OPAC/Gateway Configuration Group
Notes from the September 29, 1999 Meeting

Attending: Lynn Brown, Karen Calhoun, Elaine Engst, Philip Herold, Fred Muratori, Pat Schafer, Ed Weissman

1) Web Voyage
CUL is providing Web access to the Library catalog through Ameritech's WebPac client. Unfortunately, keyword searches resulting in large result sets crash the system. We hope that this problem will be resolved when PacLink is moved to a new CICS Y2K region shortly. WebPac, however, has other problems associated with the display of holdings information. Recently, George Kozak learned that the University of Connecticut successfully pointed Endeavor's Web Voyage client to its Notis catalog. As a result, the OPAC/Gateway Configuration Group has been asked by the Library Management Team to look into using Web Voyage as the Web front-end to Notis until Voyager is implemented in June. This should allow us to improve our current service while we also learn about the client we'll be using next year. Fred, George and Philip, who will serve as the facilitator, will be the Web Voyage/NOTIS Implementation Team. Their goal is to design the best possible Web interface to Notis for presentation at the IRPC meeting on October 25. At that time further decisions about when to release Web Voyage to the public will be considered. This scenario is premised on George determining that PacLink will not crash when it is moved to the new CICS region. Karen will verify that these developments will not impact the Z39.50 interface to Notis used by catalogers to derive Gateway Catalog records. [Karen confirmed that there will not be an impact in a message from Greg McClellan after the meeting.]

2) Library Gateway Meets Voyager
The Group discussed some of the issues, both philosophical and technical, involved in integrating Gateway Networked Resources (including the Gateway Catalog) into Voyager. Ed distributed the document The Implementation of Voyager and the Library Gateway (July 1999) which was reviewed by LMT at its July 27 meeting. (The document was distributed over CU-LIB with the meeting notes.). Ed also asked the Group to look at the Library Gateway Focus Groups Report on the Staff Web page
<http://www.library.cornell.edu/staffweb/GateEval/contents.html>. This provides information about functionality in Gateway Networked Resources that the focus group respondents valued. The Group agreed that we could not make any firm decisions about integration until we learned more about Voyager.

3) OPAC Configuration
The Group briefly discussed the OPAC configuration effort. One of the issues raised were the utilization of user groups in the design process.