more quesitons re: oclc

questions

question: who's it going to tax?
SD: it's going to tax OCLC, not CDL, for performance

q: why do there have to be ten interfaces for each campus plus a central one? It seems like deciding on a single interface would be good.

PM: If you come in from UCI the system will know via IP, and the UCI results will come to the top. BUT the basic interface will look the same. Branding will be within a framework, maybe color etc.

q: The ILL usage for UW was interesting -- I wonder if b/c there are sometimes dup records -- were people making ILL requests that UW actually had?
BJ: there's a small amount of that, but not a lot.

BHG: seems like including articles would prompt a lot of ILLs too.

q) will there be an alerts feature in local worldcat? LIke SDI?
PM: don't know. BJ doesn't recall hearing about it.

q) have you been noticing a decline in the usage of databases because of this?
bj) we'll been seeing decline for years -- I don't think it's affected that.

q) will this force us to choose the OCLC / firstsearch platform in order to integrate those databases into the product?
BJ: we don't have any firstsearch dbs so i don't think so

q) what about the functionality for the researchers i.e. the faculty? where do the researchers go when they actually need an advanced catalog? they don't need to go to google.

pm: we're not trying to compete w/ googe, much more interesting in local stuff. Where do the users go? interesting question. The other thing is this is only a replacement for melvly so we are keepin gthe local opacs etc.

bj: a great researcher anectdote -- we got a note from someone who had found an arabic lang video in worldcat local. He said "I've been looking for this for years -- I found the record once and could never find it again. Now, you can get it for me."

BHG: note that we don't know where they are starting NOW. Usability studies are needed.
PM: Felicia Poe has done some research on this -- she found that a lot of people actually started at Amazon.

q) have reuqests for in-process materials gone down since those things aren't recognized in OCLC?

bJ) don't know.

q) why did OCLC strip out a bunch fo fields/content from the records?
BJ) from a belief that a lot of the record was meaningless to for end users. Might not be true for different populations ... e.g. searching for Harry Potter is different from searching for academic music scores.

q) assessment of FRBRization -- did that come up as one of the assessment criteria?
bj) sort of -- the usability didn't really cover it.

q) why the test b/f request / elinks is not ready? why not wait?
pm) we are impatient. We wanted to get used to things not being perfect, we didn't want to wait, and we wanted to see what a major upgrade in the middle of a pilot worked. WE didn't want to delay beyond april.

q) when the pilot goes live -- does old melvyl disappear? if not, then how do we know if people are going to actually use the pilot?
sd/pm) no, but we don't know exactly what will happen. Local rollouts may disappear.

Pm) I'm planning on running melvyl for at least another two years.

q) which campuses are running the pilot?
a) it'll be all the campuses. trying to get all the ils's wroked out, at least. -- B, SD, UCLA

q) is there a name for the pilot.
sd) right now -- "next generation melvyl" we want to keep that branding/idea

suggestion: MELVYL II
("son of Melvyl" -- ed?)

q) if melvyl goes for two years, ok -- but what if this doesn't fly? What happens if it doesn't work?
a) we assume that UC would come together and decide what we want to do next.

Also: part of the motivation is that Aleph won't do what we want
PM: takes a lot of work to upgrade Aleph/Melvyl....

q) some of the BSTF reports talked about how data might not be well represented in OCLC? Are we going to continute to work to improve access to that kind of data in the pilot? Ie is the BSTF work going to be continuing despite the fact that we have a pilot up now as well?

