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Council of Librarians, Meeting Announcement

The Council of Librarians will meet on Wednesday, March 15 at 10:30 am in 703 Olin Library. The agenda includes:

1. CUL Digital Futures Strategic Plan:  Ross Atkinson will present the new version of the CUL Digital Futures Strategic Plan incorporating ideas and suggestions from the January 10 Planning CUL's Digital Future meeting as well as specific action items intended to move the Library forward in fulfilling the plan's goals and objectives.

2. Voyager Reporting:  Karen Calhoun will present the approach being taken by the Voyager Implementation Management Team Reporting Working Group with regard to Voyager reporting and specify the implications for library units. Angela Horne will solicit feedback on your expectations and requirements with regard to Voyager reports about OPAC usage. Angela's 3/1 message to COL-L, "Tracking OPAC activity in Voyager," is appended below.

Katie Margolis is the designated note-taker.

Edward Weissman
Assistant to the University Librarian
Cornell University
201 Olin Library

To: Members of the Council of Librarians
From: Edward Weissman

I am appending a message from Angela Horne, who is investigating OPAC/Reference reporting issues in the Voyager system. As a member of the Voyager Reporting Team with responsibility for OPAC reports, I asked Angela to take the lead in this investigation. She would like to know what kind of information unit and department heads would like to have with regard to the use of the Voyager catalog. She will be soliciting input from members of the Instruction/Reference Program Committee at a meeting later this month. Appended to Angela's message is a list of the reports we get now about Notis catalog activity.

Please send comments directly to Angela or contact her by phone at 5-3389.

Thanks.

------------------------------------------------------

Hello,

Ed Weissman has asked me to take responsibility for OPAC/Reference reporting issues in Voyager. This will involve determining what Voyager OPAC reports individual libraries need, as well as ensuring that each Library's staff has the equipment and training required to handle report printing/viewing.

As background to this effort, we currently track such OPAC activity as number of NOTIS searches by day and specific hour; type of search (such as author, title, etc); library use by patron category, etc. Each month Library Directors receive a set of 8 OPAC statistics reports with such titles as "Number of Searches by Time of Day" and "Number of Searches by Day of Week". I’ve attached a Word document that details the characteristics of these 8 reports. (If any Director doesn't have recent copies of these reports, let me know and I will send the January set.)

However, soon Voyager should allow us to generate OPAC activity reports that are more sophisticated than the NOTIS reports currently received monthly.

In order to ensure that you will have the reports from Voyager that you (and your staff) need, I would like your feedback about OPAC Reporting. Are you using any or all of the current eight NOTIS OPAC reports? If you aren't, what sorts of custom OPAC reports would be useful to you? What OPAC data do you need to mine from the catalog but have not been able to extract from NOTIS?

Even in the short time you have been reading this message, you’ve probably already begun to think of some of the issues surrounding Voyager reports. We have not yet created procedures regarding “Who will create the reports?” or “How will the reports be shared among libraries?” But, I would like to begin the dialog about these issues now, so that we can ease as gently as possible into Voyager OPAC statistics generation this summer.

I welcome your comments and input on any or all of these issues. Even knowing if you are interested in aspects of OPAC reports would be helpful. I would like to phone those interested (at your convenience) and talk a bit about OPAC Reporting. If it would be more efficient for us to meet in person, that is also possible. We could even exchange e-mails, if you wish. Also, if you’d prefer not to participate in this discussion, please let me know and I will remove you from my “to contact” list. I can be reached by e-mail at akh8@cornell.edu or by phone at 255-3389.

Advance thanks for sharing your needs and expertise on the subject of OPAC reporting.

Angela K. Horne
Public Services Librarian
Johnson Graduate School of Management Library
101-F Sage Hall
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York USA 14853

E-mail: akh8@cornell.edu
Phone: (607) 255-3389
Fax: (607) 255-8633

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11/7/00 jwg