CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
201 John M. Olin Library
Ithaca, NY 14853-5301
To: Sarah Thomas
From: Ed Weissman, Chair, Library Gateway Steering Committee
Subject: Mainstreaming the Gateway: Recommendations of the Library Gateway Steering Committee
On behalf of the Library Gateway Steering Committee, I am pleased to submit to you and the Library Management Team the recommendations of the Steering Committee with regard to the mainstreaming of the Library Gateway. When the Steering Committee and the two implementation committees (the Technical Services Implementation Committee and the Public Services Design Committee) were formed in July 1997, the Steering Committee was charged with overseeing the January 1998 implementation of the Library Gateway, CUL's common electronic entry-way. This target was met and since then the Steering Committee, with input from the two committees and from the Task Force on Gateway User Support, has developed a set of recommendations relating to ongoing Gateway governance, Gateway catalog management, the maintenance and enhancement of the Gateway's design, staff training and user support, and Gateway technology and technical support. The four groups hope that your adoption of these recommendations will permit the groups to be replaced by the end of the spring 1998 by groups and processes that are more in line with existing administrative structures.
The Steering Committee's recommendations call for the formation of one new group, the CUL Gateway Committee, which, with the recently formed Electronic Resources Council, will play the prominent role in managing ongoing Gateway developments. They also call for the appointment of a Gateway Coordinator, a Gateway Editor, a Managing Editor/Coordinator of the Gateway Cataloging Guidelines and Subject/Genre Terms, and a Technical Support Contact.
Finally, everyone responsible for the implementation of the Gateway hopes that the implementation of the new library management system will result in a gateway to networked resources through the library catalog itself. If this transition is to occur effectively, the LMS evaluation team must be knowledgeable about all Gateway functionality as it evaluates the systems. This is also true of the LMS implementation team whose job it will be to subsume Gateway functionality within the LMS. Attention to the functionality of the Gateway is needed in both stages if the transition is to be made effectively.
4/27/98 dih