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9 February 1998
RWA Notes
1. ERC Update. Ed Weissman reported on the first meeting of the Electronic Resources Committee. The purpose of the Committee is to facilitate the addition of new electronic resources. The Committee spent time during its first meeting identifying other operational groups, with which it needs to create connections. An initial challenge will be to define the circumstances under which new electronic resources need to be staffed through the Committee; in many circumstances this will no longer be necessary, because the process for adding such resources will have been mainstreamed. Nancy Skipper asked if electronic resources identified for cataloging need to be submitted now to the Committee. Ed said that should not be necessary; the forms should be submitted to cataloging as usual; if a problem is encountered, however, then it is likely that the question will be referred to the ERC.
2. Gateway Update. Ed also reported on the progress of the Library Gateway. The Gateway Steering Committee is formulating a description for LMT of what will be necessary to maintain the Gateway until the advent of the new library management system. The Committee is also working on the spring adjustment to Bear Access, which is due at CIT on 20 March. This will be submitted initially to me, and I will relay it to public services staff for input. While the Committee is assuming that the Gateway will now serve as a replacement for Bear Access, it is essential to maintain some BA components, such as Just the Facts. We have received some helpful user feedback, Ed said, and in general the Gateway seems to be functioning well.
Marty noted that training sessions for staff using the Gateway are starting today. He urged that as many desk staff attend these sessions as possible.
3. Database Review. It is time again to review, and to consider the extension of, our databases. The Database Review Task Force will therefore start meeting this month. It will consider both the databases we presently have, and the possibility of increasing our subscriptions to full text materials. There is representation of reference staff on the group; I have included no access services staff, although someone could be added, if Access Steering felt this were necessary. There was a general sense on PSPC that, if we do a poll again this year (which is likely), we should keep the total number of items to a minimum. Last year, the amount of time required to participate in the poll was significant. We should try to draw upon use statistics, rather than relying only on the opinions of staff. (Ed noted that Patricia O'Neill is now working on a project to compile and provide on-going access to our current statistics on database use.) We also talked about whether, in the event of a poll, we ask for input from individuals or departments; we ended up deciding that each reference librarian should respond, based on his or her expertise: departments should not vote as a group. Paul noted the difficulty of changing aggregators once a year, and urged that such difficulty be taken into account in our decision-making.
4. PSEC/PSPC. The Public Services Executive Committee has now been in place for a little over two months. Its membership and work remain somewhat tentative--but its purpose is to formulate systemwide policy for public services, with the advice and input of public services staff; I am assuming that such input will come especially by way of ASPC and IRPC, both of which now have steering committees. The name of the Public Services Planning Committee is somewhat misleading, since the group is mainly an opportunity to exchange information rather than to do planning--and since such planning will now become increasingly the responsibility of PSEC. Lance noted that a predecessor of PSPC was known as the Public Services Forum. We will therefore change the name of PSPC back to Public Services Forum--if for no other reason than to avoid the confusion with PSEC. Because I am hopeful that much public services work will now be focused in the two program committees, ASPC and IRPC, each of which meet once a month, I said I would expect the Public Services Forum to begin at some point to meet every other month, rather than monthly.
5. LMS. We talked about the Ameritech demonstration. There was mainly a concern that, at least in the public services meetings, the Ameritech staff did not address the questions we had sent them. We need to emphasize again to the other vendors that we are not looking for a regular sales pitch, but rather direct responses to the questions that we have formulated. Brendan noted that we need to approach the assessment of the LMS somewhat differently than the evaluation of, say, NOTIS. We need to ask in some cases not about whether the system will accomplish certain tasks, but rather how we as the users make it accomplish those tasks, and at what cost.
6. MAC OS. The CIT Help Desk has asked whether we would be interested in circulating CD-ROMs of the Macintosh operating system, for which Cornell has a site license. Cornell Mac users could then check out copies of the CD-ROM to upgrade their software. Susan Currie felt this would need to be studied closely in different units; reserve units have traditionally maintained material only for instructional purposes. Joel noted that we would need to learn more about the site license: would this CD-ROM be available, for example, to users who have purchased library privileges, or only to Cornell faculty, students and staff? Mary Patterson said that Engineering circulates CD-ROM software, but needs to look up in the database whether the requestor is a student or a faculty member. Ann Gray had written to me that CISER is responsible for doing this work for SPSS and SAS software; Ann said it takes a great deal of time, but that is probably mainly because CISER must charge for this material. Marty said that he sees CIT as mainly a utility company, while the library provides information. By assuming responsibility for circulating software, are we not conflating those separate functions? There was also a general concern (Deb said this would be the case especially in smaller units) that circulating Mac software would imply that the Library would now be responsible for technical troubleshooting which is now the responsibility of the CIT Help Desk. Since this discussion raised a number of policy issues, we ended up referring this to PSEC.
7. Screen Design. At Joel's suggestion, we agreed to change slightly the arrangement of the Welcome screen, so that the statement "You may press ENTER/RETURN for access to the Catalog only" would be at the top. This will stop users from entering their ID numbers on the mistaken assumption that this must be done for catalog access. Joel noted that this question arose, because the catalog button on the Gateway now connects to the Welcome screen, rather than directly to the catalog; CIT is working on this problem, and Joel said he is hopeful that we will eventually be able to move users directly from the Gateway to the catalog, without the intervention of the Welcome screen. Nancy pointed out that another line on the Welcome screen ("Library card holders enter nine-digit number beginning with 888") should remind us that users who have purchased privilege cards can also have access to our online indexes; there may be some question as to whether this is in fact appropriate from the standpoint of our site licenses.
8. Privacy. We had a short discussion about whether it would ever be at all feasible to let users working in similar areas know about each other. It seems unfortunate that we may know (through circulation) that two scholars at Cornell are working with similar information, but that we cannot let them know. The strict rules of privacy preclude revealing who is using what material, and yet that information could in some cases be of great help to some scholars and could foster collaboration. Mary said that at one time the Geology Department wanted an open policy, such that anyone could know who had checked out what geology material; this was discontinued when users, knowing who had checked out which items, began to lend items to each other-so that the person who was originally responsible for the item (having checked it out) lost control of it. Katherine Reagan said that special collections often needs to ask one user if that person would not mind being contacted about the use of a particular item; it just takes time. Several people thought it might be possible to develop some automated method which would (I suppose) link users who are using the same material, but which would not reveal one to the other unless both of them agreed upon this. In general, however, we seemed to conclude that further discussion of these issues will need to be deferred until after we have better technology.
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rev. 2/11/98 dih