Home > Cataloging and Metadata > Archive > Committees Archive > WebPAC Implementation Team >

WebPac Implementation Team : Meeting Minutes

Aug. 3, 2000

Present

  • Bill Ghezzi (co-chair)
  • Mark Mounts (co-chair)
  • Jim Fries
  • Reinhart Sonnenburg
  • Becca Lee
  • Jennifer Nelson
  • Ann McHugo
  • Bill Fontaine
  • Cecilia Tittemore (guest)
  • Jennifer Merrill (recorder)

Minutes

The minutes of the previous meeting were approved.

Announcements

Cecilia Tittemore gave an update on the Authority Control Project.  A snapshot of our database was sent to our authority control vendor Library Technologies, Inc. (LTI) in May.  LTI processed our records and returned the files to us in July.

LTI's cleanup process does the following:

  • normalize data by expanding abbreviations, fixing punctuation and rearranging data to meet modern standards.
  • look up the normalized headings in the national authority files and
    • adjust headings in our records to match the accepted form.
    • send us authority records to support those headings.

3.3% of the over 5 million headings that LTI considered did not match a record in any anuthority file.  These 184,000 records may require cleanup.  LTI provides us with a report of the headings and the number of occurrences of each.  If we were to approach a cleanup project such as this it would likely begin with the most frequently used headings.  However it is important to stress that we don't have the staff to devote to an extensive cleanup project.

We estimated that LTI would send back about 700,000 authority records.  We got 1.2 million.  This will provide us an even richer cross reference structure in the Innopac OPAC.

Loading the bibliographic records impacts the public catalog as well, because every bibliographic record that is touched in Innopac is output to the BRS catalog.  Because of this we plan to load bibliographic records into Innopac Monday - Thursday and authority records Friday - Sunday.  The authority records can be batched up to run continuously over the weekend without having to stop and feed records to the public catalog.

Cross references and cleaned up records will begin to appear, but there is no synchronicity between the two types of records so you may see blind references or other odd results in the Webpac until the whole loading process is completed.  This does not effect the online catalog because cross references will not appear there.

The estimate of time to load is still 8-10 weeks.  We hope to revise that after we've done a few loads and have some real data to analyze.

During the load the GAP2 procedures are in effect.  Updates to records are frozen except for Serials which have already been reloaded and a few other types of updates (such as URL fields).  This is because the record we are loading from LTI will overlay and replace the record in the database.  Any update done to the record before the overlay would be lost.  It is not possible to monitor records on a daily basis to see whether they've been updated.

Subgroup reports

The Search/Limit group has had two meetings and continues to meet weekly.  They are looking at:

  • other sites to become familiar with the possibilities
  • how do we want to limit and on what values

For the next meeting subgroup members will be submitting the fields they think we should include in our limit.

The group needs to make sure there is synchronicity between the pre-search (keyword search) limit options and the post-search (all other indexes) limit options.

Ann mentioned that she hopes the publisher limit will be retained.

Bill has submitted a list of questions to Innovative including:

  • Can we have a two-tiered approach to limit with a basic limit screen and an advanced limit screen which would offer more options?
  • Can we configure the system to offer more/different limit fields in the Staff version of My Millenium that aren't offered in the public version?

Would like to be able to limit to multiple languages in one limit.

Bill Fontaine wondered if we should have some public information sessions to show what we've done.  We discussed this and hope to do something like this in September/October after we've switched on the options recommended by the Post-Search Functionality subgroup.

The Main Menu design group is leaning towards the 1 page approach but still needs to look at some other systems.  They will be talking about what other links should be included on this page as well as trying to determine how we fit into the new library website.  There may be links on the library website that really should be located on the Web OPAC pages instead.

Bill Fontaine suggested that we consider including some quick links on the library website that would take the user directly to the search by Author and search by Title pages in Innopac.

Becca asked if this group is looking at help.  Mark says that's a separate group.

The Post-Search functionality group will have its first meeting on August 4.  Jennifer Merrill is putting together a chart of all the WWWOptions as a means for identifying which come under the purview of this group.  The full chart can be used as a documentation tool for our final report to show how we initially set the system up.

Jennifer Merrill agreed to make the log of options changes available for the website.  She will send the URL to Bill Ghezzi when it is ready.

Next meeting: August 10