Present: Peter Hoyt, Joel Zumoff, Joanne Leary, Pat Schafer, Howard Raskin, Carmen Blankinship, Sara Spoonhower, Ross Atkinson, Bethany Silfer

Although the main focus of this meeting was to discuss the migration of the patron database, Susan briefly outlined a draft of the plan for how we implement the Access Services pieces of Endeavor. Many aspects of Voyager, particularly for Access Services, are just similar enough to NOTIS that they can be somewhat confusing. There are numerous things for us to cover for Access Services in Voyager but the major ones include locations, item types, new circulation workflow, new reserve functionality and workflow, including templates for creating records in the opac, patron initiated requests in the opac, image server and media scheduling.

The group agreed on the order below as a general and broad guideline for preparing and bringing up functionality for Access Services:

1. Patron database Migration (we'll need to have this as part of our test database load in January)
2. Learning the circulation module and how workflow will change.
3. Reserve system and workflow.
4. Planning for implementation Summer 2000
5. ImageServer for e-reserve
6. Media Scheduling

Obviously, there is much to be done within each specific area listed. The group also agreed on a recommendation to use the existing circulation policies for the June 2000 implementation. This will simplify the implementation and will help us more accurately evaluate the system once it is up and running.

The migration of the patron database was discussed for the remainder of the meeting. Endeavor will not migrate our patron file but does provide an interface file layout to help us extract data to load into Voyager. The interface file layout can be found can be found on the Endeavor Support Web in the technical section. Susan distributed a copy of the current patron groups and categories. Student, faculty and staff records are created by the Registrar and Human Resources. Interface programs put in place by Library technology staff (Joel Zumoff) and CIT transfer records into our database. All other records are created by library staff in 101 Olin or at Mann Library Circulation desk. The majority of these include library cards, SUNY cards, NOTIS pseudo-patron cards and authorization cards (called proxy borrowers in Voyager).

One of the main differences between NOTIS and Voyager is that in NOTIS, a patron Group = where the record originated (Registrar, etc.) and in Voyager, a patron Group = specific category of patron (Faculty, staff, etc.)

The Voyager Implementation for the patron file is roughly as follows:

1. Bib load (This builds our item types.)
2. Patron Extract by CU and transferred into Voyager. The load will create patron group codes during the load processing. (No new patrons added to Voyager at this point)
3. Patron load accepted. IMPORTANT:We must wait until after the database load before changing patron group information. After the load, we will edit and/or create patron categories in Voyager

Patron Records we MUST migrate:
1. Active RE, PE and CU records that have active circulation records including charges, bills or overdues attached.
2. Expired RE, PE and CU records that still have active bill and fine records for overdue fine, replacement costs, recall fines, miscellaneous fines
3. Active patron records that have active holds or recalls (no lapsed holds/recalls).

Although we can change any or all information on patron groups, ONCE a patron group is used in a patron record, it cannot be deleted from System Administration. A patron group can be changed at any time. This is our opportunity to set up patron groups that really reflect operations. At the same time, we do not want to set up so many different groups that maintenance is a problem. The flexibility in having different patron groups assigned to different circulation policy groups allows us the ability to limit certain patron groups in ways that NOTIS did not allow. SUNY Privilege cards is one example of this. This flexibility will also allow us to more easily limit access to licensed databases.

We will definitely need to keep interlibrary loan, carrels, library cards and SUNY as categories. Although in NOTIS 6.2, we moved to using item conditions, any pseudo-patron cards that are still being used to track lost, missing and bindery will be migrated to Voyager item conditions.

Voyager has in the 99.1 release a new proxy card procedure. This can be viewed in the 99.1 release notes on the Endeavor support web. We had a lengthy discussion about authorization cards and the problems with these in NOTIS for accessing BOOKSOUT. Peter had done a preliminary look at some patron records and found only 300+ to have more than 4 subrecords. He has begun studying the program for migrating the records to identify specific problems.

We discussed the possibility of getting SAS reports for some categories, such as "Lost", "Missing" or other pseudo-patron cards, authorization cards with inactive and active sub-records.

We also discussed closing as many bill records as we can prior to the migration. We did this prior to the NOTIS 6.2 implementation so we might look at using the same parameters. For example, should we recommend that if the bills are more than 2 years old, the record should not migrate (because of the 2 year withdrawal process); but if the bills were less than 2 years old, they should migrate. According to our current parameters, patron records (even if expired) don't get purged if books are still checked out to them. Joanne suggested that after we have a chance to review and close some old bill records, perhaps we should run a bill and patron purge according to our usual parameters, and keep what is left over for migration.
If we do have access to NOTIS for a while after implementation, we'll be able to review the records that did not migrate. This will be a better situation than bringing up NOTIS 6.2 where we lost billing information altogether.

Things that we should do in preparation for our next meeting are to think about what patron groups we would want to create after we've loaded our patron file and to think about what SAS reports we need to help us identify clean-up tasks in the current file. We will also review the parameters used to close bills for 6.2 to see if we can use them again.

Information on Voyager will be a regular agenda item for the Access Services Program Committee so that feedback can be obtained.

Peter, Howard, Susan and Sara will meet as a subcommittee the week of October 25 to map the fields in the NOTIS patron records to the Voyager records.