The 2009 Conference took place from May 17-20 at the Hilton in Anaheim, CA.

 

These are my notes from the programs I attended.  Please note the Program title links will open a new browser window and take you to the IUG website.  You will need a login and password to access the powerpoint presentations, etc.  If you don't already have an IUG login, please contact Gerri Moeller for information on how to obtain one.

 

Session D5     Digitization with Millennium and CONTENTdm      Slides

 

A staff member from the University of Warwick described his library's steps towards digitizing 4,000 French plays published from 1720 to 1900.  They had no issues with copyright due to the age of the plays, which gave their digitization project a lot of freedom.  The objectives of the project were cross-searching across collections, full-text searching, and integration with Millennium and the Internet.  They outsourced the OCR of the transcripts to an agency in India, which did the re-keying.   They also employed French transcript assistants.  MARC records for each of the digital plays were created and added to Millennium.  Metadata was added in CONTENTdm, which simulated the descriptive MARC metadata from Millennium using Dublin Core standards.  This creates a direct link in the library catalog to the digital collection of French plays and gives users an enhanced level of access to these rare documents.

 

Session D13     Web Access Log Analysis

 

Millennium creates a log of all web accesses to the system.  The files are migrated to a folder at live/logs automatically at the end of the day after (so the files are 2 days old by the time they appear in this folder).  The daily log files are retained for 35 days, after which the system is designed to automatically purge them.  In order to use the log files, they should be transferred to your local system and then messaged using a log file analyzer.

 

Log files contain an abundance of information regarding the specific transaction request from the patron.  These files can be used to answer questions like: How much traffic is the site receiving?  When do people stop using the catalog?  Did a program we held have an impact on circulaton or collection use?  What pages are patrons accessing?  What pages are people seeing when they access the site?  Are they mostly coming through the home page, or directly to some other page on the site?  What browser are they using?  Do they have Flash installed?

 

Free web log analyzing software includes:  Analog, Weblog Expert Lite, and Webalizer.

 

Session E3     The Deathflip Project: Killing Off Your Authors Practically Painlessly      Slides

 

The Deathflip Project was created by Kent State University librarians as a solution to the change in Library of Congress authority records that resulted in the addition of "deathdates" to records.  The librarians create their own "deathflip" records from the OCLC RSS feed using a Perl script which parses the feed and builds a MARC record.  More information can be found on the Kent State web site.

 

Session E7     Playing with matches:  Using Regular Expressions in Create Lists  Handouts and Slides

 

Regular Expressions are a way to create searches that more specifically access data that is contained in fields that Innovative doesn't necessarily provide easy access. 

 

You access the Regular Expressions search strategies in Create List by typing "r" as the search strategy.  The handouts and slides give lots of illustrations specific for use in a library environment including finding subject headings with missing indicators...ISBNs with fewer than 10 characters... Finding records with 2 or more call numbers.

 

Session F6     SSSSShh: Some secrets of successful scripting and statistics     Slides

 

This session was devoted to using macro applications like Keyboard Express and AutoIT to help automate redundant keyboarding within the Millennium client.

 

The second half of the program was an intro to using the J programming language to manipulate large datafiles.  There are extensive support files and examples on the IUG site's page for this program.

 

Session F8     Data Harvesting with Javascript to Enhance your Data Display     Slides    

 

A librarian from the University of Washington described the javascript files he created to enhance the university's catalog.  This included: adding patron's name to the printed page of the catalog when they print records from their account, OCLC Worldcat links on catalog page, email bib records to patron from catalog, export bib. record to Refworks, "Cite this" citation of the bib. record, and an RSS feed of journals where patrons can subscribe to the table of contents of journals from the catalog.

 

Early Bird Session #1     Cataloging Forum     (no slides)

 

This forum was hosted by cataloging managers from Innovative and a cataloger from the Indianhead Federated Library System in northern Wisconsin.  They discussed the various enhancements they hope to see in the new release of Millennium, as well as the importance of differentiating between unicode and UTF-8 encoding while loading tables.

 

Session G3     Global Update with Confidence     Slides

 

The catalog librarian which hosted this session gave an overview of shortcuts to simplify the Global Update process.  She suggested that busy records go to a review file in Create Lists.  She recommends saving commands that are used regularly for future reference to avoid workflow repetition (go to "file" and save the command "save-local").

 

Session G10     Edifact Ordering and Invoicing     Slides

 

This session reviewed the steps required to set up your Millennium vendor files in order to submit orders via EDI/FTP and to receive invoices via EDI/FTP. 

 

Some of the new things learned about this process includes: 

     Use of the GIR Code field to identify call numbers when requesting physical processing from the vendor, or to establish the order includes location and fund encoding.

     Status information isn't searchable, but you can copy the information into a Notes field where upon it will become searchable.

