Coordinating Committees

Progress Report to CUWL – April 21, 2008

Library Technology Coordinating Committee

  • D2L and Library Integration – Due to Marc Boucher’s departure, I am working with Pat Fellows on this goal.  She presented on this topic with Marc and Mark Robson at EDUCAUSE in March and their session was very well received.  She was to have presented a condensed version at this conference, but was unable to attend.  She has indicated that she will begin working to coordinate this with interested campuses this summer.  She is on leave now and also short-staffed, but hopes to have some help in June.  Her plan is to train the SIS people in one session and librarians in another session.  She believes it is not something that DoIT can assist with.

  • Review of Voyager invoicing and licenses – Lisa Jewell heard from Linda Voyles about what data is needed to review our licenses, but the information conflicted with what we had sent previously.  Mitch Lundquist (Madison) emailed Linda for clarification and Linda is now checking with the accounting and support teams to see if the information collected from Madison’s script is sufficient.

  • Voyager upgrade - Bill Doering (La Crosse), chair of the Hub and LAMs groups, is coordinating this with Lisa.  We decided to upgrade to 6.5.4 due to the late release date of Voyager 7.  We also plan to upgrade Oracle this summer so that we don’t have that to deal with at the same time as the Voyager 7 upgrade, which will be more time-consuming for some staff due to the new OPAC interface.  Upgrade dates will probably run mid-July to mid-August.  Linda Voyles is checking on dates for all of the campuses.  Madison and the hub will do their own upgrades, but need an Ex Libris engineer available.  Eau Claire and Stevens Point, who have not joined the hub yet, will need Ex Libris to perform their upgrades.

  • ILLiad upgrade – Jon Mark Bolthouse (Colleges) will coordinate this with Lisa.  This upgrade is more involved than usual due to a change in the way the email notices go out, although not as much work as the last upgrade that changed all of the web pages.  Jon Mark is helping people setup the Email Manager ahead of time to make sure it works.  Then we will decide on upgrade dates and Lisa will schedule it with Atlas.

  • MetaLib/SFX refresher sessions – Several campuses indicated an interest in SFX and MetaLib training due to staff turnover.  Milwaukee is willing to host, if this is an option for us.  Lisa is checking on this.

  • Assisting others with automation questions -  Several LTCC members have been approached to see if our committee could offer assistance in getting some specific automation projects setup.  We coordinated a conference call between Eau Claire, Stout and several other campuses to answer questions about setting up Voyager to checkout textbook rentals.  We are happy to serve in this way to connect people to appropriate resources and experts as this is one of our stated goals.  Bill Doering has also offered to present at the summer conference to show an Access database he setup for electronic resource management.

  • Ex Libris/UWS strategic planning meeting May 8 – Ex Libris key staff will come to Madison to meet and greet Lisa; LTCC members will attend for the strategic planning discussion.

  • Sharing access queries – The LTCC discussed this suggestion which came from Marc Boucher recently, but has been suggested numerous times over the years at LAMs meetings.  We looked at Bill Doering’s extensive database of queries.  Although this can be quite helpful, queries and reports often have to be customized further to meet individual needs.  We also talked about using the same queries for the ALS survey so that our data would be comparable across campuses and we wouldn’t all be duplicating the work of creating appropriate queries.  We recognize that sharing queries won’t be possible for every question on the survey.  Differences in cataloging practices sometimes mean that the data is not in Voyager or is coded differently for different libraries.  Standardized queries may not even be desirable if the numbers differ radically from the previous year.  Yet the savings in time could be significant and the data more reliable than paper tallies.  The question of whether we might switch to shared access queries was taken to the Executive Committee and they agreed that we will run the ALS queries as usual this year, and then compare the results to standard Access queries.  Then we will be able to see if this will save a significant amount of time and we’ll see how closely the numbers match or differ. 

Respectfully submitted by
Marlys Brunsting
UW-Green Bay
Chair, Library Technology Coordinating Committee