Information Services Advisory Group
1999/2000 Summary of Activities

In early 1999, ISAG reviewed its charge and possible agenda for the future. A number of focus areas were determined as having priority, and the approach that was adopted for many of the specific action items was the creation of task forces to carry out the work and bring developments back to ISAG for review and comment. This type of interaction seems to have worked well for a number of developments that benefit from discussion by a representative group of public services librarians.

Proposal Review

ISAG has reviewed and commented on proposals from CAAG, the Web Task Force, the E-Reserves Working Group, and CAG, related to

Heard Library Web redesign
Database approach
Subject descriptors
Interim web page changes
Subject Guides page review
Changes in indexing in Acorn
Eliminating the general material designator (GMD) except for music
Changing the Computer Files GMD to Electronic Resources
Internet resources catalog records

For each of these, committee members have undertaken a self-education process to understand the issues and then make recommendations or comment, as appropriate.

Information Sharing

Part of ISAG's role is to share information among the libraries on developments in electronic services, reference services, and instruction efforts. In what is intended to be an ongoing information sharing, Education and Central, in separate sessions, addressed the particular challenges of reference and instruction in their particular library settings. ISAG developed a web page showing the hours for all of the reference operations and will try to maintain that. ISAG received information on the Library's decision to participate in the Library of Congress Cooperative Digital Reference Service, and we invited Paul Gherman to come to speak on and discuss his ideas and ours on the possibilities of cooperative reference services with other partners, such as IRIS, ASERL.. Through various updates, we learned about CORC, FirstSearch developments, SilverPlatter developments, and SFX and other reference-linking possibilities. Once completed, ISAG visited and learned about the new electronic classroom.

ACORN

Many of ISAG's activities relate to ACORN and Webcat, as the primary interface for users with the Library's collections. Some of the more routine maintenance ACORN activities included review of enhancement ballot proposals to SIRSI, consideration of time-out limits for ACORN searching, ACORN search screen clarification and reworking, adding buttons to ACORN for additional links out, hearing a report from the ISAG representative to UUGI (Janet Hirt), consideration of including and decision to not include relevance ranking as a webcat option, review of problems associated with searching monographic series and what might be done to help. One major conclusion was that a number of FAQ-type helps need to be developed and linked into ACORN; these are on the agenda for 2000/2001.

ISAG and CAAG members joined to for the ACORN Development Task Force which considered and recommended various changes to our indexing structure in ACORN. As a result of this Task Force, various indexing problems were corrected, full support for Medical Subject Headings was implemented, a form/genre index was created, and members of the Task Force learned a great deal about how the ACORN indexes work.

ISAG assisted with the consideration of adding the Women's Center and possibly other university collections to ACORN. The naming and terminology to be used were important considerations.

Task Forces

A task force that completed much of its work in 1999 was the Request Task Force. Circulation and ILL staff were included in the Task Force deliberations. The process of requesting services from the library from within ACORN was reviewed for potential changes and improvements. A set of new links were explored, created, and added to facilitate recalls, Annex requests and ILL requests.

Another task force has worked hard on two revisions of the Virtual Catalogs for Athena and IRIS. New versions were introduced in 1999, and work was completed on another introduction for August 2000. The Vanderbilt group has served as the primary developer of the Athena interface with input from each of the other libraries as they have been interested in providing it.

A User Survey task force developed a multi-stage model for surveying our users on their use of ACORN. The first two stages included web-based surveys, and to date we have completed four quick surveys, and two data collections on the longer 20 Question (actually 27) survey. Much was learned from this process, and a summary report was made to LMC. The previously mentioned FAQ-need was confirmed by many of the comments received in the survey.

2000/2001

ISAG will be setting its agenda for the coming year shortly. We anticipate dealing with the following continuing items:

Additional studies in the ACORN User Survey model
Development of FAQ items for ACORN
Development of "How Do I …?" instructional items for the new Web page
Consideration of and planning for cooperative and virtual reference services

We will add other items as they are added by ISAG members, LMC or other working groups. ISAG remains committed to trying to assist with improving information services to the university community.

7/31/00