     In invoicing, there is an extended view mode which will display the holds on a title.  This mode can also display previous payments when an order has been partially recieved and partially paid.

 

Session H8     The Catalog User Experience: Mere Bling or Necessary Enhancement     Slides

 

Librarians presented ways they added value to their library catalog using widgets and javascript files.  These enhancements included: text messages for holds notification, Meebo embedded in the library catalog, a link to Worldcat results, GoogleBooks widget, "Map it!" showing item location in the library, and LibraryThing embedded in the side menu of each bib. record.

 

Session H13     Statistical Reporting     

 

Millennium offers statistics through two interfaces (Millennium Statistics and Web Management Reports).  Not all reports are available through both interfaces.  The Web Management Reports has two interfaces (www.infosoup.org/manage and www.infosoup.org/iii/webrpt/app).  The later is where Innovative is developing new reports, though only some of the Circulation reports have been transferred over to this new site).  Millennium Statistics can be used to gather statistics using live data.  The data available via the Web Management Reports is static as of the last time the report was run.

 

Some of the ideas and suggestions that came from this class included:

     Running statistics on holdings records to identify the piece count of serials (number of issues [items] recieved.  (Run stats on holdings, then look at the Location Report.  This will also identify items miscoded.)

     Using Icode2 to identify items missing or withdrawn (We already have a process set up for this)

     Use Serial Code 1 or 2 to identify dead titles (regardless of whether they are to be retained or not)

     Use Order Codes 1,2, or 3 to identify subfund information for agencies with either a large number of funds to manage or consolidated system ordering. 

     When using Order Codes, set them up with numbers (1,2,3,4,etc) instead of specifics.  This way different agencies can use the same codes for different purposes.  This will require each agency using those codes to know their own definitions. 

     Circulation Request Report: Shows titles placed on hold by either staff or online.  With counts, by title, by patron.

      Circulation Cross-tab Report: Queries over time, can limit by terminal or stat groups, define the value for rows and colums from a choice of patron/item fields e.g. PTYUPE and ITUPE 

     User Functions Reports (may have to be turned on by III): Stats on the functions patrons have performed using the View Your Own Record otpiotn in the webpac

     Patron Search Reports:  Number of searches performed. 

     Journal title index results in order of popularity.

 

New Reports recently developed include:

     Collection Development reports

     Budget Planning reports (helps predict next year's costs)

 

J2     Global Update: Practice May Make Your Results Perfect     Slides    

 

This presentation displayed how one academic library used Global Update to update URLs for electronic resources in their library catalog (i.e. 856 MARC tag) to re-direct users from a proxy server and directly log them into electronic resources from the bib. record link.  It also showed how Global Update can be used to identify and remove duplicate fields (i.e. 500, 520 MARC tags) and extra spacing in the bib. record.

 

J4     Converting Our Collections to RFID: Goals Accomplished and Lessons Learned   Slides

 

Fort Collins Public Library converted their collection to RFID tags for better circulation and collection management at a cost of $800,000.  Fort Collins PL is a stand alone library within a large consortium.  They spent two to three months developing their project proposal.  While they are part of a consortium, they didn't seem to spend a lot of time worrying about compatibility with what other libraries in their consortium were (or would be) doing.  They considered benefits of RFID tagging to be offering a higher level of services to patrons through greater efficiencies in materials handling, higher accuracy in moving materials in and out of the building, smoother and faster handling of materials upon return from the patron (and back out onto the shelves).  They determined that their ROI (return on investment) would be 5 years.  They also decided to use the III Shelfcheck Express stations housed in tables that they built.  They decided to build in a buffer of a year or so between this and other big projects, so patrons and staff could get used to this system.

 

Step 1:  Weed!  They conducted both fast weeds (condition) and deep weeding (no circulations for...)

             The assigned a Team Leader for the weeding project and for the tagging project.  They weeded everything that hadn't circulated in the prior year.  They also weeded based on low circulation, poor condition, old formats (they toss out VHS and Cassette collections).  Don't put a tag on an item that's not going to circulate.  They used staff, Friends, and volunteers to tag items.  Ft. Collins contained 400,000 items.  Has a circulation of 2.3 million.  They weeded 66,000 items in six month.

 

Step 2:  Retroconversion!  They wanted quality over speed.  Do the job well the first time.  If you have a question, set it aside and ask for assistance from someone higher on the chain of command.  They worked in teams of four.  One person pulled a cart of book and delivered it to a team of two who created the tag, encoded the barcode, and inserted the tag in the back of the book.  The fourth person took the cart of tagged items and reshelved it.  The team leader created a staff schedule for the project.  Teams were taught the process in small groups.  The team leader determined the chain of command.  This person also decided how to approach the collections.  Once tagging a collection was begun, they stuck with that collection until it was completely tagged.  Tags were placed 1 inch from the bottom to 8 inches from the bottom in order to have a greater chance that the tags would not be directly lined up with each other.  This enables tags to be more easily distinguished when using the wands.  Also, verify that the tag is properly encoded with the barcode.  They bought pre-cut tags.  The project managers met weekly to discuss issues and progress.  These reports were sent via email to all staff.

