08/30/2005
by:Beth Lang
Minutes August 22, 2005
By: Beth Lang
Present: Margaret Groesbeck, Beth Lang (recorder), Barbara Polowy, Bonnie Vigeland (chair)
Absent: Bryan Goodwin, Sherre Herrington
Minutes
Minutes of the July 22 meeting were approved. Bonnie will post the minutes to the RIO website (http://fivecolleges.edu/sites/libraries_rio/)
RIO members agreed that the most important function for the RIO group concerning the ALEPH implementation is to keep in mind how all users will use ALEPH – from the new freshman student, to the sophisticated post-graduate researcher. We are the voice for the ALEPH users, and this will be our main focus as we evaluate ALEPH.
RIO members responded to the document from J. Jourdain titled “ALEPH Stuff for RIO”. Jan had referred to this during last Monday’s ALEPH training session held at Amherst College.
[Document labeled:
jmj:U:Ex LibrisALEPHImplementationPublic InterfaceALEPH stuff for RIO.doc]
The document offers suggestions & examples for these aspects of ALEPH design:
logical bases
indexes
limits
filters
Logical bases (subsets of the catalog).
Keep:
Five colleges public catalog
Amherst catalog
Hampshire catalog
Mt. Holyoke catalog
Smith catalog
UMA catalog
Renaissance Center catalog (*note: BL just learned from Leslie Button that Ren Cat will be included within the UMA catalog in Aleph)
Five colleges Depository. RIO suggests that all Five College Depository items be included in within any local single institution catalog search. This should be transparent to the user – ie. they should NOT have to select the inclusion of the 5-C items in their search. (*note from Leslie about the structure of data in ALEPH – UMA depository items will be included within UMA catalog. Four colleges depository items will be included within Amherst College catalog.)
Media equipment of each of the five colleges
Reference materials (UMass has this in III and wants to keep.)
Electronic resources (includes e-journals and books such as NetLibrary)
Questionable:
Should we use materials types as logical bases? RIO prefers to have material types as a limit or a filter. (includes Five Colleges films, images, maps, music, spoken recordings, scores, etc.)
Five Colleges manuscripts and archival materials – leave this up to SC&A librarians
Logical bases by language materials (English, Russian, Asian, and Spanish are suggested.) shouldn’t this be a filter instead?
Five colleges computer /data files & Five colleges non-print/non-image holdings (what are these?? Need more info.)
No:
Five Colleges holdings available for loan (can we get a better definition of what this means? Leslie thinks it has to do with media types, but not sure.)
Five Colleges books (why use this? Too limiting.)
Five Colleges journals (Leslie says this is similar to the journal title search in III. Perhaps we need more info about this one.)
Other RIO questions about logical bases:
Can we add logical bases at any time? (looks like we can, per RIO minutes from 6/21.)
Should sub-libraries be logical bases?
Indexes
Under Author – expand to include personal, corporate, conference.
Call numbers – expand to LC, other, etc.
Filters (pre-search) & Limits (post-search)
RIO members will look at other libraries’ use of these (using the same list of libraries we’ve looked at already to evaluate patron interface.) In usability testing, we can evaluate use of terms and vocabulary, and layout with the user.
Specify the filters for both basic and advanced searches. We will work on this.
Other questions: what is the difference between Location and collection, in “ALEPH speak.”?
Where does the “New titles” option come from? (index or filter)
Next meeting: Friday, Sept. 9 at 2:30[?]
We will take a closer look at indexes and filters.
