I-Share OPAC Team Meeting: May 8, 2013

Attendance

Members present

Paige Weston, Jamie Bourne, Kelly Fisher (minutes taker), Paul Go, Kirk Hess, James Lefager, Rong Li, Jan Waterhouse, T.J. Lusher

Members absent

Jacob Jeremiah, Karl Pettit

Reports

IUG

The IUG will be meeting on May 10. No report otherwise.

CARLI

• Paige and Jan attended the ELUNA conference recently. Paige attended a session on PRIMO and found it very interesting that when conducting known item searches, naïve users performed better than more experienced users. Also, there was a feature that asked if searchers meant to capitalize Boolean operators, which must be capitalized in order to work in our catalogs. Paige also attended a session on VuFind 2.0 and reported that the new version looks almost no different to users. Jan reported that she learned that most libraries who adopt a discovery service ultimately end up having to perform major catalog cleanup projects after the fact.
• Paige has been working on forms in VuFind that are not set up correctly for adaptive technology, particularly the callslip request form.
• Paige sent an email to the group about VuFind issue #56, (the message seen when a patron is not eligible to place a request due to a problem with the user’s account) as the current message is misleadingly specific. It was agreed that using the term “block” was the best way to be more generic and the phrase “There is at least one block on your account” was selected as a good replacement.
• Paige has not heard any more about the UIUC development of the mobile interface for the union catalog, although CARLI now has a better environment to work on it. Kirk mentioned that there is a Minerva app that can be used.
• Paige is working on a new version of the search box builder now that the CARLI website has moved.
• Paige is setting up new titles lists for the four new I-SHARE libraries.

Discussion

Discovery Layer Forum Post-Mortem:

Paul thought the four sessions went very well, barring some technology issues. Paige thought they went great and reported that there were 25-30 participants at each session and there had been 184 visits to the recordings page. Paige also thought that with so much interest, it was clearly worth doing.

OPAC Logs Usage Wiki Page:

Paige sent out a link to the page on May 7 and encouraged the team members to add content. Kirk mentioned Piwik software that allows users to load Apache logs and analyze them; however it runs very slow on a standard computer.

Donor Notes & Electronic Book Plates:

The team’s recommendation to the I-CAT team was passed along. No response has been received.

Labeling mfhd 856 fields:

Paige doesn’t know how to complete the entire project, but can change a label for now. The team agreed with that decision.

XC & the Future:

The team won’t work on the VuFind gap analysis now as had been planned, as there has been no indication as of today that we would choose VuFind 2.0 over XC. The team could revisit the wish list for XC that had been created earlier, but there is no real task for the committee at this point. The new I-SHARE Systems committee will have more to do with this topic in the future.

Items from the Floor:

Paige reported on the language limits within the advanced search page of VuFind, as the language prevalence has changed since 10 years ago when it was originally created. It was decided to have English and All Other Languages as the only options, especially since the language facets on the results page will help narrow choices further.