SD) I don't know -- there is a group that's looking to see if Map/GIS data will work well in local worldcat.. .
PM) the exec team was very clear that we can't do everything that was brought up in the bSTF, so they said that they will focus on the front end discovery tool (i.e. the open catalog).

followup: it'd be nice to know what recommendations of the BSTF got adopted and what went off to die...

q) on some of the quesitons, are there programs about what is going on at some of the campuses? Are there campuses that are having a horse & pony show about this?

pm) we come and present when we're invited by your ULs.

q) is there a deadline (to submit commetns via the survey).
SD: no special deadline... word was origianlly supposed to be distributed by the ULs so it might have gone out on different campuses at different times.

bj) the original idea OCLC wanted was that there would be one place to go for online access. But for print material, there was one place to go right up front. So we moved the request button down there whehre people are looking... so two interface design issues and then a more serious thing, FRBR.

q) is there any good guesstimate of how much of our stuff wont' be in the pilot? significant?
sd: they are matching on OCLC #s -- so if it doesn't match it won't go in. That's up to 50%... so there's some question of whether we want that included at all.
LIsa from missing records team) -- i.e. in process records etc.

q) is online holdings information going to be in the pilot verison? i.e. which campuses have links to online info -- whcich isn't always right...
sd) yes, but it'll have the world cat frame on top mostly for navigation purposes

q) I found it intriguing that article records are included... does it seem possible that we would expand database access via melvyl in teh future?
bj) OCLC has expressed interest in expanding their access -- obviously that would all have to be negotiated with the vendors etc.

q) are people using the worldcat.org web 2.0 tools (reviews etc?)
BJ) very little use. There's not critical mass yet, i.e. of the reviews.

BHG: I'm impressed by how fast it is!

q) what are your plans for special collections?
bj: we are still arguing with them about how much of the record to display. I'd like to see them just turn it all on..

q) is there a perception thqat OCLC will lose revenue if they display the full record?
bj: I don't think so they are mostly just coming out of the worldcat environment...

q) do you have transaction log analysis
bj: not yet...

done at 11am

A profession of dial-twisters

From BJ: "Librarians are inveterate dial-twisters... if there's not a dial to twist we ask them to put some dials on there to twist. OCLC has to resist all the requests for local customization if they are going to get anywhere, and instead focus on commonalities between organizations."

Also: "OCLC is very responsive to data... (rather than "staff feel that...")." Bring data to the table.

On the whole, OCLC has been good to work with for UW.

Bill Jordan

The next presentation is from Bill Jordan, from the University of Washington. He started out by giving a background of UW.. they have 9 IT people, for instance.

Why they got started? Lots of brainstorming about the future of the catalog etc., then Betsy Wilson went to the senior leadership of OCLC. The UW team then went to Dublin and spent three days locked in a room with OCLC hashing things out (yikes -- ed).

the notion of "perpetual beta" was brought up -- unsurprisingly some staff were not so comfortable with this.

BJ says he expected to get "flooded" with comments -- but they actually weren't. There were just 60 questions via questionpoint over the term of the pilot. Reactions were mixed. People who had already figured out the catalog were unhappy they had to figure out something else. The loudest and unhappiest comments came from the faculty and staff of the library school!*

UW did do usability in May -- 10 questions and OCLC sent staff up from Mountain View to help run the tests.

Some of the results: ILL requests have gone up *dramatically* -- loans up 40%.

Problems: some issues around the amount of the record that gets displayed. The record is stripped, even on the advanced view. A lot of the contents notes are gone, eg. (The catalogers are threatening to edit the records via the comment feature!) For some collections it doesn't work at all -- e.g. for special collections and music, no good.

BJ thinks the solution is just to show the whole record, like they do in firstsearch.

Problem between records not matching -- ie. the master record in OCLC & the record in summit. Now, they think they have this worked out & there is ~98% match rate.

Problem w/ confusing display -- i.e. the book review link is confusingly labeled vs the actual record. The internet resource icon appears when they get supplementary material online -- i.e. table of contents -- and users HATE that.

Problem with button placing -- usability testing is key.

The biggest outstanding issue is their FRBR display -- which "is terrible". They've taken the most widely held manifestation of the work as the main record -- then attached all the manifestations to that record. So you have to go to the most widely held record to find online versions, new versions, etc -- understandably users don't make this connection.
People don't actually want to know we have the 1968 version in storage.. they want the 2000 edition, which might be less widely held. Catalogers think that making a real work record might help.

* my alma mater -- psa.