 

Equipment:  Ft. Collins went with Bibliotecha tags and conversion software, RFID pads, inventory wands, security gates, and gate software.  From III, they purchased Express Lane self-checks, Item Status API, the Spanish language interface and the Ecommerce software.  The computers and monitors were off the shelf equipment.  The self-checks cost $7,500 each.

 

Challenges:  Determining how (where) to place the tags on all items.  Most of the time this was obvious, but some items/formats didn't play as nicely.  The team leader and supervisors met to review the difficult formats and review options.

 

Results/Prizes:  Customer satisfaction was the best prize.  Most patrons were hugely impressed with the whiz-bang magic of the new self-checks.  There were lots of smiles and expressions of Cool!.  and Wow!, and How'd it do that!?  Staff liked it because the provided faster checkins and checkouts.  The library ended up with a better collection due to the weeding.  They also were able to decentralize checkout.  And the ecommerce enabled patrons to pay for fines themselves using their credit cards.  The library also placed a staff member at the self-checks (especially early on) to help patrons and resolve their problems at their check-out station.

 

 

K01     Millennium Enhancement Forum     Slides

 

This program was about the recent changes made to the user enhancement suggestion and selection process.  The slides contain excellent notes on the recent changes to the methodology.  It also includes comments from the audience on problems and/or frustrations they had with the system.

 

K5     Successful Partnerships for Authority Control     Slides

 

A panel presented how each library uses vendors and in-house help to manage authority control in their library catalog.

 

L6     Millennium and XML: Repurposing and Customizing Catalog Metadata     Slides

 

Innovative employees discussed how their product can convert MARC metadata to XML to create new book lists in XML format and an RSS feed of the new additions to the library catalog.

 

L12     Print Templates:  Making them work for you     (no slides)

 

This program covered the necessary authorizations to access the Print Templates and reviewed that basics on how to implement and use Print Templates:

 

• improperly build templates will fail to preview
• you can save labels to 9 different queues.  Queues will empty once the client is closed.  You cannot save labels in queues awaiting printing.
• the queues can be accessed by Create List and Cataloging.
• templates can be exported from the client and imported into iReport for modification.  You cannot add fields to the Data Palatte in iReports.  :(  If III hasn't made the data field available, there is no accessing it for a label.

Labels coming in 2009b release (4th quarter):  Acquisitions:  Monographic, Claims and Cancellations; Serials: Claims; Circulation: all that haven't already been released.

          More information can be found at: http://csdirect.iii.com/lswiki/PrintTemplates/WebHome

 

Acquisitions Forum

 

This early morning discussion group reviewed what was new in the acquisitions module for 2009b, and the results of the ballot for acquisitions.  In addition to the new print templates, you'll be able to save sorting and exporting parameters in Create List.  The clients will display the agency name that has items on order instead of "other agency".

 

The top 7 votegetters from the 2009 ballot include:

• Add a canceled data field to the order record so libraries could gather statistics on orders canceled.
• Archive the payment history file
• Have the ability to toggle between the vendor code and the vendor name
• Globally transfer or rapid update a set of onorder records from one fun to another fund (really unlikely to implement).
• Add expected pub date to a filed field in the order record
• Create a report limited by vendor and date range for shipping charges.

 

Questions:

• I want separate accounting totals for different funds - try using the fund heirarchies.
• Can order funds be auto-filled? - Try using Groups with just the one line.
• Invoice line item notes truncate down to 35 characters max after posting - will be looked into
• Export pay fields in telnet (limit by date periods) but not in Millennium. - Expect this to be made available in the near future.
• Can't use hypens in vendor codes. - Recommend not using them or any of the illegal "system" characters
• Conducting an author search withing the Acquisitions module has limited sorting by date options - Try conducting the search in the OPAC.  The OPAC has stronger searching capabilities.
• Vendor code limit to five characters is too small - 2009b will allow you up to 15 characters for vendor codes.
• I want to redo my fund structures - Create new funds at the beginning of the fiscal year.  Develop funds based on the information you want in your reports.
• What are subfunds?  They don't show up in heirarchies.  - They were created to distinguish firm orders, standing orders and subscriptions within a fund.  Most reports are more easily managed by creating different funds for each of these and then using heirarchies to create the reports desired from these building blocks.
• You could use subfunds for branches if they don't have to have funds allocated to them by collections.  SFPL does this.
• An alternative is to use Acquisition codes 1,2, or 3 for order/fund/collection codes.  Codes don't have to mean the same thing for every library.  Each agency can define the codes for themselves.
• I have phantom encumbrances.  How do I get rid of them? - Call the Help Desk.  The number one cause for these is not zeroing out at fiscal close, or an encumbrance is adjusted, but not posted.
• What happens in EDI invoicing when a pop-up appears?  - Switch to the extended view to see the details (the extended view tab is on the bottom of the screen).  There's an Admin setting to set Details as the default view.

