TECHNICAL SERVICES STEERING COMMITTEE

Minutes

December 16, 2003

 

 

Members Present:  Bill Covey, Michele Crump, Martha Hruska, Erich Kesse, Tom Minton, Cathy Mook, Lawan Orser, Betsy Simpson, and Phek Su

Absent: Rich Bennett and Naomi Young

 

1)            Announcements & Updates

 

·         Martha Hruska introduced Tom Minton as the new Webmaster.

·         Business Services will be visiting departments to explain ERP changes that the University is in the process of making for paying OPS, travel, and the UF books.   UF books will close May 15th which means ordering will stop March 31st.

·         In addition to the holiday closing:

o        Martha Hruska will be out December 24 and January 2nd.

o        Bill Covey will be out on January 2nd.

o        Tom Minton will be out January 2nd - January 6th.

o        Cathy Mook will be out December 22nd - 24th and January 2nd – 13th or 14th.  Preservation will be open until noon on December 24th and closed on January 2nd.

o        Michele Crump may not be here on January 2nd.  It depends on the mail delivery.

o        Betsy Simpson will be off January 2nd.

o        Erich Kesse will be off December 22nd –24th.

o        Phek Su will be off indefinitely starting December 18th.

o        Rich Bennett will not be here December 22nd –24th.

 

2)            Budget Update – Michele Crump

 

·         Materials budget - $1,001,276.24

·         $513,000 has been spent out of DSR funds for ISI.  $452,000 will be recouped from other universities.

 

3)            Aleph  – All

               

·         Work on data load review is in process.  The number of problem reports is much less with this review.

·         Jennifer Kuntz reviewed the in process status codes in a meeting yesterday.  It was mostly an educational session however there needs to be a final decision about our use of them by January 15th. Binding will use Pseudo patrons.  Conservation and reprographics probably will use IP status codes.

·         Rich Bennett has placed report training on the calendar for the 1st week in January, before ALA.

·         The large cataloging training group met last Thursday and will meet again on January 20th to discuss workflows.  The small cataloging training group will meet on January 6th to discuss the core cataloging curriculum.  It is hard to move forward with developing workflows without having reports training.

·         May 3rd is still the ALEPH STP deadline.

·         There is an all day meeting scheduled for tomorrow to discuss past and present problem reports.  A possible follow-up meeting is scheduled for January 22nd.

·         A patterns project for predictive check in is in process.  John Hein (UNF) is cleaning up the Harvard list and then incorporating Iowa, MIT, and possibly Boston College.

 

4)            Re-class project – Lawan Orser

 

·         Beginning yesterday, Terry Smith is working on the Re-class project in LAD.  Student help is needed for pulling volumes for re-class.  It is not clear if students will be available over the holiday.  Doug Smith should be contacted if departments have students that want to work over the break.

·         For the past month Contributing Cataloging staff have been very helpful in approving/assigning LC call numbers to the remaining 20,000 volumes.  As of December 16th 15,486 have been assigned new call numbers.   Contributing Cataloging staff are ahead of schedule.

·         There is a problem with processing. Only 1/5 of the 25,000 volumes to be re-classed have been completely processed and the timeline is getting tight.

·         Phek Su, Betsy Simpson, and Lawan Orser will discuss the possibility of Contributing Cataloging staff help in volume processing.

 

5)            Library Web – Tom Minton

 

·         Most of the activity in the last month has been on the Public Service side with notices about the amnesty, book drop, and parking.

·         Survivors skills Web page is being developed to help direct patrons in the absence of public computers and some services.

·         A browsing by call number tutorial is being developed.

·         A page is being developed to list available study space and computer services.

·         UF will be changing the 150th theme as of January 1st or 2nd.  A new design for UF Web pages is being developed based on the president’s page. The current UF word mark will no longer be used. At the last Trustees meeting approval for the brand, shade of blue and orange, font, etc was requested.  UF will release style sheets that all UF departments may have to follow.  Departments that do not follow the style sheets may be taken off of the UF Web tree and blocked from search engines.

