Tag Archives: Research & Collection Services

Enhancements to Millennium – balloting

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The software/database that generates our library catalog, Millennium, is produced by Innovative Interfaces, Inc.  Each year at this time, the Innovative Users Group (IUG) conducts balloting to determine which improvements to the software, of those proposed, its members most want.

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.

NERCOMP New Discovery Tools symposium — summary report

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In Feb., I attended a symposium on New Discovery Tools sponsored by NERCOMP. The primary sessions were

  • One Library’s Journey Toward Next-Generation Discovery and Delivery (Steve Shadle, Serials Access Librarian, University of Washington Libraries)
  • Information, Not Location: Putting the What in Front of the Where So Patrons can Find When, Why and How (Ken Varnum, Web Systems Manager, University of Michigan Library)

with additional “lightning presentations”.   If you are interested in reading my impressions, I’ve uploaded a summary here (MS Word doc).

The URL for the conference is here.

Web Apps For Educational Use

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I recently ran across this article called The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education – 2009, which appeared on Larry Ferlazzo’s blog dedicated to resources for ESL teachers and learners.

To cite just one example, here’s #6: “Blerp lets you annotate webpages and … might be the best tool of its kind out there. … Type in a webpage address, click on “post” and you can type on a virtual post-it note and place it anywhere on the text of the page and you are then given the page’s url with the notes. It’s extremely user-friendly.”

For Catalogers: Changes to the Millennium load table

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Before the holiday break, I met with Mike L. to see if about changing the Millennium load table to strip out some annoying extraneous MARC fields when records are imported from OCLC via Connexion. He was able to change the following:

*       050/090: no more duplicates when importing from OCLC
*       082: stripped out
*       440: change to 490/830
*       653: stripped out

We tried to figure out why the relator codes $4 in the 1xx & 7xx fields were still remaining in music (mostly), but couldn’t see where the problem lies. Jess & Terry will keep an eye out for when these appear in music bib records.

Collection Management Goal #3: Withdraw PAO periodicals

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Goal Statement

Complete online withdrawal and physical removal of bound periodical issues duplicated by PAO (Periodicals Archive Online) digital coverage.

Bound volumes are duplicated by digital coverage and take up valuable shelf space. Often shifting of volumes is required to accommodate new volumes, etc. These items are now rarely used as digital access is preferred.
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Collection Management Goal #1: Reorganize

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Goal Statement

Collection Management has so far lost 4 staff (2 catalogers, 1 Media Coordinator, and 1 acquisitions) to the 1st round of ERP.  We have identified several changes in workflows and responsibilities that should help us maintain our core services.  We now need to implement these.
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Some library statistics – needed? On new site?

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I currently maintain two types of monthly statistics.

In the folder O:\ORGS\LIS\LISstaff\ILS III Millennium User Materials\EZProxy statistics you can see stats relating to useage of on-line resources through EZProxy. These are in the form of a bunch of .html files accessed through an index file I’ve named +START HERE 2009.html.

The other is a spreadsheet of the record counts and numbers for the various record types in the III database. O:\ORGS\LIS\LISstaff\ILS Implementation-III\III record counts.xls

If anyone uses these, they should be accessed somehow through the new website. Or they can be abolished as a “not to do” task.  Anybody care one way or the other?