SERIALS WORKING GROUP
MINUTES –OCTOBER 7, 2002

Minutes from previous meeting were approved as posted to the list. Sue Wiegand from Saint Mary’s College joined the group for the first time and introductions were made.

Pam Nicholas outlined the claiming procedures to be followed during Belinda Hoffman’s maternity leave. The procedures were basically the same as outlined the month before. Anyone needing to have missing issues claimed should send requests to the email box at Library.serials.1@nd.edu or call Trisha O’Rourke in Serials Acquisitions at 631-6374 between the hours of 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., Monday through Friday. The deadline for submission of new print subscriptions is October 15, 2002. Leigh Taylor will handle all new orders for print or electronic in Belinda Hoffman’s absence.

Next the discussion focused on the use of “pages” in the items screen of the serials application window. Serials Acquisition’s staff uses this area to place various internal check-in notes such as “sent to serc”, etc. The problem is that using this field causes a display in the Web OPAC as well. Apparently there has been some question from patrons as to what some of the messages mean. Nastia questioned if “pages” in the GUI could be suppressed from the Web OPAC view? Pam Nicholas indicated that we had this conversation with ExLibris before about using perhaps a “notes field” instead of the “pages” header, etc. but nothing ever materialized. Mandy will further investigate the above two scenarios and report back to the group.

Update on the In-Process Notes—Pat gave an update on the In process notes. Apparently there are two sets of “z”subfields contained within the processing notes and it is difficult for LSD to break them apart. There are approximately 5,000 records overall that will need some type of clean up work done. Mandy suggested we make sure we are aware of the data strings before we simply move them around. Aaron suggested pulling the file into a spreadsheet and trying to get the subfields to sort into various columns to help with this problem. Mandy agreed to help Aaron try to work with the file or have someone from LSD help him if she is not available in the next couple of weeks.

Mandy gave an update on the Serials testing for patch 4 for 14.2. She stated that overall there is roughly about 1,500 fixes to the system. She has been working with the various individuals responsible for testing in Serials to learn more about testing. In addition she also reminded everyone that it is time to think about enhancements for the Serials module. Mandy said she would send out the list of enhancements groups and their members for 2002-03.

There being no further business the meeting ending.

Respectfully submitted,

Pam Nicholas