Documentation Committee Meeting Minutes
April 1, 2005

Present: Camille Andrews, Carmen Blankinship, Amy Blumenthal, Megan Perez, Gail Steinhart

Announcement: Megan is leaving for school this summer and his help on the committee has been much appreciated. If anyone knows of someone who might be interested in joining the committee, please let Gail know.

EJAC page linking
In response to Leah Solla's request for the Documentation Committee's help on brainstorming additional places to link the Enhancing Journal Access at Cornell's web page on resources available to Weill patrons, Camille agreed to check the few places where Weill has mentioned and Gail is making minor corrections as well.

RedRover Update
No new news is available on the RedRover update.

GuestID
GuestID is still on the horizon, with no firm deadline for implementation. PSEG is addressing the issue, partly in response to Michael Cook's call for the formation of a library committee to help address library concerns about the issue (currently he is the only library staff member on the CIT GuestID committee). When GuestID is implemented, the Documentation Committee will take further action.

Resources: Known Problems page
Gail has posted Amy's "Resources: Known Problems" page. The members of the committee were encouraged to report any additional problem resources or broken links to the old page.

Future help page revisions
Since nearly all pages were recently overhauled because of the indexing project, it was decided that another review of pages probably wasn't necessary at this point.

Other business

Camille passed out copies of the revised Frequently Asked Questions on Find Article, Find Databases and Find E-Journals. She will also e-mail it to the committee for suggestions and to Gail for posting.

Joanne Leary may be taking over for Carmen Blankinship as Access Services liaison to the Documentation committee, though this is not confirmed as yet.

Amy has contacted Paul Houle about removing the automatic browser check from the Problem Connecting form and the computer set-up page, since it is incorrect (it tells people they have Netscape 5.0 which does not exist). She is waiting for a reply.

Amy has contacted Ross about creating a page on policies for exceptions with sponsor (either a standalone page or something linked to CIT). Exceptions with sponsors must get a NetID from CIT but this does not automatically grant them access to library resources. For access to print resources, they must see the Public Services office in Olin Library to get a library card and to be added to the Voyager patron database. To gain access to electronic resources, however, Ross must grant them access, after doing rigorous research into their actual need and getting proper documentation. If he approves them, then Amy or George will add them manually to the permit server. Everyone in the current Cornell community should be on a particular kind of permit that allows them access to certain resources (cu.employee, cu.student, etc.) and exceptions with sponsors have to be added manually. At this point, there is no definite channel for exceptions with sponsor (or the sponsors themselves) to be notified of what procedures they need to follow to avoid encountering a problem in getting access, and the channels to resolve their access problems are sometimes complicated. It would be beneficial to add policy information to the Technical Support: Resolve Errors and Common Technical Questions page under "Why Can't I Get Into the Cornell Restricted Resources?" (http://www.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/helper.cgi?helper=/newhelp/toc.html) instead of stating that no exceptions are made for non-Cornell community access as we do now. Under this same page, we suggested links to Leah's EJAC page, circulation, and the addition of the Voyager patron module problem described below.

Alternatives for a policy on routing exceptions with sponsors include having them contact LIBIT-L (not an ideal solution since LIBIT-L is a closed list), having them contact Ross (also not ideal since we do not want to inundate him with outside queries and he is sometimes not available), or having them go through the Public Services office (which until now has not played a major role in the exception with sponsor problem).

Four additional complications were identified during the discussion of the above.

  1. Until December, everyone with a NetID had remote electronic access, no matter what their status. This has since been corrected but patrons are often confused as to why they are only now unable to access e-resources.
  2. Though getting a library card through the Public Services office does not guarantee an exception with sponsor electronic access, this has not been made clear in the past. Also, the presence of more than one patron record for the same person (which often happens because of the inability to purge automatically old patron records from Voyager and the frequency of patron category switches) apparently prevents someone from accessing both patron information and electronic resources. Though duplicate and expired patron records can be manually removed from the Voyager database, this is still an additional wrinkle in library access. Also, because the Voyager patron database and the electronic access permit server are completely separate, this problem should not affect electronic resources access at all. Amy will investigate with Pete Hoyt.
  3. As another wrinkle to the patron category switch problem, Human Resources is sometimes behind in changing the type of permits that a user has (for example, though a person is no longer a student and now an employee, their permit by still be a student permit, which only allows them access to certain resources).
  4. Additionally Boyce Thompson Institute members should now be on their own permit on the server for electronic access, so they should have no problems getting access to electronic resources (whether or not they have a library card). However, for print materials, they need to renew their library card access each year.

Next meeting: Friday, May 13 (106 Olin). Megan is scheduled to take minutes.