Minutes of Thursday, October 11, 2001 meeting

1) Public Services Policy Memo #6, Cooperative Access Arrangements.

Reviewed RUL's cooperative agreements, PSAM #6, which is available on the Staff Resources web page. The NJ Academic Library Network and Council of Two-year College Libraries agreement will be replaced by a new VALE Reciprocal Faculty Borrowing agreement on or about Jan. 1, 2002. Judy was asked to locate a standard undergraduate referral letter for Sage and add it to the Appendix.

2) Reserves/Ereserves/Ariel updates. (Roger, Donna, Judy)

• Scanning is going well in the unit libraries. Some lag time was experienced accessing the U drive during virus attacks, but is OK now. We are planning to expand ftp privileges at selected sites. Donna needs to know the name and IP address of PCs to arrange for ftp privileges.
• A "Best Copy Available" template is available to use when scanning bad quality originals.
• We have no immediate plans to convert ereserve documents to text files. With so many different staff learning to scan, name and save files, it has been important to maintain one protocol.
• More questions about printing are coming up as students use ereserves at PCs with different print options selected. The tip to click next to the "Print as Image" box has been added to the online users guide.
• The reserve fine structure was revised in Unicorn. The 15 minute grace period was reinstated, followed by a $1 fine until $2 fine kicks in at the 3rd hour, and so forth.
• Agreed with Jan's request to use PROFESSOR'S VIDEO and PROFESSOR'S DISK for call numbers of personal copies of videos and disks on reserve.
• Summer 2001 reserve records have not yet been removed. Chris has asked SIRSI if we're getting reliable reserve circulation statistics with U2000. If they answer yes, we will run Remove Reserve reports and delete eres files from the web server. Otherwise, we may need to wait until U2001 is installed in order to run reports to pick up missed reserve circulation statistics Donna will go ahead and remove sum01 eres files from her "t" in the meantime.
• Ariel 3.01 has arrived and Systems will begin installation next week.
• The Electronic Reserve User Survey will run from Sat. 10/20 to Sat. 10/27, a link to the survey will be posted on the first page of the Reserve Desk's "Lookup Items on Reserve" screen.

3) Unicorn/Systems issues. (Chris)

• Upgrade to U2001. Chris has suggested installing the U2001 upgrade overnight the night of Jan. 1, 2002, and staff agreed with this recommendation. Access staff will be working the following day and can help identify bugs or problems. Chris plans to install U2001 in the test database by Nov. 1, 2001. He encouraged us to read SIRSI's Release and Sub Release notes available on the SIRSI Customer Services page, and shared the userid and password(s) for access to the site. There are major changes to "holds" that are worth reviewing, but will not automatically be installed at existing sites (us). Judy will distribute testing assignments to ASC members by the end of October; we will report back results at our Nov. meeting.
• Database structure conversion. Downtime is needed for a database structure conversion, to correct "item database error" messages when editing records. Estimated time is 7-10 hours. Jan. 12, 2002 is the recommended date.
• SIRSI consultant rescheduled. SIRSI needed to reschedule our trainer/consultant visit in order to send an appropriate person. We have asked for the week of Feb. 4 or 11.
• Blank address 1s. We are now running a script before every user data load to identify records with blank address 1s and to then switch the radio button to 2 if there is address information in address 2. Chris reported 8,828 records have been identified, 8,029 had address 2 information and were switched, and approximately 800 have no addresses.
• Cleanup of LOST-PAID/REPL in-transit charges. The LOST users are functioning OK now. Lists of barcodes still in-transit to the LOST users were distributed for each library to cleanup (untransit).
• ASC agreed with NB Libraries' recommendation to start producing in-transit lists by library, rather than a big system wide in-transit list. Judy will work with Chris to set these up, to be emailed to staff, and will look for an alternative to 3-part reports at the same time.
• Caution from Systems to be careful to click on "OK" and not just back out when creating a new user record. Approx. 30-40 "Name not yet supplied" user records were discovered in the database.
• ugrad/grad problem fixed itself as records started coming across with school codes. Note: whenever a school code is blank, the data load automatically assigns ugrad profile.
• "Recall Notice" now appears on the subject line of email recall notices and overdue recall notices.
• Notices have been updated with complete library addresses.

4) Circulation control of items sent to technical services/collection support services departments.

Discussed issues surrounding proposal to create special users with STAFFUSE profiles to charge items needing repair, relabeling, and new barcodes. Judy will continue to work with systems, collection support, technical services, and access staff. A test user has been requested to experiment with.

5) Announcement and Information Sharing.

• Ana has returned to ILS-Alex. Staff will be testing some new features of upgraded ILL Manager software.
• Nick Reichardt is in training for government documents at Alex and LSM
• RS function group in NB reviewed statistics gathering for this FY.
• Some shifting in reference taking place at LSM
• The Annex will not reopen to the public until the end of spring semester. Requests are being filled and Christopher can be reached there in the morning.
• Recon/withdrawing taking place at Douglass. Math is getting replacement stacks
• Physics has acquired a DVD player.
• Heightened awareness with fire codes observed at Kilmer. Elevators had been down at LSM, now Kilmer
• The Systems office is under piecemeal expansion.
• Primary Contacts for SIRSI modules: Academic Reserve (Chris), Acquisitions (Chris), Authority Control (Bob), Bookings (Bob), Cataloging (Bob), Circulation (Chris), Requests (Bob), Serials Control (Chris), Webcat (Bob), Systems Administration (Chris), Reports, according to module.
• Group users still under investigation for RA cards. We will edit the "Library" field from RU-ONLINE to a "LIB" when updating student user records to alumni profile status.
• Sunday "A" Team shift are starting.
• Revised, standard replies for routine Ask A Librarian questions will be issued soon. Access AAL Team changes Nov. 1.