RSIG Minutes

July 25, 2001

We met July 25 in the Baker Conference room.
All members were present except Peggy.

Announcements:

EEBO: Roberta reported that approximately 60 thousand records for the Early English Books Online are now ready; the vendor has some sample records for us to view, we will receive those shortly.

Music Cataloging Outsourcing:

Fern Heib will begin working on these materials on Monday (July 30). The barcodes and procedures have been sent to her. We expect to receive the records on diskette. She will not attach the barcodes to the materials, to allow for binding decisions upon receipt. RS Cataloging will check the materials against the inventory upon receipt, and will add the correct information to the Comments field in the item record for Marking.

Prepayments:

Prepayments against 2002 subscription renewals have been sent to Ebsco, Harrassowitz, and Swets-Blackwell. (Prepayments at this point in the year allow us a greater reduction in our service charge to these vendors.) Thus far, both Ebsco and Harrassowitz have confirmed receipt of the checks, we await word from Swets-Blackwell.

Printers:

New HP Laserjet printers have been installed in some workstations at Baker, and they are currently being installed where needed in the GLB. During the discussion about the new printers, Roberta raised the question whether we have a letterhead template. Some have made their own for their own use - we will further investigate a more generic letterhead.

Automatic discharging/CAG membership:

Sue Davis represented RS in a recent CAG meeting to discuss the possibility of changing to automatic discharging in Acorn. Automatic discharging will be in place on August 9, 2001. It was decided that we would implement AD with the override feature, but LITS would explore the easiest way to enter the override. Two possibilities are a single keystroke override and/or a barcode that can be used to enter the override information. In addition, Sue will become a permanent member of the group, representing RS.

Observatory:

Observatory Library will be transferring their materials to Science and the Annex Thursday of this week.

Annual Report:

Roberta is in the process of preparing the 2000/2001 Annual Report - much of the information is being gleaned from the monthly reports of team leaders. Roberta has also asked for some statistical information from the team leaders. Once the report is complete, Roberta will distribute to Team Leaders for comments, etc.

Multiple copies of NetLibrary:

Solinet has recently announced that they have acquired "6,311 multiple copies of the collection's most popular 3,686 titles". We briefly discussed whether these records needed to indicate that there were multiple copies and the unanimous decision in RSIG was "no".

Retreat:

Roberta reminded us that we had discussed having a retreat for RSIG Team Leaders this Summer. As the end of Summer is quickly closing in on us, we hope to have something before the end of August. Roberta will check everyone's schedules - more to follow.

Agenda items:

Purchase Express article:

All RSIG members have read the article written by Linda Clendenning of the University of Virginia about the 7 day delivery service they offer to their patrons. Mary Ellen distributed a printout from UVA's website describing their internal guidelines and standards. It was agreed that the possibility of this type of service would be included as a part of the larger discussion of RS workflow, at the RSIG retreat.

Circulation and Video Cataloging:

We followed up on a discussion in RS Cataloging about LRC videos. LRC has been keying records into Acorn; we discussed whether it might be helpful to them, and better for the patrons, to use oclc. We will pursue this issue further.

Updates:

Mary Ellen: Not much has changed since our last meeting. OS is still processing many materials ordered at fiscal year end, though what is being shipped by the vendors seems to have slowed a bit.

Nancy: Nancy reminded us that there will be a hardware upgrade on August 4th (Acorn production is being moved to a new server). This will result in some downtime over the weekend. Dale will send out more information about the schedule.

Sue: There have been many large binding shipments this Summer. Binding and Marking will be losing one person this week, and another by the end of August. Sue and some of her team members have been working with Special Collections in reviewing some of the very old materials from the University of Nashville.

Zora: Zora noted that the Women's Center is adding new records to Acorn. It was noted that there may be more that needs to be done to these records as they are added to Acorn. Zora will discuss this matter further with the WC. There was also some discussion, unresolved, of whether RS should be capturing statistics on these. Zora also noted that there are numerous microfilm sets coming through Cataloging. Cataloging also reports that the oclc ports seem to be locking up lately. Zora sent a message to users of oclc to please be sure that they don't inadvertantly have multiple sessions open at the same time. Zora also reported that Rich is heading up the inventory project - and many of the catalogers offered their time to assist in the cataloging of these materials. Rich will be pulling samples from the inventory for the catalogers.

Susan: Susan has been discussing the Tennessee textbooks with LeeAnn in Education. These texts will be sent directly to Cataloging for Susan and Becky to process in small batches, beginning August 1. In the meantime, Susan is working on many Cox materials.

The meeting adjourned at approximately 3:10. Our next meeting will be August 22nd.

mew