• “Running a User Experience Group in the absence of a Sys Admin.” (BM). Bentley University. Without a Sys Librarian, III duties fall to a group of 7: 2 tech support, 2 reference, 1 circ, 1 tech services, 1 special collections. 8 staff can access the III helpdesk. Very interesting model.
• “Sierra Roadmap & Update” (BM) III’s pitch for the wonderful new world of Sierra. Sierra will have 100% of Millennium functionality.
• “Learning Library-Specific Context to Mobilize Library Catalog” (BM) At University of Miami concern for the usefulness of the OPAC on mobile devices, even though searching starts with Summon, led to the adoption of Bob Duncan’s mobile stylesheet, with modifications to take care of their OPAC customizations. Definitely worth follow-up.
• Load Profile Forum (BM & AH). Useful review of resources available to load profilers. Wiki available but underutilized! Time for Middlebury to review RDA implications.
• “Automation: Boost your Productivity a Thousand Times.” (BM) Good tech geek presentation. Use of Expect in various flavors, AutoIt plus Java to automate repetitive tasks e.g creating review lists from record numbers, barcodes etc.
• Systems Managers Forum (BM) Mostly controlled by III staff member talking about transition to Sierra + how things would work in Sierra. Take away message – III’s efforts will be largely directed to Sierra development from now on, even though they insist that Millennium development is continuing. My conclusion – Middlebury should consider the future of our ILS with all due haste!
• “When your item types just don’t work anymore” (AH) was a discussion about how and why a library totally revamped their item types (going from around 10 to 101) to help them better identify various formats of material, which in turn aided greatly in tracking statistics of all kinds for all reasons. Most of it is useful ‘inside baseball’ stuff, but one intriguing thing that came out is that they (a public library in Oklahoma) loan out bike locks.
• Two useful sessions focused on using Millennium (and, in one session, additional assistance from an outside vendor) to aid in weeding (AH). (One library had 100,000 volumes in off-site storage to weed.) Interesting factoids: Jefferson County Public Libraries in Colorado (my home state!), with 10 branches, serving 548,000, orders 100-120 copies of bestsellers. They run their weeding list weekly and withdraw about 120,000 items each year.
• Four useful sessions dealt with various aspects of batch record loads, particularly those for e-books. (AH) One session was presented by staff from San Jose State University, where they provide e-books from 17 different providers/platforms, and have patron-driven acquisitions programs from three different vendors. They use a combination of tools, including Excel and WinBatch scripts, to de-dupe and perform other necessary functions on batch records.
• “Using circulation data to validate an approval plan” (AH) described one library’s journey towards refining their approval plan profile (for print books) to match or surpass the circulation rates for firm orders.
• “Getting the most out of Print Templates” (SO) –creating and using print templates for everything from spine labels to hold slips.
• “Centralized Weeding: using create list and icodes to streamline the weeding process” and “Millennium Makeover magic: weeding in an INN-Reach consortium”- (SO) The 1st presentation dealt with both public and Academic libraries and the later was an academic library that was involved with  INN-Reach. In both, faculty  was given a say over the weeding. There seems to be no standard method for choosing what is to be weeded.
• “Creating lists for Beginners – Why created the wheel again” (SO)  In other words, use others’ lists (with permission).
• “Confounding by Copyright?” (SO) It seems guidelines change all the time and you can “buy protection” for copyright privileges.

There were brief presentations each day by Innovative and SkyRiver staff highlighting tips and support info. They also had a poster area which showcased new ideas.
The Innovative Interfaces Info Center was available during the entire 3 days, and the staff told me the new product, “Sierra” is coming very soon (no date).  What I was told about Sierra is that it is a service-oriented architecture, acts as an integrated resource management and work flow with one piece of software (no modules), and users have a choice of a cloud or local-based deployment. Millennium will continue to be supported of course, with a new release underway.
If you would like to contact the Innovative Interfaces service rep Deborah Devine, she welcomes communication:
Internet: http://www.iii.com
Email: ddevine@iii.com

Follow Innovative on Twitter http://twitter.com/iii_Innovative

After Scott Simon’s remarks, there was a brief IUG business meeting, at which I learned there are now 1200 institutional members of IUG.

On to the sessions – the presentation materials for all of these (except as noted) have been uploaded to O:\orgs\LIS\LISstaff\ILS III Millennium User Materials\IUG 2010 materials

Day 1 – afternoon:
I went to Create Lists during the first session (Dan attended on day 3); all that I will add to Dan’s report is that she covered a lot, I could tell it was useful, I wrote some of it down (HAS is not a keyword search), but I’m not sure I got enough to pass it along, and I don’t think there was sufficient info on the slides (mostly screenshots) to pass it along, either. Nonetheless, if there is interest, I can probably either run an info session or post my notes on the server for my colleagues in Collections (and others) who may be interested.

The Statistical reports session was a let-down; not much that I didn’t already know.

I got my first introduction to regular expressions in the Playing with MATCHES session, like Dan did.  A whole new world has been revealed – slight exaggeration.  Seriously, I’m kinda psyched to have learned about this and have confiscated the library’s copy of Mastering regular expressions (the location is “Catalog Office” and I’m kind of in the Catalog Office, so I’m not checking it out.  It is available for check-out if you’d like, just don’t look on the shelf where the other “Catalog Office” books are).  In addition to the slides from his presentation, the presenter included a handout listiing metacharacters that are valid in Create Lists – the handout is on the server, above.

