Collaborative Technical Services Team WebEx meeting minutes October 3, 2013

Collaborative Technical Services Team WebEx meeting minutes

October 3, 2013

Present at the meeting were:  Beth Burnett, Bill Walsh, Bob Trotter, Cathy Jeffrey, Chris Huff, Dave Evans, Donna Bennett, Guy Frost, Hallie Pritchett, Jacquiline Vickers, Jeff Carrico, Sherrida Crawford, 

Cathy Jeffrey welcomed everyone to the meeting and spent a few minutes introducing some of the WebEx functionality.  Cathy polled the group to see if they preferred polls to reflect percentage responses only or if they wanted to see the response of each individual as well.  The majority voted to see the responses from individuals.

Cathy mentioned that this was a meeting rather than a presentation and encouraged everyone to participate fully in the discussion.

Cathy suggested that the group begin their discussion by focusing on issues related to collaborative technical services that would impact the proposed rfp for a next generation system.  To kick start the discussion Cathy asked the group to  answer two questions.  Results of the poll were:

Question 1: Do you believe that having a single catalog rather than 30+ individual catalogs would be a good thing?

Answer:         yes                  36%
no                   55%
no answer     9%

Question 2:  Do you believe that it is POSSIBLE that a single catalog rather than 30+ catalogs may be in the USG Library consortia future?

Answer:         yes                  91%
no                   9%

David Evans summarized the results describing them as the majority of members believe it would be a bad idea but most believe it could happen.  Discussion continued on the subject of what functionality a single catalog would need.  Cathy Jeffrey brought up a document where team members could record ideas as part of the discussion.  Following are the ideas that were listed and/or discussed.

In her initial document Cathy suggested that a single catalog should be able to default to a one institution and be able to be limited to two or more institutions if desired. Sherrida Crawford wrote: “Not sure if you could see just your own local entries on a bib.”   Bob Trotter responded to these comments saying “I mean you would see all local entries, not just your own.  I would think that you would be able to limit by institution or a group of institutions.  In our current UC we have a hierarchy that determines which record replaces another.”

Sherrida went on to discuss her concern that a single catalog would result in the loss of local customization.  Guy Frost concurred and indicated that the bibliographic record enhancements that Valdosta State adds are used by patrons to identify specific materials.  As an example he mentioned that they routinely add information about award winning books.  Patrons use this information to determine which ones are available at Valdosta State. Guy also mentioned that some libraries like UGA had spent decades enhancing records.  Sherrida referenced the table of contents enhancements to which some libraries have committed significant effort.  She suggested that it would be unfortunate to loose these enhancements.  Someone suggested “protecting designated fields from overlay.”  Cathy asked if a single catalog could somehow capture these enhancements if that would make a single catalog more palatable.  Guy and Sherrida agreed that it would and that was added to the list.

Bill Walsh suggested that robust batch loading and batch editing capabilities should be included.  Jeff Carrico emphatically agreed.

Jeff Carrico also suggested developing “Best practices” which he described as “A general agreement that ‘this is good enough’”

Authority control and database management for a single catalog environment were discussed briefly.  Several comments were added to the list as follows:

Bill Walsh is hoping that we will not have to rely on 3^rd parties to process locally.
Cathy Jeffrey suggested that multiple users should be authorized to update the database.
Hallie Pritchett suggested the ability to centralize authority work – i.e. have one library or department responsible for authority work and allowed to work on all records in the system.
Guy Frost stated that this might be too large a job for one library to handle.
Bob Trotter wrote that “Authority control would be in the cloud (according to the vendors).  We will probably be looking [at] a mixture of databases, some with single institutions and some with multiple.” 

Hallie Pritchett brought up government documents.  She described the current way in which depositories receive bib records with links to online content and pointed out that each depository in the system had its own criteria for which documents they would receive.  The group discussed whether the USG libraries might have a single government documents profile and receive one record that everyone could use.  Cathy asked if it might be possible for the online government documents to have their own location in the system.

Dave Evans mentioned a recent Kennesaw State acquisition with a large number of records which they had not yet loaded into the system because of their concern about the impact of such a large file of records.

Cathy closed the meeting with a request that the group select a regular meeting day and time.  Most members of the group liked the 12:00 pm Thursday meeting time and selected the first and third Thursday of each month for the meeting schedule.

The meeting was adjourned.

Submitted by
Cathy Jeffrey

Addendum.

After the meeting, Chris Huff wrote to say that he had some difficulty getting into the shared annotation tool.  He made notes of some of his observations during the meeting and forwarded to me.  Chris’ comments are copied below.

Area of Concern:  A single catalog/database shared across all institutions appears likely, but many are concerned that this will be a problem.

Needed answers:

1) Definitions:

a. Single Catalog

b. Single Database

2)What are the benefits of a single catalog/database?  What is the value in choosing this approach?

3)What are the disadvantages or limitations of a single catalog/database?  What would we loose by choosing this approach?

-Loss of legacy, local-level data?

-Inability to have a separate, local record?

-Method to preserve individual customization?

Area of Concern: Authority Control...

-who will be tasked with maintaining this for the system.

-work of authority control will need to be distributed across the system because the workload is heavy -there may be value in concentrating staff expertise in authority control and allow this staff to have access to other library records.

-already moving toward OCLC-hosted authority control as source

Government Documents

-opportunity to reduce redundant marcive processing -would we have just one selecting institution/entity?

-how would we handle things like readex serial set?

Here's a link to the Orbis Cascade Alliance/ Collaborative Technical Services Team

http://www.orbiscascade.org/index/ctst-2012