08/19/2008
Attending the meeting: Bryan Goodwin, chair, Susan Kimball, Beth Lang, Barbara Polowy and Bonnie Vigeland
Old Business:
Aleph manager interview:
Bryan reported on meeting with the candidate for the Aleph manager position and noted that she had reference desk experience and seemed well aware of public service issues with the Aleph OPAC.
Next Gen vendors:
RIO members feel it is very important to work with the DEDCC committee on Next Gen concerns and Bryan will send the recent DEDCC report to RIO members. While understanding that financial concerns are critical, RIO members would like to find out from the library directors what our committee should do next.
Aleph title fields indexing:
RIO accepted the suggestions of the cataloging committee about which fields should and should not be part of the title indexing. We will ask that the cataloging committee request from AMC that their suggested changes be made in test so that we can see how they will work for users.
SFX in the Aleph catalog:
RIO would like to see an example showing the 5 institutions’ SFX buttons for e-journal records, in place of the text links, in the Aleph test database. We had this set-up in III and RIO feels it was helpful for users trying to find e-journal holdings. Beth will check with Linda Matson for more information about testing this. [Beth has since reported that this will take quite a bit of programming so won’t happen immediately but can be added to the list.]
Title KW searches in Aleph for “lost” items:
Beth brought up the question of SFX finding “lost” items in the OPAC, items without an ISSN or ISBN. Editing X server settings (per instructions in the SFX manual for the Plug-in program for Aleph section 9.3) will enable SFX to do title searches in Aleph following a failed ISSN or ISBN search. A link to the catalog will show in SFX if there is a “hit” with the title search. Linda Matson is working on setting this up with Jan Jourdain and AMC to look at in the test server.
Print journals in SFX:
Susan reported that she is working on adding print journal holdings to the Amherst SFX KnowledgeBase this summer. The primary objectives are to:
1. Display summary holdings for print journals held locally or only display the catalog link when print holdings are available
2. Pre-populate AC and FC Depository request forms in the same way ILL forms are pre-populated, but only displaying the target when appropriate
MARCit records in the OPAC:
Some RIO members were not aware that the serials catalogers had decided to add these records for journal titles in aggregated collections.
Since each institution has its own instance of SFX, the serials committee did not consider it a 5-College decision at that time.
Alerts function in the Aleph OPAC:
RIO has completed its work on the Alerts pages and is ready to have them go into the prod server.
Next meeting:
Scheduled for August 18th at 9 am at Hampshire.
Recording secretary,
Bonnie Vigeland