 

M6     Create Lists 101     Slides

 

Two academic librarians gave a demonstration on how Create Lists can be used to identify media items never checked out in their library catalog, as well as how to use Create Lists for call # normalization.

 

M10     Acquisitions - It's a New Age       (no slides)

 

Reviewed the process of obtaining order records from vendors along with vendor bib records.  The key here is to use Data Exchange to set the agency when importing the order data.

 

 

1.Vendor order sent to Millennium.

 

 

Import bibs from vendor website

vendor sends list to OCLC via Promptcat

Import orders via Quick Click ordering

 

 

Vendor aware of order unless Edifact Status reports or EDI invoice. Due to the need of an order # (.o)  Unless you use blanket PO's.

 

 

Can use Data Exchange to import vendor order cart to local system.

 

 

Data Exchange can create bibs, full or brief and order records.  Create a review file of loaded records.

 

 

 

 

Data Exchange mode.  A button in Acquisitions Import Invoices mode.  Defaults to Bib & order load table.  Get PC allows bringing in a saved file.  Or get FTS assumes file on vendors server.  Remember to remove files when you have complete the loading so you don't load them again.

 

 

Orders to appear as if by magic?  Consider Quick Click.

 

 

Quick Click: 

Select materials to vendor cart.  Automatically loaded: bib & orders!  Via B&T, Ingram, BWI, Midwest Tape.

 

 

Approval Plans (#106111)

 

 

Vendor sends you materials and file of records (bib/order/item & invoice).

Import file creates bib and orders with status 1.  Can reject if wanted, or accept titles which changes status to “o”. 

Process invoice and pay status “o”.  Can delete status 2 orders.

 

 

Requires purchasing Extended Approval Plans (includes monographic orders).

 

 

Possibly use Inventory Express to purchasing (See which vendor has what)

 

 

Web works selection lists:  web interface for the integrated selection list.

 

 

Download from bib utility.  Can create command line options in OCLC.

 

 

Download via Z39.50.

 

 

Key manually.

 

 

Orders transmitted to vendor via EDI,, print, fax, phone or webpage.

 

 

Inventory Express:

Key bib in Millennium

Use template that prompts for ISBN first

Searches ISBN in vendor database.

Select the vendor to purchase generate a PO.

 

 

Use 949 command line in OCOC bib to create and order record.  Load profile can be set up to queue in the order automatically to the print/send queue.

 

 

Multiselection Groups

Setup in Admin/Parameters/Acqusitions

Allows you to set up a template of location/fund/number of copies.

Once selected, details can be changed.

In Settings add groups as prefferred, so you don't see everyone's groups.

 

 

 

 

Currently used Receive process allows Claiming because the Rdate value is only updated once all copies are received.

 

 

Using receive and create items, can system increment barcodes.  No.  System assumes barcodes are not sequential.  If you enter the first barcode, you can get the system to by selecting the items and the system will fill in the rest of the barcodes.  Depends on how the barcode check digit is established.

 

 

Next year orders set order status to 1.  Then use Selection List to change those from 1 to “o”  to iniate an order in the new year.

 

N4     Encore Implementation: One Academic Library's Experience    Slides

 

A Colorado University described their decision to implement Encore in addition to their library catalog.  They liked that Encore has ISBN searching, relevancy ranking, priority on title keyword over subject keyword, serials display on top of results (i.e. "Time" in a keyword search), community tagging (tagged course reserves), Yahoo images embedded in Encore (i.e. Jesse Newland special collection finding aids without Content Pro), facets, and no limits on results (i.e. you could retrieve your entire database if you had a "hook").  They consider Encore the ultimate reference tool for the average user and implemented it to bring users back to the catalog (but keep users comfortable with the regular catalog using the regular catalog).  Encore does not allow call # searching and should be supplemented by a regular catalog for serious searching, but gives users a more "Google"-like library experience.

 

O1     Serials Forum     (no slides)

 

Innovative employees announced that they are starting a serials list-serv.  They announced the winning enhancements suggested for serials.  Guests asked their own questions about serials, such as how to gather collection statistics for serials (i.e. # of titles, # of added copies).

 

P8     Why Keyword Matters     (no slides)

 

A librarian from Yale Law Library discussed why keyword is an important aspect of the library catalog.  It serves the novice and the expert searcher.  She gave examples of how keyword searching could be improved in Millennium, such as equality for indexes/repurpose the index browse from search mechanism to results navigation tool, displaying table of contents information more clearly, filtering genres, and keyword navigation within the subject index.