Minutes of August 12, 2004 meeting

Present:

N. Mukherjee, R. Smith, P. Weniger, D. Meister, E. McElroy, A. Peteet, A.Martinez, M. Tokar, D. Vorhees, C. Sterback, J. Reinhart, J.Gardner, M. Harris, C. Foote, Y. Ishii

Penny Weniger was welcomed back to ASC.

1) Housekeeping

• Contact lists:
  Please submit changes for the staff contact lists. A Reports distribution list was circulated for updates.
• Publications and Web site updates:
  The Borrowing Privileges and RDS brochures have been revised for fall. Reserves Services, A Guide for Faculty will be revised. NBL will contribute updated reserves procedures for the Staff Resources pages. RDS staff who have not yet received new PALCI bands with a Rutgers IDS# should request them from Lucye.
• Statistics:
  RUL's total nonreserve circulation was 669,996 in 2003-2004, up 1% from last year. Reserves circulation was 35,206, down 5%. RDS filled 60,819 book and 5,038 article requests last year. 3% of the books were filled by Requests, and 97% were filled by user-initiated Holds. Rutgers sent 5,822 books to PALCI libraries in 2003-04.

2) WorkFlows 2004 beta testing

Dean has placed Property settings and instructions for uploading toolbars on the TSB server in a Beta 2004 Circulation folder for the beta testers. He is checking circulation desk workstations in NB/P (LSM, Alex) where basic charge/discharge functions will be tested. Systems PC staff will be around to update all beta testers clients to the latest build. Instructions for programming barcode scanners have been shared. Dean has posted two problems to the beta test Web Forum. Chris expects testing to continue beyond mid September. Beta testers, please remember to report questions and problems to Dean & Katie (not Chris).

3) Ereserves Working Group update

The Ereserves Working group (R.Smith, D.Voorhees, J.Reinhardt, S.Rogers, D.Goldberg, D. Meister, D.Sterback, J.Gardner) met with Jeanne Boyle earlier this week.

The group reviewed and discussed copyright. Our policy is based on fair use; the guidelines are open to interpretation. Faculty need to interpret fair use of materials they place on reserve. The libraries do not pay for or seek permissions. We will not burn disk copies of ereserve documents for faculty. We purge ereserve documents each semester, at the advice of and correct policy according to university counsel. Roll-over works OK for re-using documents between semesters, except between spring and fall or when there are gaps in communication with professors. We shared strategies for dealing with faculty who request multiple chapters of a book for ereserve. It was noted that the university's copyright policy draft deals mostly with works produced at Rutgers.

The group agreed that we would begin to provide electronic copies only, unless specifically requested by faculty, and stop processing photocopies for check-out at reserve desks. This decision was based on the % of photocopies with low or no circulations, the libraries overall goal of digital delivery, Route 18 construction in NB/P. This academic year will be a transition period during which staff will work with faculty. We will always respond to special requests and formats (scores, art reproductions). Reserve staff will maintain faculty photocopies in staff areas in case there is a need to re-scan, and return them at the end of the semester. SERC's role in reserve services will be monitored during the transition.

Other items:

• Imaging Services will inventory versions of Acrobat at unit libraries and recommend upgrades if needed.
• We will continue to link to external urls and items available online in IRIS, and will highlight these options in the revised brochure.
• Reserve staff will submit purchase requests for electronic books (ebooks) when requested by professors for reserve.
• PDF will continue to be our primary document format. With increased requests to link to external urls, a need for guidelines was expressed. Pitfalls include dead links, sites going down, linking to sites with copyright infringements. A meeting of front-line reserve staff was suggested to work through some of these issues.
• Audio reserves has realized efficiencies since using a syllabus style template that eliminates the need for creating brief records. The audio reserves working group will reconvene to update its recommendation for a system wide audio/spoken word reserves service.

4) Billing Working Group updates

The billing working group recommends we remove overdue recall holds 40 days after they become overdue and send a Hold cancellation notice to the patron. Chris has tested creating an overdue recall bill and writing an extended info note with information about recall due date, etc. in the patron record before the Hold is cancelled. ASC agreed with the plan. The billing WG is also interested in integrating billing for lost PALCI and ILL books into billing and collections for lost Rutgers books. A strategy for dealing with bills for patrons with bad addresses, especially old expired patron records is another goal.

5) Misc. Items, Announcements and Information Sharing

• PALCI is investigating the reasons for cancelled requests. Based on our experience, we do not think that 2 out of 10 PALCI requests we receive are cancelled because the items are in circulation (results of a sample). We are more likely to cancel requests because a local decision is made not to loan an item that has a circulating sublocation in IRIS.
• We are scheduled to change override operators Aug. 24th, and switch to Address 1 on Sept. 1st.
• Georgina discovered that a user's hold position displays as 1 in Self Services and in WorkFlows Display User holds, no matter what the true position. Queue positions are correct in Display Item hold. Chris has reported this bug to Sirsi.
• There will be no August down time this year. Systems will rebuild the keyword index, but all in background and we should notice no systems deterioration.
• Systems is replacing its 2nd air conditioner the week of August 23rd and in the meantime experiencing daily breakdowns of existing equipment. Implementing the Yankee approval plan and PromptCat.
• Darryl is updating ereserves ftp permission information, reviewing Adobe Acrobat system wide. Please contact him if you have problems opening an electronic file from faculty. UMDNJ staff visited ILL and Imaging Services for a demo of the scanners we are using with Ariel. RDS staff can call Imaging Services for account verification if they receive a paid article request without an account code.
• NLB collection management activities: the Chemistry reference collection will be weeded; MathX collection will be transferred to the Annex or SpCol; continuing to work on Special Collections at LSM and the Douglass folio collection; using with a laptop & scanner.
• Melanie Robinson is new staff member at Math.
• SMLR is processing a donation of books from Bernard Downing
• MARC holdings for current titles are almost done at Chang.
• Douglass is working on a merging reference and circ information services at one desk, studying a shift of collections.
• NBL reserve staff are making use of a new Access database to trace reserve acquisitions.
• RDS procedures documents are being reviewed and converted to html
• Media is adjusting internal work assignments. Media is seeking a SCILS intern to work on creating brief records for spoken word materials. A proposal to use UPS for video delivery among the 3 campuses has been submitted to administration.
• John Shepherd is the new Music Librarian beginning this fall.
• Helen Funnye is new staff member at Dana, comes form Newark law library and will be the claims returned contact.

NEXT MEETING: Thursday, September 9, 2004, 9:30-11:30 a.m.