Meeting Minutes: Voyager Implementation Task Force  
10/27/99


Members Present: Gwen Gregory, Molly Molloy for Nancy Turner, Susan Beck, Sherry Ward, Holly Reynolds, Anne Moore, Norice Lee, Diane Lund for Grace Gonzales-Small, Jean Dickinson, Debbie McCarthy, Carol Boyse

Meeting convened at 2:23 pm with Gwen thanking the group for working hard and all pitching to share load. We all discussed common ground rules for meetings, acknowledging that at times we may disagree but that we should remember to respect one another's view points. At the same time each of us should feel comfortable raising issues or concerns because this is the forum for those issues.

FUNCTIONAL TRAINING
Gwen noted that Endeavor would prefer to conduct a Tuesday-Friday (Nov 9-12) session rather than a Monday-Thursday (Nov 8-11) session. Is this ok? Some members have plans for the end of the week so Gwen will see if Endeavor will keep to the Monday-Thursday session instead.

Dan Sweeney has been assigned as our trainer. He spent four years as a Serials Librarian at SUNY Buffalo and one year in Acquisitions at Wake Forest College. He has been with Endeavor since this summer. Dan has no problem with 11 trainees instead of 10 and doesn't feel that videotaping the training sessions will be an issue unless, of course, the camera becomes intrusive. Gwen volunteered to track down videotaping equipment and use. Back to Dan. He worked at a library that migrated to Endeavor from Dynix so he is aware of system migration issues. He has done other Endeavor training sessions. His specialties are Serials and Acquisitions. He would like us to write down our questions about system functions and capabilities in advance to mentally prepare ourselves for the training. We should consult our list of questions during the training, raising any that are unanswered from the sessions. Gwen has sent Dan all our names. He has requested that we wear name tags during the training. Dan will send us an outline of the training session as well as enough training packets for all trainees.

Questions about the training:
 What about extra training for Mongraphs/Acquisitions?
This can be scheduled later on in the coming year.

Will Dan provide follow-up response for questions that he isn't able to answer during the training sessions?
Gwen will ask about how he will handle these types of situations.

Will Dan provide us with training materials different from those found on the Support Web page?
Gwen will check on this.

Is he assuming that we possess certain level of familiarity with Voyager?
Probably not.

Which OPAC version will he teach? PC based or Web?
Perhaps it is best he teach us the version we will be using. This should be the web version since Endeavor has announced they intend to only support one OPAC version but Gwen will verify which version.

DATA EXTRACTION
Carol has been working quite hard on data extraction. She has recently been problem solving how to transfer records from the HP to the server. The file she needs to transfer is 3.5 gigabytes, a very large file indeed. It took her 15 minutes to ftp the 425 MB from a PC to the Voyager server. It took 24 hours to move that same data from the HP to the PC which is why Carol was overjoyed to hear from the HP folks who indicated that FTP software can be loaded on to the HP. This will bypass some very time consuming steps of transfering the file to a PC and then to the server. Sherry asked whether Carol had gotten all the records and Carol believes that she has. Gwen asked how long would it take to have all the VTLS files (authority, bibliographic, holdings, item) ready for Endeavor. Carol figures by November 15 but she can't predict exactly how long it will take. It might go really quickly now that FTP can be loaded on the HP.

UPDATE FROM KAREN GEGNER
Gwen reported that Karen is working on how to make all our records link up together (VTLS, holdings, Innopac). She has recently received some programming from another VTLS library that might help. Gwen asked Diane about the ISSNs in VTLS and whether these were accurate. Pretty much so, said Diane but ISSNs are problematic because they change with the publisher even though the title and content don't change. Also, ISSNs are only fixed in VTLS but not in Innopaq. Gwen wished to know about the ISSNs because these are a good link between the two systems' serials records. Presently Karen has all the Innopac records but not all the VTLS ones so it's a bit hard for her right now to match these up.

TRAINING
How should we organize the training? The large Bibliographic Services conference room will be outfitted with four PCs and this room will be dedicated for training. A projector ought to be hooked up to one of the machines for demonstration purposes. We really shouldn't plan in too much detail about staff training until after the functional training in early November. During and after the training we will get together and plan for staff training. In the meantime, we all should keep track of specific tasks we do in our units and departments and use these as examples. It is also good to begin collecting everyday examples to use as training exercises, too. For some training areas, we should offer multiple sections of the same training session. It is also important to keep track of decisions made as we go along. We should have some history of our process. That way, later on when we look back and wonder why the system is or is not working in a desired manner, we would have a record of our decision making process and could trace the problem from there.

