What is Bib Services Doing?
By Patricia Martin, CDL Director of Bibliographic Services
This is the first in a series of reports from CDL’s Bibliographic Services team.
On Wednesday, June 24th UC Berkeley publicly introduced OskiCat, their new integrated library system purchased from Innovative Interfaces Inc. (III), replacing the GLADIS and Pathfinder systems. CDL congratulates UC Berkeley for pulling off a very difficult migration, in record time. It’s a huge achievement!
But wait! What does UC Berkeley’s achievement have to do with the CDL Bib Services team? The Bib Services team played a huge and largely hidden role during this migration. At the same time that UCB was laboring to go live with OskiCat, we were busy making sure that OskiCat worked smoothly with UC-eLinks, Request, Melvyl AND WorldCat Local (WCL), and prepared for UCB’s records to be reloaded into classic Melvyl (which is happening later this summer).
Here are some of the major Bibliographic Services team milestones of the past year.
7 million records, multiple snapshots, detailed analysis, WorldCat configuration – OskiCat Transition!
When faced with the decision by UCB to migrate to III, CDL veterans and survivors of the UCLA migration to Voyager paused, gulped and pulled out their notes. Rebecca Doherty served as the Project Manager and main liaison with UCB, and Lynne Cameron assured us it was only a matter of “export, delete, add in the new UCB records, import all, index and merge”; it takes about 6 weeks of indexing and merging to process all 33 million records. If all goes well, this should be complete by the end of August, in time for UCB’s fall semester.
WorldCat Local
In addition to keeping UCB’s catalog records up to date in Melvyl (now known as “classic Melvyl”), Bib Services and Ellen Meltzer’s Information Services team have been working on the WorldCat Local pilot, with Leslie Wolf as our project manager. CDL is moving to a more formalized “evaluation phase” of WorldCat Local, scheduled to start in late August, when UCM and UCB begin classes. This will allow us to stress-test WorldCat Local during our peak active months of October and November, and will provide valuable performance information. At the end of the evaluation phase in December 2009, CDL will present its evaluation and recommendations to the Executive Team and University Librarians. We will continue to run classic Melvyl for the foreseeable future.
ERMS
Lena Zentall, our Electronic Resources Management System (ERMS) project manager, along with Margery Tibbetts and Adam Brin, have been working collaboratively with Ivy Anderson’s Collection Development & Management team — both at CDL and distributed throughout UC — to implement our long dreamed of electronic resources management software. UCLA has also recently purchased the same Serials Solutions ERMS product and Lena is in regular contact with them to share information and expertise.
Request and UC-eLinks
Sherry Willhite, Michael Thwaites, Debra Bartling and Bob Brandriff have been working steadily on implementing Request in WorldCat Local, at the same time dealing with the daily challenges of keeping the Request service and its components up and running. Debra has been faced with some tough troubleshooting for VDX (UC’s consortial borrowing software) but has still found time to document and prepare VDX for the upcoming migration to VDX 4.1, and to develop a data warehouse approach to VDX reporting. Claudia Woo is now the Bibliographic Services JReport (database reporting interface tool) expert, and Leslie Wolf has taken on the role of project manager for the Request team.
For UC-eLinks, Margery Tibbetts, Adam Brin, and Lena Zentall have implemented direct linking to electronic articles, making our endusers’ lives significantly easier.
HathiTrust
Lynne Cameron is CDL’s HahtiTrust co-Technical Lead and is working with Bob Brandriff and Adam Brin on bibliographic metadata issues. Adam has also been tasked with overseeing the tight integration of HathiTrust into WorldCat Local. To round out our efforts here, Stephanie Collett is working on an improved page turner for the public interface, and the Bib Services Technical Team has provided feedback on the HathiTrust Data API.
Strategic Planning and KPIs
Leslie Wolf and Lena Zentall have been leading the effort to structure Bib Service’s strategic planning, and to make sure planning aligns with CDL’s and UCOP’s efforts. They have led the team in developing accountability measures, including key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics. Look for more in this area over the next few weeks.