Minutes

SSN issues

1) In Acorn currently, it is possible to search for an email. Since SSN is going away, and there will be no possibility to use SSN or partial SSN as an identifier, is email an acceptable unique identifier? Emails will be automatically populated for students, faculty and staff, but not for other kinds of patrons. How practical is it to require email?

CAC members expressed skepticism that it will be possible to require email from patrons. There is the sense that some patrons do not have email. In addition, Blair has 900 pre-college patrons, and it will not be practical to ask for emails from this group. In addition, there is doubt that email will suffice as a sufficient piece of information to tell patrons with similar names apart. There was concern that email is a volatile piece of information that changes frequently, and it is an unreliable means of contact and identification. There was the sense that the group needs more information on how many records are without emails and how many records there are with the same name before a definitive judgment can be made. Tao will create reports to collect this information. There was some preference for making staff and faculty records provisional so that home address could be added manually. This possibility needs to be investigated for feasibility.

2) In the daily feed (still in the proposal stage) from MIS for the purpose of populating Acorn patron records, home address will not be included. How important is home address when campus address and email will be populated? CAC members were supplied with a list of fields to be used for populating Acorn patron records, for faculty, staff, and student records.

CAC members were strong in affirming the need for home address. CAC members believed it is important to continue to collect home address. If HR will release home address on an as-needed basis, there may be increased comfort with the lack of home address directly available in the Acorn record. Tracy will pursue with Lisa Shipman in regards to the possibility of obtaining home address on an as-needed basis.

Continued Record clean-up

Tao has completed the expiration and purging of records, per our discussions in 2008. From Tao:

1. For recommendation one, among the 1886 records, 198 records have EMERITUS in Department field, and based on Janet's suggestion, I left those records untouched. 1565 faculty records with 6-digit userID and no activities after 2001 have been purged, 123 user records still have bills associated with them, so they are not purged.

2. For recommendation two and three: 1042 records have been expired with the expiration date of 3/31/2009 and notes have been added. No emeritus records are expired. If the faculty record is expired, faculty surrogate records are expired too.

Agenda item: Is there any interest in reviewing the 198 Emeritus records? These Emeritus records have no activity, 2001 - present. Is there any interest in reviewing the records with old bills attached to them?

There is interest in reviewing the emeritus records. Tao will create a report of emeritus records by library. As you review the records and discover one that is no longer relevant, you may change the expiration date to the day’s date.

Subject lines for patron notices

We can change the subject line for patron notices. Is there any interest in doing this? See attached for suggestions from Michael Jones. If you would like to see a listing of the notices emailed to patrons, see the CAC web site at http://lib1a.library.vanderbilt.edu/circdoc/.

This is technically possible. However, in order to implement this change, a custom script will need to be created. During every upgrade to the Sirsi software, the script will need to be re-created and tested. Because of the potential for error and the introduction of complexity, there was reluctance to implement this idea. There was significant support for the idea itself, but reluctance to implement.