Present: Marshall Breeding, Zora Breeding, Roberta Winjum, Mary Charles Lasater, Ronee Francis, Pete Wilson, Jake Schaub
- Business
- The Annual committee report for the Metadata Committee has been submitted.
- The Mapping subgroup of DLPG is still unofficial, so it must outline its role if it wishes to continue beyond December.
- Progress reports on new resources to be loaded into DiscoverLibrary
- The DL test server is currently “not playing well” and there is no access to it at all at present.
- The Mapping Group has made progress in the Global Music Archive, notably the geographic facet, which is (i.e., was) accessible in DL Test, although there are some issues that remain to be worked out regarding the display.
- DiscoverArchive is en route to being added to DL as well, although the use of qualified Dublin Core necessitates an additional string for each field in order to be effectively integrated into DL. This process is ongoing.
- Planning related to system-wide metadata issues
- Mapping of FRBR in DL is ongoing, with various exclusions and solutions for false FRBR families being identified one-by-one and addressed where possible.
- The geographic facet for GMA, the serial set native interface, and Art & the Christian Tradition has been added to DL Test, but is not wholly displaying properly. It is currently unknown why. The committee discussed the difficulty in applying facets uniformly across a variety of types of resources.
- The 518 and 028 fields were requested by music, and are (i.e., were) displaying within records in DL Test.
- The 240 field, also requested by music, is not yet displaying, but also needs fine-tuning regarding FRBR in light of its use across nearly all other collections.
- The committee also discussed that the long history of technical problems with DL Test tended to halt mapping progress (and consequently, train-of-thought) whenever they occurred. This lack of continuity was identified as a major sticking point to overall progress.
- Acorn issues and updates
- Unicode continues to be absent from Acorn.
- DiscoverArchive issues and updates
- DSpace and Fedora will be merging into DuraSpace. It is unclear as yet how this merging will affect our system.
- The nature of committee work was discussed, notably the importance of ongoing communication between front-end and back-end users and caretakers of the system. As well, it was mentioned that since members serve on committees often only as a small portion of their overall job responsibilities, they need to be aware of their roles and communication not only within the overall job hierarchy, but also amongst the committees themselves. In the case of mapping, it was noted that this may be beyond committee work as it requires much more time and commitment, and might benefit from being more institutionalized.
- On a similar note, the comments drawn from the two DL Town Halls were discussed. Among them:
- It was decided that DL staff were not always aware of the means by which reference staff used Acorn in their daily business.
- An example of this was how staff limited a search to materials held in the Reference Collection. There is currently no facet for Reference in DL as the term is treated and addressed differently among the various branch libraries. Nancy is currently trying to find an effective means how it might be mapped, although she will be requiring input from reference staff as to how they accomplish this search in Acorn. To her knowledge, there is no way to only search reference materials in a way that would include all of the reference locations/item types that make up that collection across all libraries.
- Regarding future plans, the committee also sought to outline various issues that could be considered recommendations:
- 1) Primo Back Office training for DL staff is needed. This would save much time and effort down the road.
- 2) Formal meetings should be scheduled with DL “stakeholders” among the reference staff in the various branch libraries in the interest of addressing their questions, requests, and needs regarding DL.
- 3) Priorities (perhaps the top 3) should be identified with LITS and other relevant committees in light of the fallout from the DL Town Halls.
- 4) Maintenance of DL in the long term must be planned for. This includes possible upgrades, migrations, etc.
- Further issues:
- We really don’t know what users think about DL, especially given that only a small proportion actually use it.
- The extensive federated search in DL is rich in breadth, but can seriously complicate results.
- The facets in DL are currently promising much more than they can deliver.
- Despite the wide dependence on Acorn, it is quickly becoming antiquated as the nature of library collections continues to evolve.