RSIG MINUTES

1/20/99

PRESENT: Susan Bell, Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Zora Breeding, Sue Davis, Peg Earheart, Sylvia Martin, Monica Sanchez, Maryanne Vaughan, Flo Wilson, Mary Ellen Wilson

OFFLINE RETURN: A decision was made at a previous meeting to begin offline return of holdings (batch loading via OCLC) with material charged to the inventory. Discussion at this meeting confirmed that this was a good starting point, and suggestions were offered as to how to proceed. Peg suggested using an Annex charge with only a small number of charges against it. After offline return is completed for all inventory items, a new routine will be set up at the Annex for incoming RS inventory. Annex staff will manually update OCLC for any incoming inventory items with OCLC records. When assured that offline return has been successfully completed for Annex material, current material, including INVD, will be addressed. This material will probably be identified by date cataloged. Divinity, Law and Medical Libraries need to be informed of this procedure, and asked not to update their records during processing. ACTION: Peg will ask Netfix for a report on records charged against a specific Annex charge number. These records will be used as a sample test for offline return. (Peg will eventually ask Netfix to invalidate some of her charge numbers since Sirsi does not limit number of charges/card as did Notis.) Sylvia will talk with appropriate staff at Divinity, Law, and Medical Libraries.

CHARGELIST: Flo and Sylvia presented a proposed project to identify and locate material charged to RS patrons before 1/1/98, and that remains charged to them. A trial report was run that identified 14 books charged to Binding. Five of these books were found on the shelf, and consequently, were discharged. Where are the other nine books? Are they still in process? If not located, should they be declared lost/missing? Should they be replaced? Who will do the leg work involved with this type of project? Will it be possible to hire a student to assist with searching and clean-up? These questions were discussed as well as other possible ways to sort reports for this project. Items with multiple charges will be a major problem. ACTION: Peg will help with cleanup of those items already identified on trial lists. Nancy will check with Sirsi to see if current locations can be changed by batch process. Sylvia will continue to experiment with reports.

INTERNET LIBRARY: Mary Ellen reported that OS is having difficulty creating orders for the Internet Library. Since most purchasing libraries want their library as a call in addition to that of Internet Library, OS staff must do much record manipulation in order to create these multiple calls. ACTION: OS will create the call for Internet Library only , attaching order to it and putting name of purchasing library in 952. Catalogers will create call for purchasing library at time of cataloging.

URL PROBLEM: Zora mentioned that records downloaded by OS with a URL are misleading since patrons might assume that the material is available when actually it is still on order. ACTION: OS will delete 856 with URL after downloading.

SHELF READY MATERIAL: Sylvia reported that John Haar will be querying his staff and that of other libraries to see if there is interest in shelf ready material, and if so, what components of available packages are of particular interest. Sylvia and Mary Ellen suggested to John that time be allowed for the YBP approval and PromptCat start-up to fall into place before additional changes are made to our processing profile. ACTION: Sylvia will contact John to see if it would be helpful if she compiled a list of available shelf ready services and prices.

UPPER CASE VS. LOWER CASE: Nancy and Zora noted that holding codes in Notis were displayed in lower case with a comma as separator, e.g. cen,per. In Sirsi, holdings are represented in upper case with a hyphen as separator, e.g. CEN-PER. These codes go into the 949 fields of new records. Nancy suggested that we standardize by using Sirsi's upper case and hyphen since this format appears in policies and must be used in order records for translation into correct codes for location and item type. ACTION: Staff will be asked to consistently use upper case and hyphen for holdings codes.

FAQs: Sylvia remarked that she would like to follow up with putting FAQs onto the RS Documentation web page. ACTION: Team leaders will prepare a list of questions (with answers!), to be given to Sylvia by Mar. 15.

COMPARATIVE STUDY: Flo talked about undertaking a project to compare time involved in in-house processing vs. that of outsourced processing. Via Netfix, she has asked if there is a report available to facilitate a way of doing this. There is some urgency to begin this project in order to have comparable data available in the same time frame that BNA and YBP services are being evaluated. An option suggested for beginning this project is to look at material, processed in-house and now on the shelf, and work backwards to determine how long it took to get to the shelf. Are there reports that can be run to obtain this information? ACTION: Sylvia asked RSIG members to be prepared to discuss this project in greater detail at the next meeting.

RSIG MINUTES: Sylvia suggested that RSIG minutes be posted on the RS Documentation web page. There was no objection to this.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: Peg announced that Ann Ercelawn will be at the Annex on Feb. 4 to train Linda Davis and Leonor van Cotthem how to add Internet calls to records that already have URLs (approx. 1300).  This project was discussed at an earlier RSIG meeting.