, but
Shawn reports that this feature often doesn't work.

2. Relevancy Ranked Search
Why didn't we implement this? Let's take a look at this and see if we
can just provide it as an option in the production catalog?

3. Downloading Hathi Trust records
A lot of work. Is there enough interest in this to justify Lyman's time?

4. More info in stacks on what subjects the call numbers correspond to.
We like the idea. The signage project is currently in process. Maybe
this is a good time to pilot something? Maybe Trina can talk to Access
Services?

5. Next OPAC
Started reviewing desirable traits for our next OPAC
Icons to distinguish one type of material from another—we have a few,
we'll keep an eye out when we look at other systems to see if this is
handled better elsewhere for books, journals, and gov docs and
electronic resources.
Boston College Aleph catalog has a locate button with a map.
http://library.bc.edu
From the ASU library catalog you can click on a button and rerun the
search in the CRL catalog.
We'll continue this discussion next week.

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