Minutes of February 9, 1999 Meeting

Present:

Judy Gardner, Harriette Hemmasi, Nancy Hendrickson, Rhonda Marker, Mary Page, Linda Turzynski, Bob Warwick (attending for Ann Scholz-Crane), Mark Witteman (chair & minutes)

Agenda Items

1. Testing of Unicorn 98.4
2. Scheduling upgrade to Release 98.4
3. Unicorn Users Group Enhancement Ballot
4. Location policy experimentation planned for test system

I. LIS Imp members reviewed their findings in testing Unicorn 98.4 which was loaded onto the test system approximately 3 weeks earlier. Not all members had finished all facets of their testing, but all seems well up to now. Two advertised changes for 98.4 appear not to actually work:

1. the DUPLICATE ITEM command still creates duplicate title control numbers
2. the superscript and subscript characters still work with alt-2 keystrokes rather than the alt-3 and alt-4 keystrokes mentioned in the release notes for InfoVIEW. (In WorkFlows, however, superscript characters are composed with ctrl-3 keystroke sequence and subscript characters are composed with a ctrl-4 keystroke sequence, as advertised in the release notes.)
3. the copy-and-paste function which worked fine in InfoVIEW does not operate on most display screens in WorkFlows
   
   This means that serials staff will need to memorize or write down data elements that are needed on subsequent screens. Not only does this extra step make routine tasks more cumbersome, we anticipate an increase in errors.

II. LIS Imp has scheduled the upgrade to Unicorn 98.4 for the evening of March 15, Monday of Spring Break, beginning at approximately 6:15 PM. 6-8 hours of downtime will be required for the upgrade. The time was selected because:

1. on March 15, the libraries close at 6pm. Systems can start the upgrade at about 6:15pm, thereby minimizing impact.
2. Weekdays are best for upgrades as almost all Systems staff members are available the following day as is the SIRSI Helpdesk.
   LIS-Imp members will have another three weeks (until March 4) to raise concerns that must be addressed before upgrading to 98.4.

III. LIS-Imp members reviewed the enhancement ballot by having everyone indicate which enhancements were important to them and how many points they were awarding to each. Libraries are allowed 100 points to spread across the ballot, giving 0-5 points per enhancement.

After LIS-Imp members indicated the votes they would like to give to various ballot entries, the Committee found that they had already allocated about 160 points.

Given time constraints, the group agreed that Mark should exercise his best judgment and pare down the enhancement votes to the requisite 100 points for RUL rather than have us negotiate this at a subsequent meeting. Mark will give the final vote at LIS-Imp's next meeting.

IV. Mark announced a plan to experiment with the LOCATION policy on the test system. What will be done is to replace the "IN-LIBRARY" location with the 140 different ITEM TYPES, and making the HOME LOCATION match the ITEM TYPE for all copy records. The CURRENT LOCATION, however, would still display the various not-on-the-shelf locations (such as ON-HOLD, CHECKEDOUT, BINDRY) when appropriate. The change is being considered for three reasons:

1. MARC Holdings -- a feature that both SACOPS and SACOTAS said RUL should pursue -- will work much better and be less laborious.
2. "Route to" messages upon discharge of items within the owning library will become much more helpful (i.e. "Route to REF" or "Route to STACKS" rather than "Route to IN-LIBRARY").
3. SIRSI's future development of the requests module may make this configuration much more desirable.

This will effect the way in which copies display in IRIS if Systems cannot work out a customization to continue the practice of displaying IN-LIBRARY for materials that are indeed in the library.

The experiment with the LOCATION policy will continue on the test system through the month of March while tech services units explore MARC Holdings procedures.