| USMAI Consortium of Libraries |
| University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions |
| Electronic Resources Management Task Group > Minutes for June 28, 2006 |
Because of the Verde implementation timeframe agreed to within USMAI, the implementation will not have the advantage of working with Ex Libris as early adopters of Verde 2.0. We hope that Ex Libris will nevertheless be able to address the complexities of Maryland.s consortial implementation with responsive developments and enhancements
One area of complexity that Ex Libris has committed to addressing is the need for a consortial level SFX (which USMAI does not have).
The consortial level Verde instance will be able to push only .local. information into campus instances; it cannot push data for items that exist in the knowledge base. However, knowledge base data could flow from a consortial Verde to a consortial SFX; from the consortial SFX into SFX instances for each campus, and then into the appropriate Verde instance for the campus, as depicted here:
Without a consortial SFX instance this would not work for us. To resolve this problem, Ex Libris has agreed to provide and populate a consortial SFX for USMAI, free of charge.
Since SFX does not maintain all of the data that exists in Verde, it is unclear to the ERM implementation group exactly what data can flow through SFX into campus instances of Verde; we will explore this question with Ex Libris.
Betty provided a brief update about the ELUNA meeting. The Verde content for the meeting primarily featured future directions for the product. See Betty.s written report for details.
Of more immediate interest: There will be a listserv for the Verde product working group, and an enhancements wiki.the hope is to keep the enhancements process nimble and reactive to current environments and needs rather than having it slowed by a formal voting-style process.
The committee reviewed the administration of organizations (vendors, licensors, providers, etc) within Verde to establish local practices and identify any questions.
Discussion: Nathan clarified the distinction between vendors, providers, licensors, and licensing agents. Because for any given product it will be clear which organization is the provider and which organization is the licensor, it is unnecessary (and counter-productive) to create hybrid records to represent organization relationships. So, for example, even though we get LexisNexis products via PALINET, we should not have a .LexisNexis Palinet. organization. Instead, we have a LexisNexis record (pointed to as the provider of the products) and a Palinet record (pointed to as the licensor and vendor).
Local practice question: Will we be able to push or copy organization records from the consortial instance into campus instances? If we can, will we want to? There is concern that different libraries may have different contact and other details for their relationships with vendors; e.g. some USMAI libraries may deal with the ARL contact team at a vendor, while others might deal with the .small academic. team, etc. If we copied consortial records would we overwrite local changes? The team will investigate options.
Local practice decision: Because each library maintains its own distinct list of vendor codes in ALEPH, we will not attempt to map ALEPH vendor codes to Verde org codes. We will maintain a list of Verde org codes on a USMAI Verde wiki so libraries can consult and cross-reference.
Local practice decision: Since the codes don.t seem to matter much.usually the system displays full names of orgs for selection and display.we will choose short, easy (though perhaps less intuitive) two or three letter codes.
Local practice decision: We will create an ITD org record that has the roles of consortium and licensing agent.
Local practice question: We have yet to fully explore the functionality of .licensing agents. as opposed to .consortia. within Verde. For consortial licenses, we may recommend that libraries identify ITD as their .licensing agent,. or as the .consortium,. or both. We may also make no recommendation and allow each library to configure the system as it finds most useful. We will know more as we have a greater opportunity to explore the system functionality.
Local practice decision: For organization records (but not for library records) records, we encourage the use of alternate names. Since the list will be very large anyway, these alternate names will make it possible to find vendors by multiple versions of their names. (For example, one will be able to find Thomson Gale under T or G).
System bug/enhancement: Contact roles should be checkboxes rather than multi-select. Generally, multi-select boxes should be very rarely used it is too easy to deselect choices without noticing.
Local practice decision: For each org we will explicitly encode at least one contact as the Technical Support role (assuming the org offers any technical support at all). This should make it easier for infrequent users of Verde to find the correct contact person for support. For all other contact roles, we will assume any role is covered by the .main contact. unless a different person is explicitly encoded.
Local practice decision: Contacts need not be actual persons. For example, a general Technical Support department might be entered as a contact.
Local practice decision: Since the unnecessary .Job Title. field shows up in the brief contact list, we will use the field instead to provide valuable notes about the contact, such as .Available M-F 8 am . 8 pm.
System bug/enhancement: Instead of displaying the useless Job Title on the brief contact list, the system should show Role Notes instead.
System bug/enhancement: Active links to vendors. .Problem Report. websites within the contact information would be a nice enhancement.
System bug/enhancement: While experimenting, we entered LexisNexis as a licensing agent, and saved the org record. We later unchecked LexisNexis as a licensing agent, and re-saved the org record, yet LexisNexis continued to show up as a choice as a Licensing Agent for licenses. How do we remove organizations from showing up as choices to be used as licensing agents?
Local practice decision: For library records in the system we will not use alternate names, since adding alternate names adds entries in the alphabetical list and makes browsing for the desired library more difficult.users can fairly easily learn the authorized names of the fifty MDL libraries. (We will use alternate names for org records, however).
Local practice decision: At E-Collections Task Group renewal times (twice per year) we will ask each library to review their library records and contact information to provide any updates and changes.
Local Practice Decision: We need a library record to represent the licensee for the USMAI and MDL licenses. The system functionality is that this record should represent the legal entity that is the licensee of record for the license. Unfortunately, past practice has not been consistent in identifying the licensee. It appears variously as University of Maryland, University of Maryland Libraries, University System of Maryland, Maryland Digital Library, and other forms.
We will establish a single library record to represent the legal licensee entity for all USMAI and MDL licenses: UMDL (University of Maryland, College Park for the benefit of the Maryland Digital Library, Maryland Higher Education Commission (MDL, MHEC) and the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) (collectively, Maryland Parties)). Moving forward, we will use this text to identify the licensee in all licenses, whether for all of MDL or only for the 16 USMAI libraries (or a subset of them). For encoding of past licenses, we will use the established [torgo] record within the system, and hope to adjust the language during routine license renegotiation.
The committee worked through the .Default license. in the Verde system and encoded the values we deemed likely to be nearly universally true for all licenses. For the most part we elected to leave fields blank; we felt that a blank or undetermined value would encourage encoders to read the license carefully, while a default value may engender carelessness. (The actual decisions by the committee were encoded into the system and are not represented here in the meeting minutes).
The committee divided up the remaining licenses as encoding assignments. Nancy will scan and deliver the licenses to the assignees. Assignees will map these licenses and enter the encodings into the system. We can review each others. work as needed or requested.
The committee will meet at UM Law on July 12th, 9-noon.
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