Other training issues discussed were who would do the training for the group? Are not the members of the Implementation Committee responsible for training in their area? What is the role of the subcommittees vis a vis training? How can the subcommittees be more involved? One thought was for the Cataloging subcommittee to take on the role of trainers since they will be the first trained and won't have a lot to catalog. In some cases, training of the Circulation people can be combined with branch training.

PUBLICITY COMMITTEE
We briefly discussed having a publicity committee. Gwen will pursue committee membership further.

TIMELINE WEBPAGE
Gwen has created a web page showing our migration timeline. It is available at http://lib.nmsu.edu/depts/committees/implement/timeline.html. She will update it as changes occur.

COMMITTEE REPORTS
OPAC:  This committee meets every Friday at 9am in the Branson classroom. Molly reported that the OPAC group will host another brainstorming session on Friday, November 5 at 9 am in the Branson classroom. This session is for the entire staff as opposed to the first session that was primarily for those who work the reference desks. She noted that this session will be more structured and that participants should do their homework beforehand. Jan Hylen has sent out an e-mail invitation to all library staff for the session and the homework questions are listed therein.

Nancy is working on a web page that lists other Endeavor library OPACs and focuses on their screen design, features, etc. She will link it soon to the Implementation web page.

INSTRUCTION:  This group meets every Monday at 9am in the Branson classroom. Susan passed out a five page analysis of OPAC searching in Voyager that Don Taylor had created. The handout looks at different types of searches (author, title, subject, keyword) and offers pragmatic commentary on how Voyager handles such things as periods, hyphens and misspellings. The handout focuses on three catalogs: Auburn University, Idaho State University and Trellis, a consortium of three university libraries in Ontario, Canada.

Susan then described plans for conducting several focus group sessions with students and faculty where groups would react to 3 or 4 specific OPAC functions or search features from 2 distinct OPACs, discussing what they liked and didn't like. These plans are in the preliminary stages. They will probably be conducted after Thanksgiving.

She noted that Susan Pinkerton found a good, all purpose web site on Web usability that includes links to articles on web design and readability. Titled, Usable Web: 728 Links about Web Usability, it can be found at http://usableweb.com.

AUTHORITY:  Sherry has been playing around with the different profiles and the bulk import. She was able to get this to display in the cataloging module. Hurray! She has discovered that see references for series and uniform titles DO NOT display in the OPAC. This will certainly be a problem. See also references that have bibliographic records attached re not a problem, however. A good test is to look up the series Sage Communications in Society (not the correct heading) in VTLS. When looking at the record for this heading in VTLS it will route the user to the correct heading, Sage Communications in Society series. Voyager does not provide this helpful routing; instead, it provides the user nothing but a dead end. Another example would DLB for Dictionary of Literary Biography. Endeavor needs to address this problem by making it an enhancement for a new release.

CIRCULATION:  This group meets every Wednesday at 9am. At their last meeting they discussed all the different circulation processes they will be doing. Most of these are self-evident but some issues have arisen such as will ILL use the same check out process as Circulation. This is still being pondered. Holly has contacted Josie at Auxiliary Services about the ISO number on the ID cards.

CATALOGING:  This group met yesterday (Tuesday) and at their meeting most of their questions were about training but these have been answered today. Debbie talked about what Cataloging will do once the bibliographic data has been pulled. They will cease cataloging 2 days prior to this event and on the day that the load has been approved (January 18?) they will import their data to Voyager. They are still investigating procedural details for the interim period between systems.

BRANCHES:  This group met just this morning (Wednesday) to practice with the systems administration module. They will also meet next Thursday. Right now they are in a holding pattern until after functional training.

SERIALS  Diane Lund reported that this group met on Monday to look at the extraction of III reports. They will begin to meet weekly after functional training.

MONOGRAPHS:  Jean and John got together to set up an Access file but they haven't met as a large group.

SYSTEMS  Carol announced that she is in the process of setting up a scanner (or perhaps a light pen if a scanner cannot be found) with the practice workstation. She is also looking for a special scanning keyboard to hook up to the workstation. This type of testing will help determine whether our current peripherals will work with the new system.

Respectfully submitted,
Susan Beck

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Send comments and questions to: sward@lib.nmsu.edu