Minutes of January 6, 2000 Meeting

Present:

K-N Au, J Boyle, H Dess, H Hemmasi, T Haynes, A King, R Marker (recorder), A Montanaro, M Page, L Sak. Absent: L Langschied, R Sewell

1. Report from the Acting AUL/TAS:
   • Representatives from the MIT Library are interested in coming to RUL to look at our implementation of Unicorn. Date is not yet confirmed.
   • The Documents Special Interest Group met, and asked for refinements to a Unicorn report that Systems ran.
   • A group will be established by Hemmasi and Boyle to make recommendations on how best to handle CD-ROMs.
   • Hemmasi demonstrated new searching choices in IRIS, on the initial Quick Search screen, that will be instituted due to changes resulting from authority control.
2. Report from Acquisitions:
   • As of January 1, Jane Sloan is reporting through New Brunswick Libraries and Hemmasi is acting Head of Acquisitions. Acquisitions has been placing rush orders (manually) as needed this week. New Brunswick state funds order are being held until allocations have been entered in IRIS. Acquisitions and Cataloging personnel are sorting shelf list cards to prepare for recon while Unicorn is down. End processing is expected to be caught up by the end of the week. Acquisitions is examining new spine label stock to use with a laser printer. Dana and New Brunswick will send samples of their labels to Hemmasi.
3. Report from Cataloging:
   • Marker thanked Marjorie Li and the staff and librarians of the Cataloging Department for their work during her maternity leave.
   • Two gift collections have been received (Showalter and Diamond), and are awaiting collection development decisions before they are cataloged.
   • Looking forward to having online authority control, and the ability to eliminate some manual authority work.
4. Report from Systems:
   • Montanaro reported that the Libraries survived the Y2K calendar change with no significant problems.
   • Headers in ZMLITE email have problems. Staff are encouraged to move to PINE or Netscape.
   • Montanaro reported a "certificate expired 12/31/99" message on electronic resources from certain vendors. This does not cause a problem w/online access.
   • The payroll system's response time is slow, there are some problems that are being addressed.
   • Unicorn backup went smoothly and the software upgrade was successful. Name authority records loaded fine. There were some problems with subject authority records, and the schedule is about day behind. If downtime lasts longer than this week, we may need to make provisions for services such as ILL.
5. Training and Development Committee survey:
   • TSC discussed each element of the T&D Committee's survey, and Hemmasi forwarded responses to that committee.
   • Review of goals and workplan for 1999/2000:
   • TSC discussed Goal #3: Explore linking electronic databases to library holdings.
6. Round robin:
   • R Marker: Elizabeth Leister has been hired full time through June 2000 as Librarian V.
   • A King: Tim Corliss has been hired beginning January 18 through 2002 as Labor Archivist.
   • M Page: The LIS Serials Training Group conducted sessions prior to the winter break. They will have follow up training this week. Training in Newark is scheduled for next week, and in Camden for later in January. LSM discontinued their Recently Received shelves for journals. LSM date stamps for journals were found not to be Y2K compliant: "99" is hard-coded on the rubber stamps.
   • K-N Au: The Dana representative to TSC will change at some point in the future.

Next meeting is scheduled for February 3, 9:30 a.m.