SFX Systems Committee Meeting March 23, 2016

Minutes

Attendance:

Members present: Max King (meeting leader), Mary Burkee, Cynthia Scott, Denise Green, Lauren Jackson-Beck (minutes), Xiaotian Chen, Joanna Kolendo, Jeff Matlak. Members absent: Steve Oberg, Andy Meyer, Peter Tubbs

1. CARLI Updates:
 

SFX software upgrade.  CARLI has upgraded SFX to 4.8.3. Next is a software revision which is changing SFX from MySQL to MariaDB software. Gordon Fellows is testing this now and CARLI will make the switch before the June 30th deadline. There will be some downtime, but CARLI will probably do this change on a Sunday.

2.    Conference Call:

The next Open Conference call is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, June 15th. Denise will send out an announcement.

3.    Deliverables: 

A discussion concerning the drafts of our 2016 deliverables took place. All drafts are located on the Google Docs page:

https://drive.google.com/a/my.wheaton.edu/folderview?id=0BzdbQD8WEedDfi0xWW04TVYyVm53SU1ta0w1N1JpSjB1NXBoTjlqUlNFM1pyemZiMVlxaDQ&usp=sharing

a.    Max has read through all of the documents. He is pleased with the consistent standard of format following Steve’s example. He wanted to discuss several points going forward.

b.    Joanna expressed concern that her topic, WorldCat, didn’t integrate with SFX and therefore she wonders if WorldCat should be dropped from the list. Cynthia thought we should keep WorldCat in, because if you don’t know anything about WorldCat, this helps to give some information.

c.    Joanna agreed that WorldCat Local does integrate. Max raised the important point that some products are transitioning into other products (e.g. Serials Solutions to ProQuest 360 products and WorldCat into WorldShare) It is therefore valid to have a bigger picture of what is happening with all of these products. Cynthia felt the same way about the CrossRef product. Denise says there is particular confusion with the WorldCat.org products because there are now many.

d.    Lauren raised the issue that some companies are now offering multiple products and a more expensive product may offer better linking with SFX. If no committee member has that new product, then it is difficult to assess the nuances of the connection between SFX and the product. Cynthia remarked that we need to say clearly what products are available with these companies. Lauren will add this to the ProQuest 360 Core document.

e.    Mary and Denise were both impressed with the work the committee has done so far and lauded the members for getting material in on time.

f.    Max asked for additional ideas for products that we are missing? Cynthia suggested Ebsco’s SmartLinks and putting SFX into EbscoHost. Max thought this would be interesting to pursue. Cynthia volunteered to do this.

g.    Max asked if anyone had Primo, the ExLibris discovery layer. Denise said that she would contact the SFX Urbana group about this because the University of Illinois tried Primo. She will copy Max on this correspondence so Max can do a write-up for the deliverable.

h.    Xiaotian suggested some minor modifications to Google Scholar. Jeff will take care of this. He also suggested that we add a sentence to the EZ-Proxy document stating that SFX administrators can check a box in the target depending on whether the target is a free target or not. So the decision to activate EZ-Proxy can be made at the target level.

i.    Max asked again if there was any core information still missing. He liked Peter’s reference list with links to various products. Max would like us to think about adding these to our documents.

j.    We will all be able to edit each other’s documents as we review them in Google Docs.