In Attendance: Surinder Ghangas, Bill Kara, Susan Markowitz, Scott Wicks, John Saylor, Pat Schafer, Susan Currie, Linda Westlake, Lynne Personius, Elaine Engst, Diane Hillmann, Philip Herold, Karen Calhoun, Ed Weissman.

I. VUGM/Wisconsin

George Kozak completed an in-depth training course and is now officially certified by Endeavor.

Scott Wicks - Felt site visit to Wisconsin was much more productive than some of the VUGM meetings. Learned a lot of little things that have big impacts from talking with them especially in the realms of Acquisitions and Fund Accounting. Got to see their archive of NOTIS data. They will give us their software used to extract and present the archival data. They also offered us their extensive library of Macro Express macros and gave us the password to look at their Voyager Manuals. Some of the VUGM classes weren't as useful. The working groups, which provided opportunities to compare with other universities, offered the most useful exchanges over lunch, between meetings, over dinner, etc.

Susan Currie - Didn't go to Wisconsin. Went to very productive sessions at VUGM. Several had very direct application to Cornell's experience. Uuniversity of Pennsylvania was the closest to us; they are big and have lots of libraries. Found out about lots of bugs; some will be fixed in Voyager 2000, some are new. Susan has lots of notes from VUGM that she'd be happy to share.

Philip Herold - Also thought the trip to Wisonsin was more productive than VUGM. Spent one morning with the documentation help committee at WI and got some documentation from them. Also got a packet of info from the OPAC group. It was recommended that we document all communications with Endeavor. WI had lots of trouble with Endeavor not following through on promises. They alerted us to a delay that occurs when you have suppressed records in your system, which we will. They experience a nine-second delay when starting OPAC. Philip went to some productive sessions at VUGM including one on networked resources and OPAC.

All agreed that VUGM is an important venue for keeping informed of Voyager news and making connections with institutions that can help us through implementation.

II. Delay in the release of Voyager 2000

The upgrade to Voyager 2000 may not be released until later this year (after the date we had chosen to upgrade). We've told the steering committee that we'd like to postpone our upgrade to 2000, possibly until over the winter holiday. Some points that were raised were:

• Will it hurt to plan for the August upgrade and have it fall through?
  
• We will be really busy with testing and working out the kinks with '99. We will want to have '99 mastered before attempting an upgrade.
  
• We will want to have time to test 2000 thoroughly before upgrading. If Endeavor delays its release we will not have enough time to test it fully. We don't want any surprises after the upgrade. We've found many more problems with the system than other institutions have because our thorough testing and preparation.
  
• Other institutions have been able to get much added functionality out of the '99 release by using Macro Express.
  
• Surinder feels that with all the changes planned for Voyager 2000, there will be an upgrade to Oracle as well, which will compound the workload for Library Systems.
  
• Everyone agrees that it's best to not push for the upgrade.

We have been looking forward to the technical services enhancements in the 2000 release. The interface between Voyager and the GFA inventory control system is also tied to the 2000 release. While a postponement would be disappointing, it would not be a showstopper. Now that the big moves are over for the time being, we will not be doing very large bulk location changes between now and the calendar year. The lack of the interface will affect the efficiency of circulation services to central campus if circulation continues to rise, but we will do our best to compensate.

III. Status of 2nd Test Migration

It was clear from the 1st day that we had access to the new test load that things were wrong. It turns out that Endeavor used the wrong mapping file. Diane had taken responsibility for fixing the file after the first migration and we were hopeful that it would give us a really good 2nd test load. Endeavor mistakenly used an older file and didn't even ask why changes we had said we were going to make, were not included in the file they used.

Other changes that we had requested were also not included. We created a detailed report of errors including examples from the 1st test load. Endeavor promised that all of our corrections would be made and many of them were not. Vendor records have still not been made available.

We feel that we can not accept this load as is because that leaves us counting on the same promises for the final load. We are giving Endeavor a chance to "fix" the load but we still have the option of not accepting it. We've made some adjustments to the mapping file and Endeavor is going to use it to re-load the holdings records. This re-load will occur on 4/20/00.

The entire test load gets done in three steps and they are only re-doing the final step though there were problems with all three. We will test the other two pieces independently using the 1 million record test database and a special database created for us by Russ to test our special programming. Many of the changes we requested from Endeavor had to be done in the first step of the process, these will be tested in the test database.

There will be a 10-day delay in configuration. Some of the work done on configuration will be lost when they re-load the data.

IV. Report from the Steering Committee - Tom Hickerson

2000 Upgrade
The Steering Committee approves of IMT's decision to postpone the upgrade to 2000 until December.

June 26 Implementation
The Steering Committee is dismayed by the inadequacies of the second test load. The risk factor for the final test load has been raised. The implementation schedule is important to everybody and each aspect has been carefully planned around implementation on June 26. Sarah Thomas will express our dissatisfaction with the most recent test load but we can't count on a higher level of quality control in the future.

The Steering Committee would like IMT to look ahead and consider the effects of being unable to go live on June 26. How will this affect our plans and is there an alternate implementation date that could be considered in the event that any other unforeseen things keep us from implementation on June 26?

V. Implementation Date

Many of the same considerations apply to the implementation date as did to the upgrade. The one piece that has to be in place before going live is that we haven't been able to do a full configuration of the system yet. This must be tested on the second test load before we do the final extract.

The next date that would potentially work for implementation is in August after the summer session and before the fall semester begins. The drawback to this date is that it is after the beginning of the new fiscal year so we will have some records in the old system and some in the new.

Most IMT members feel that they would rather work to the bone to go live on June 26 than have to renegotiate the schedule. All our plans have centered around going live in June from training library staff to publicity to circulation.

VI. Macro Express

Macro Express was demo'd at Wisconsin and IMT requested of the Steering Committee that we purchase the software. We currently have a few individual licenses and have been working with it. It will allow us to get more out of Voyager '99.

VII. Training - Susan Markowitz

The full schedule of classes is out. About 100 people haven't signed up for the basic class. We need to make it more clear that supervisors need to notify their staff which course to sign up for. There will be renovation work in the blue room for the whole month of August. This shouldn't be a problem since we should be done with Voyager '99 training by then and we will postpone Voyager 2000 training due to the postponed upgrade.

VIII. Publicity - Ed Weissman

A letter from Sarah Thomas announcing the release of Voyager will be going in faculty mailboxes on May 5. An article should appear in the Chronicle on the same day. There will be a public Voyager web site at: www.library.cornell.edu/newcatalog/ where information for the public will be posted. This site will include Sarah's letter, an abbreviated implementation schedule, top 10 reasons why Voyager will be great and page shots from the new catalog.

IX. Steering Committee News - Lynne Personius

Alan Manifold has been approved to come and give reporting training. Have not approved the SysAdmin recommendations yet. They had a few questions about the post-implementation committee.

X. OPAC - Ed Weissman

Web Voyage should be integrated with Gateway help. We're working on a way to do this. ASCII Catalog is pretty primitive.