Helen Schmierer, Bibliographic Analyst in Harvard's Office for Information Systems and Lynda S. Kresge, Associate Head of Library Technical Services at Harvard agreed to meet with Naomi and me at Midwinter upon our request, to talk about Authorities in ALEPH. We prepared ourselves to ask questions about other ALEPH functions. Our summary notes are below:

Helen's quote early in the discussion: "Acknowledge That Your Life Is Going To Change"

Other contact persons suggested: Stephen Hearn, University of Minnesota; Sandy Card, SUNY Binghampton

Freeze time
Create original records in ALEPH on TEST system; save to local file (cataloging)
Practice in ALEPH
Pull things for outsourcing
Orders by email (Acquisitions)
Look at MARC tagging for series; decide which ones need updating; valid treatment codes instead of local notes
Work on items in SAVE file

Tips, warnings, etc.
17 inch or larger monitors (also a suggestion from Univ. of Delaware)
Drag & drop capabilities (permissions taken away) as Items don't have "owns" field (this will be taken care of in ALEPH 16.2)
Unicode (implementing diacritics)
Long URLs (truncation/broken url)
Indexing (look at every index; do word searches; single character diacritics)

Authority records
Valid MARC 21 values in leader 008; no local codes
Use subfield delimiter 5 to protect local authority notes fields
CLARR like functions for BAM (Tables in Mandatory errors and Triggers)

 

---

Prepared by: Priscilla Williams and Naomi Young
Submitted: February 12, 2003