 

6)            Systems – Bill Covey

 

·         Facilities Department will not have MSL 107 available for wiring until December 26th.  Systems should have the room ready to go after the first week in January.

·         HSS is supposed to bring a few public computers from West to East to test.

·         There will be wireless access in the renovated Library West.  Wireless access cannot be used for fixed installations as it is for mobile applications.  Wireless access on the first floor of MSL works well and is very popular with students.

 

7)            CAGER – Naomi Young

 

·         Naomi Young was not present.

 

8)            Relocation plans - all

 

·         Reference staff and collections have moved.

·         Public Service computers are starting to move to East.

·         Current periodicals scheduled to move on December 18th.  An attempt will be made to insert a code into approximately 4000 titles to generate a message to list location as Smathers Library.  Michele Crump will talk to Donna at FCLA about the possibility of doing a batch update to insert the code.

·         The retrieval form is under development and is scheduled to go up on January 6th.

 

9)            Text Conversion and Tagging update – Erich Kesse

 

·         Waiting on FCLA to flip the switch on XPAT to allow the products of our Prime Recognition software (text conversion software) to be displayed to the public.  This switch is scheduled to occur in January/early February.  Once the switch is flipped then our operations will change.  Currently everything goes into imaging, images go into a page-turner, and pages have to be turned electronically.  After switch all textual materials will go into prime recognition, converted to SGML, and SGML will go up online.  Most of the student staff will switch from imaging to text processing and creation of SGML. DLC has been trying to automate as much of the SGML process as possible.  Mark Sullivan and Ying Tang have been working on a quality control tool that will allow quick basic mark up text.  It appears that mark up can occur within one day.  Therefore, after scanning there should be a 24-hour turn around for putting the material on the Web in text searchable format.  The PDF images will still be visible and the text will be completely searchable.  Everything should be going out in text only format by February 2004.

o        Gus Clifton presented an overview of the Prime Recognition and mark-up process to Resource Services.  Documentation can be found online at http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/digital/technologies/software/prime/

o        TWO UPDATES re: FCLA’s support for Prime product:

§         New version of XPAT (text, image and EAD search software) was delivered by U. Michigan in advance of schedule – load & migration of local programming is nearing completion.  Among other new features:

·         JPEG2000 (zoomable image better than Mr. SID) will be supported

·         EAD support is more limber, accepts facet updates

·         Better text behind image support (i.e. better Prime product support)

§         This, however, pushes back Prime product to late January/early February.  The DLC is telling faculty contacts awaiting the change that it will now be available by mid-to-late February.

§         That said, FCLA and DLC have begun to draw up specs for purchase of next generation software.

o        Newspapers

§         NISO is preparing to empanel an Historic Newspaper Metadata standards committee (suggested by UF)

·         NEH is reportedly supporting this effort (puts UF in on the ground floor of the proposed USNP Phase II: Digitization projects)

§         DLC & FCLA will invite newspaper system vendors to review their products with us in February/March.

 

·         Resource Services has been helping with automated tagging.  Tables have been built which allow (using simple rules and Perl scripts) identification of words with capitalized text.  At the beginning of the year can begin using TSSC to demonstrate how this works.

·         Carol Turner asked the DLC to explore virtual browsing.  The Library of Congress is already working on digitizing table of contents, abstracts, and indexes to make them searchable. Workflow for this process is being discussed.  See http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/digital/temporary/OSPRe/Ospre.pdf  and http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/digital/temporary/OSPRe/OspreQuestions.htm A more complete set of OSPRe documentation can be found in the Outlook Public Folder “OSPRe.”  Director of Development Sandy Melching is presenting a funding proposal for this project to Dale Canelas.

 

10)          Statistics for Electronic resources

 

·         There is now a library committee to assess what it will take to collect electronic resources statistics for ARL.  Steve Shorb will call the first meeting.