Minutes of October 30, 2002 Meeting

Present:

S. Bartz, N. Borisovitz, V. Bowman [via teleconference], J. Boyle (acting chair), E. Calhoun, R. Warwick (recorder), M.B. Weber

Absent:

None

1. September 25, 2002 committee minutes

The draft minutes of our September 25 meeting were approved with the changes that Mary Beth got from several committee members. Mary Beth will distribute them to the RUL_EVERYONE list and send them to Sam McDonald for inclusion on the staff web pages.

2. September 25 action items

We reviewed the status of the action items from the September 25 minutes.

3. LIS meeting report -- Boyle

Jeanne reported some of the highlights from the October 3 LIS meeting that related to IPAC activities.

• The upgrade to Unicorn 2002 (U2002) was discussed. We need to sign off on U2002 by the December 5 LIS meeting.
• A new feature for us to consider is broadcast searching. In U2002 we will be able to implement broadcast searching from WebCat to three other Z39.50 sites.
• The minutes of the LIS meeting will be distributed widely. We will be able to read more details there.
• LIS is considering whether to have a SIRSI consultant return this spring. We need to get back to Chris Sterback if we have issues that we think a consultant could help us with.

4. IRIS Guide -- Bartz

Stephanie is making good progress with the revisions to the IRIS Guide and the committee wants to encourage her in this endeavor. The following issues were discussed.

• Call Number Browse options, especially how selecting a Class Scheme affects a search. We considered whether this section should have more or less description. Since there is some uncertainty about how this all works, we might want to talk with a SIRSI consultant about the options.
• We recommend keeping only ALPHANUM, LC, LCPER, and SUDOC as Class Schemes in the pull down menu on the Call Number Browse page in WebCat.
• We will add a section on Status to the Guide since this has been requested from some reference librarians.
• We discussed whether this is a "guide" for users or a "manual" for librarians since each approach has a different level of detail.
• There are a few sub-locations that appear to be obsolete and we will talk with individuals regarding about whether they truly are obsolete. We recommend removing any obsolete sub-locations from IRIS (than thus from the IRIS Guide). To start we will ask Judy Gardner about the old RES-1, RES-2, and RES-3 sub-locations that don't appear to be used any more.
• Bob did a rough count from the http logs for the past few months of the number of times that the IRIS Guide page was delivered from the web server and distributed a spreadsheet at the meeting. It was felt that the page was delivered enough (more than 2000 times each of the last two months) that is was well worth our effort to revise it.

5. Brief records in Unicorn -- Warwick

Bob forwarded this issue from the minutes of the September LIS meeting. The Cataloging Department is reviewing whether the old Geac circ-only records should be removed from the IRIS database and Rhonda Marker asked that this suggestion be brought to IPAC for its input.

• Ellen was an invited guest to give her insight on this issue since most of the Geac circ-only records are government documents records. She brought numbers from a 1994 report that Betty Fry did for her that showed there were 13,947 such records at that time. More have been created since then and some have been overlaid with full records since then. All of these records are shadowed; they do not appear in WebCat.
• After a full discussion, the prevailing opinion in IPAC was that the records should stay in IRIS but we also felt that we did not have enough information to give Rhonda a recommendation at this time. We will ask Rhonda for a report on the circ-only records that she is talking about so that we can make an informed recommendation after a future discussion.

6. New IPAC member

Following her spirited contributions to the brief records discussion, Ellen was asked to become a permanent member of IPAC. She agreed. Welcome to the group, Ellen!

7. Display of non-book formats in IRIS -- Boyle

This was a remaining issue from the old PAC committee that we discussed to see if it was still an issue that needed our attention.

• The former PAC committee began a review of the initial IRIS display for individual records in each format. They only finished books and serials and partly finished archival materials.
• We decided that this display review was worthwhile and, therefore, still needed to be done for the other formats. We will add this to the IPAC projects for the spring.

8. U2002 release notes -- Boyle

Jeanne passed out the relevant sections of the U2002 Release Notes so that we could see what WebCat changes/corrections/enhancements are to be included in the new release.

• We need to review these notes and decide which of the new features we will implement in IRIS and how changes to the existing structure will affect IRIS.
• We began to review the notes but realized that we could not see some of these enhancements because our custom WebCat pages (which do not have these new features included) get in the way. For our next meeting, Bob will move the custom pages out of the way so we can see the new changes. A message will be sent to the LIS group telling them which days our custom WebCat will be unavailable so that they can let their testers know.
• One new feature in the release notes that we definitely want to try out is the broadcast searching to Z39.50 sites. The system will support broadcast searches to three Z39.50 sites. Initially, we'd like to set up CRL and the two Rutgers law libraries in the test system to see if/how this would work in our environment.
• We ran out of time and will continue discussing the release notes at our next meeting.

9. Next meeting

The next IPAC meeting is Wednesday, November 27, at 9:30 AM.