Day 2 …

… started off with a session on Working with Millennium data in Excel.  This session introduced two tools – text-to-columns and pivot-table – and two functions – COUNTIF and TODAY() – that are very helpful in manipulating data that have been exported from Millennium into Excel.  The presenter was from a public library system (with multiple branches) in Oregon and his examples were circ-related, mostly using patron data, but the tools/functions will be useful for Acquisitions and Serials data and perhaps Cataloging as well.

I went to a couple of Innovative sales pitches, the first was Managing your digital collections which described three Innovative products.  Content Pro is the equivalent to CONTENTdm, which we won’t be letting go of anytime soon.  Symposia is Content Pro on steroids (my paraphrase) – an institutional repository system that allows fairly granular specification regarding who on campus can access or add material to the repository; the word ‘sophisticated’ was used repeatedly.  Perhaps most applicable to us is Encore Harvesting – for libraries that use Encore (Innovative’s ‘discovery tool’; we do not use it at this time), Encore Harvesting allows incorporation of metadata from another digital collection (CONTENTdm in our case) with the bibliographic database so that searches will return search results from the ‘library’ database and the digital collection and the other resources included in Encore’s universe.

Since my primary motivation for attending IUG was to improve our understanding and usage of Millennium’s Electronic Resources Management (ERM) tool, I attended the ERM forum.  (The ERM is kind of a parallel catalog that describes and retains vital information about our electronic resources – article and index databases, full-text journal sources, etc.)  At the forum, the product manager for the ERM presented the updates for the 2009B release (available “imminently”).  The big news is the ability to link license records to multiple resource records.  (In our case that means we could use one license record for, say, ProQuest, and link it to our resource records for ProQuest Psychology Journals and ProQuest Education Journals and ….)  There are also improvements regarding maintenance of the ERM and also ticklers (setting up email notifications for trial expirations, for example).

In the afternoon, I attended the Serials forum.  Innovative’s Serials product manager was not in attendance, so many questions went answered.  I asked for a show of hands of how many have stopped checking in journals.  (This has, at times,  been a topic of interest on the serials-listserv and the sense I got from the traffic on the listserv is that many institutions have stopped checking in print journals.)  I was surprised that in a room of a couple hundred people, only two raised their hands indicating they no longer check in print journals.

The last session of day 2 was Demystifying license mapping – the promise of ONIX-PL. The idea here is that publishers of online material will standardize their license terms and, when that happens, it will be possible to standardize license records and when that happens, the world will be a better place – for one thing we will all know, clearly, whether or not we can fill an ILL request for a certain article.  The consensus in the room seemed to be that we (libraries) need to tell publishers (e.g., Elsevier) that we want this and we want it now – because until some publishers use it, Innovative can’t test it and make it happen, and publishers don’t want to do it because none of the ILSs are ONIX-PL-capable, plus they seem to like being vague about whether ILL requests can be filled. (The presentation for this session was not made available.)

Day 3

The first session of Day 3 turned out to be something of a repeat of the ERM forum – going over what’s new in the 2009B release for the ERM and also for CASE (Innovative’s equivalent of the services we obtain from Serials Solutions).  Afterwards, I took the opportunity to introduce myself to the ERM product manager and ask him some newbie questions about how the ERM is used for e-books.  (Middlebury is currently evaluating e-book vendors.)  It was an interesting conversation that I will relate in more detail to anyone who is interested.

Perhaps the highlight for me came in the second session of Day 3 – Analyzing your electronic resources investment: tools and strategies.  Co-presented by the ERM product manager from III, and the Systems- and Electronic-Resources-Librarians from Wayne State University, it was a description of using Counting Online Usage of NeTwork E-Resources (COUNTER) statistics (journal usage statistics in xml form) with features of the ERM to analyze how expenditures made on electronic resources are being used. Since returning, I’ve made an initial contact with the person at EBSCO (our major journal subscription vendor and purveyor of numerous databases) who helps with this. Barbara Merz and I will collaborate on implementing this and, hopefully, start importing user stats of the EBSCO databases in the next few weeks. After that, we’ll start working with other vendors.

The final session I attended was MARC Madness – batch record loads. (MAchine Readable Cataloging [MARC] is the metadata standard used for the records that describe our books and other items in the library database.) We do a number of batch loads of bibliographic records – government documents, online journals, and more.  The presentation seemed aimed at libraries that have been slow to do this. It was my introduction, though, to MARCEdit, a desktop stand-alone freeware package that enables easier editing of bib records than one can do directly in Millennium.

That’s a brief summary of the sessions I attended. In addition to the ERM product manager (Bob), I chatted briefly with the ERM product engineer (Mike) and also met our Innovative Rep, Pablo.

Feel free to ask any questions.

This year, I will be collecting choices from local (Middlebury) users and submitting our collective ballot to IUG.  There are several modules of the Millennium software that have proposed enhancements: Acquisitions, Cataloging, Circulation, Coverage Database Products (includes Electronic Resource Management), Create Lists and Reporting, INN-Reach, Serials, System Functionality, and WebPAC.  Because of the proprietary nature of the software, the proposed enhancements are password-protected.  If you are interested in voicing your opinion about any of these modules and have not yet received a list of proposed enhancements for the module of interest, please send me an email.  The deadline for getting your choices to me is Tuesday, April 6th.