From Library Committees

Meta: 11-10-08

Present: Marshall Breeding, Zora Breeding, Ronee L. Francis, Mary Charles Lasater, Bill Walker, Pete Wilson, Roberta Winjum.

Absent: Nancy Boggess-Korekach.

Volunteer for minutes: Zora

Suggestion for future minutes: rotation

• Progress report on new resources for Discover Library: Mary Charles updated the group on progress of mapping DiscoverArchive, Serial Set records, and Global Music Archive records to Primo. (work on Art in the Christian Tradition has not yet begun). Progress has been frustratingly slow.
  • The Serial Set records are ready for a trial run but there was a problem with OAI harvesting, followed by the server hardware failure and Dale Poulter’s much needed vacation, all of which has delayed progress on the trial run to date. With the backup server now being pressed into service as the main Primo server, no experimentation can be done with our mapping changes. Serial Set will be ready for loading if the OAI problem is resolved.
  • Tao You and Jodie Gambill have been working on the Global Music Archive. Their help has been very valuable but progress is slowed due to Steven Nordstrom’s departure.
  • Ronee and Chris Benda have been working on DiscoverArchive, which has presented many challenges due to the many formats of materials involved and the lack of consistency in inputting data.

There was discussion at this point about whether qualified Dublin Core can be translated to the Primo mapping. Marshall was sure that Primo has that sort of granularity. The reason for the confusion was that the extract process from D-space stripped out the qualified DC tags. The question remains whether Dale can figure out a way to extract these records preserving the qualified DC tags or if this is a limitation of the D-space software.

Frustration was expressed over the difficulty of trying to learn Primo Back Office. Training on Primo Back Office was limited to only a few staff many months (years?) ago. It was suggested that a Mapping Boot Camp was needed – or some better process to bring new things online.

Can we get Primo training for the people currently working on it? VU’s training was back when we were beta partners. Many things have changed and new Primo customers are getting the benefit of training that has been improved and updated. Recommendation: updated Primo Back Office training from either LITS or ExLibris for those currently working on Primo mapping.

• Comment from NBK: If we are to get training for Primo Back Office, it will have to come from ExLibris and not from LITS, since most of LITS staff are just as far behind on this as any others.

Question: what about Primo mapping after the fulfillment of the current assignment. Reminder to Marshall – the mapping group is still waiting for a formal charge. Will this current group be involved in future mapping challenges? Some sort of formal permanent group needs to be formed so that we don’t lose the expertise that is being developed and so that working on these sorts of projects is an official part of the members’ job duties. Recommendation: A formal mapping team needs to be constituted.

Roberta and Marshall informed the group that there has been discussion at OUL about the process of making decisions about Discover Library. Decisions about what goes into Discover Library have long-term implications and greater involvement by the Research Services and Collections Committees as well as the Library Council is needed when making these decisions.

There was much discussion at this point about the Serial Set records: what we have in print versus the online collection and what informed our suggestion for not adding them to Acorn. The two main reasons were the cost and loading issues. Cost of the marc records plus the authority processing was around $30,000-$50,000. Loading would have taken many months due to the large number of records and the need to load only 5-10,000 per week so as not to overwhelm adutext and indexing. A need for re-indexing after such a load was also a factor in weighing the benefits of loading these records into Acorn or Discover Library.

• Continued progress on developing expertise in non-MARC metadata. Marshall brought the team back to the agenda. We need to develop layers of expertise in working with metadata: to set up metadata structures for projects, to input metadata for collections, to map the metadata for sharing and retrieval by other systems, technical expertise in metadata applications. Should we develop training on basic Dublin Core application for DiscoverArchive? A suggestion was made to also seek outside training on DC and/or metadata project management. We ran out of time for further discussion and agreed that we see the need for more expertise and training and will discuss at future meetings.

Our next meeting will be Nov. 24th.