RSIG Minutes 11/20/02

Members present: Susan Bell, Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Peg Earheart, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum.

1) Reindexing next week. The reindexing will start at 2:00AM Wed. 11/27 and is expected to be finished by 8:00AM Sat. 11/30. While Nancy would like to err on the side of being more cautious, the rest of LITS feels strongly confident that most normal work on Acorn can continue. Because the reindexing will be going on during 3 normal working days, we recommend working as usual during the reindexing. Work during the reindexing will be done on Acorn3. Smartport CAN be used during reindexing.
Things that will NOT be able to be done during reindexing:

• No bibloads will run from Passport. You can work in Passport, but you cannot bring records over into Acorn from Passport.
• No batch loads of records of any kind. No loads of Promptcat, Marcive, TOC, etc. will run during reindexing. These will queue up for loading after reindexing.
• Nancy was unsure if LOAD ORDER will work. She will try to verify this before Wed.

2) Maintenance work. Peg had a list of duties that have been identified as "Maintenance" related activities that have been traditionally done by the Maintenance team and continue to be done over in the Annex by Maintenance staff. Roberta, Zora, Linda Davis and Ann Ercelawn also have a copy of this list (and it is available in the RSCATS folder in the new Maintenance folder). These duties will transfer with Linda to the Cataloging and Authorities Team. The duties include:

• lost and withdrawn titles
• intra-campus library transfers (TS libraries only)
• bound-withs, as reported by the TS libraries
• not on Acorn titles needing recon, as reported by TS libraries
• charging items to "missing", as reported by TS libraries
• lost or damaged at Bindery volumes
• ILL questions regarding holdings on OCLC but not in Acorn
• notifications from public services staff of errors on bib records

There may be other things that are identified as Linda and other staff at the Annex work through this transition. Some things may come up so infrequently that they have yet to be identified. Linda will keep track of the time she spends on these activities for the transition period (until the end of the fiscal year) to help us guage whether one person will be adequate staffing to handle these maintenance activities.

Peg had an additional item of concern. It is Annex policy not to accept materials that are "Not on Acorn" for storage at the Annex. Large Government Information shipments of gifts from other TN libraries have traditionally been exempted from this rule. Peg is anxious that we support her in her efforts to make this rule apply to all materials. Another group of materials in this category are the Peabody theses that have recently come to the attention of Juanita and Sharon. Peg is very concerned that these get barcoded and have an Acorn record before she has to store them. This is increasingly more important in the new system of shelving at the Annex. The Government Information materials that came from other libraries had SuDocs labels and were shelved by this number. The Peabody theses likewise have theses "T" labels on them. But the Annex has moved away from shelving by classification number and now requires a barcode and a notation in the bib record for each item so that it can be retrieved. Support was expressed for making no exceptions to the Annex policy.

3) Future of RSIG. Roberta suggested that RSIG be disbanded and that the team leaders group currently known as TechForce take over RSIG duties. This group would then ask Nancy and others to its meetings as the need arose. There was concern expressed over the fact that much of the benefit of RSIG has often come in the form of serendipitous information becomming known through the members' interaction. The group felt that perhaps the RSIG distribution list, or something similar, should continue for such matters of common concern. Another concern was that the TechForce group has a different focus than RSIG. These are details that will still need to be resolved. The RS Management group will also cease to function and those functions will also have to be folded into the TechForce group. The last meeting of RSIG will be the Dec. 18th meeting, which is planned as more of a social farewell event.

Announcements from all:

• Sue announced that they, too, are seeing lots of books. She cautioned us that she had spotted an unbound serial that was mixed up with the monographs. Mary Beth Blalock recently asked Sue for the last 7 years of binding statistics totals. Mary Beth has identified a large historical textbook collection in the Peabody Library with cleaning and relocation needs. She has asked Sue for help. Sue cannot committ time until the current PUP project is completed. Details have not been worked out, but some of the materials are of interest to CRL and possibly Special Collections. .
• Nancy had to leave, so only had time to say that she has created a new holdings code for Central called erl-net. She worked on getting the mfc holdings code for Managment onto the Web because it had been inadvertantly left off that page. She has created a new fund level 2 of new-elect for Central electronic materials.
• Mary Ellen reported that the fruit of our labors has paid off and the turnaround time in the Baker mailroom has decreased significantly. OS staff has cleared out the mail room and has made a dent in the backlog of gifts. OS has received a paper copy of the EBSCO invoice and is trying to get the electronic datafile invoice so that it can be loaded electronically. We hope to work with both Sirsi and EBSCO to help them beta test the Sirsi invoice load. OS met with internal audit last week. This was a preliminary meeting to look at OS workflow. The women from internal audit were thrilled to find out that Mary Ellen had Visio flow charts of OS workflow. Mary Ellen will meet with them again in December to do an actual transaction review.
• Zora reported that CAT is feeling the effects of the increased efficiency in OS in the gazillions of books currently flooding our shelves. She reports that not much has changed in normal work. Michael is still working with Don and Pete as part of his training. Zora also reported that she has been working to resolve the issue of what to do when a textbook comes with an access number to set up an online user profile. It looked for a while like the best option was going to be for CAT to set up the user profile with a generic user name of Vandy and password of Library. This would then have been printed on flags which would have been glued into the books. However, when she sent John Haar a copy of the license agreement for the book she was setting up, he responded that "Reading this confirms my feeling that we should simply not make the website accessible to patrons....I think we'll save ourselves a lot of potential trouble if we take the approach that we're providing the book as a convenience for users, but that anyone who wishes to use the website would need to purchase a copy." Zora will find an appropriate way to document this and let the libraries know. She will also ask the bibliographers in question if they want the user access codes for use by the library.

Our last RSIG meeting will be December 18th.

Minutes submitted by Zora Breeding.