E-Resources in the Catalog (ERIC): Continued work in support of implementation of SFX in catalog: refined genre identification so that Request and ILL services could act differently for journals, books and videos, created targets for videos, worked on bringing 856 and 956 fields into the Find It menu.

Inter Library Loan:

• Five members of the Resource Sharing Task Group gave a panel presentation on the USMAI Implementation of Illiad at the International Illiad Users Group meeting. The powerpoint from that presentation should be available on the group's website soon.
• In ITD we continued to work on the installation of consortial Illiad. Currently working on resolving file sharing problems across domains and institutional firewalls. ILLiad software relies on file sharing to operate. Investigating VPN as a more secure solution which would also require no firewall changes.

Authentication:

• Work has been done to get Shibboleth released into the live environment in mid-April. The User Interface Task Group (UITG) has collaborated on the log on screen.
• The interest in our project to implement Shibboleth for single sign-on is growing:
• Dave Kennedy participated in a presentation at CNI with Oren Bet Arie and Tom Wilson
• Ex Libris has an article about the work in their newsletter: Ex Librian concerning the Shibboleth project.
  
• There is a link to the CNI presentation on the Internet 2 website. Look under "Shibboleth for Real".
  
• Dave will be presenting at Eluna and IGeLU, he has also been asked to be part of a panel at 2 Educause conferences.

Why all the excitement? Because there has been a lot of talk about Shibboleth for years, now we've actually applied it in real environment. We aren't the only ones, but we are part of a small group. The challenge now is to expand Shibboleth beyond the services we have working now and to coordinate with IT staff at our campuses. The more that adopted Shibboleth, the more places single sign-on will work for our users.

ResearchPort/FindIt:SFX has been moved to port 80. This was done in response to a request from UMUC and from problem reports about port 9003. We still need to systematically change all internal and external links that still refer to the 9003 ports. Betty attended IGELU Interim Steering Committee in Stockholm (at IGELU expense) to plan upcoming Fall annual meeting and to prepare for and participate in a meeting with Matti Shem Tov and Marc Daubach re: plans for IGELU and ELUNA to work with Ex Libris on the development of the product suite. Will be responsible for creating the IGELU Verde Product Working Group.

Electronic Resource Management (Verde): The ERM Task Group met twice to work on the interpretation of the consortial licenses for Verde. A subcommittee of Joyce Tenney and Nathan Robertson were tasked to draft a "best practices" document. The ERM TG also participated in a Webinar on Verde version 2

Electronic Resource Licensing:Individual worksheets with most prices (approximate prices) were compiled and distributed to each of the 50 Maryland Digital Library E-Collections TG members and directors. Betty attended (and assisted in hosting) the ICOLC meeting in Philadelphia. Distributed summary notes to USMAI.

Patron Loader/Email notices:

• HSHSL and UM Law are now live with the new combined (faculty/staff/student) patron load. This latest load involved a complete rebarcoding of their current patrons. Old barcodes are maintained as alternate barcodes.
• Handled a large number of requests for fixed due date courtesy notices (BC, ML, UB, SM, SU).

Aleph:

• Began testing the new loader. Once this new loader is in place we can proceed with Collection Manager loader and loading of NetLibrary records.
• Fixed loader staging database cleanup problem.
• Prange Education Collection - completed the extraction of all Prange education records with the addition of HOL and Superholding data.
• Aleph Security Subgroup -created cross-functional proxy request form and sent an email out to Campus Contact and COIALL on submitting campus cross-functional proxy requests with a deadline of April 28.
• Per CPC request, updated validation tables for MARC tags 029,260,and 898
• Modified SCMI list for Towson.
• Autographics and UMC99 project - produced reports identifying autographics records with OCLC numbers. Discussed options for project with St. Mary's and UM.

Authorities in Aleph:

• Added OWN of SHARED to test authority records.
• Created permission for viewing records in Authorities test.
• Created an "Authorities in the catalog" wiki page for the UITG to support work on the presentation of authorities in the PAC.

User Interface Improvements:

• Continued UITG work on addressing usability issues with catalog and Find It: made changes to wording and layout of Find It menu. Began planning usabilty testing on recent catalog and Find It changes.
• working with the UITG, put several changes in place in the test catalog. UITG is seeking feedback from the COIs before moving these changes into the live catalog.
• Changed the Journals catalog to include all serials.
• Right-justified the labels on the Full View of Record, standard display
• Suppressed display of "catalog card" and "citation" display choices on top of Full View.
• Suppressed display of some tags from Full View (310, 321, and 362) and revised display of others (510).
• Corrected the language of certain error messages.
• Put a re-designed image of the findit button (created by Janet Evander) in the test catalog for usability testing.
• Suppressed display of findit button in the Course Reserves catalogs.

EDI Invoice Loading:Attempted but failed to load the first Hein test file. Hein EDI file structure is to some extent customized; need to closely examine Hein file structure and work with the vendor.

EDI Ordering:

• Worked out some details with BBS on records selection and exporting
• Completed ITD development of the bibliographic loader to handle the bib. and the acquisitions information in incoming records from BBS Collection Manager.
• Began testing this loading of records.

College Park Project to Limit Use of SSN. The College Park campus has undertaken a major effort to eliminate the use and retention of Social Security Numbers. ITD has participated in a number of aspects of this project. We have requested retention of the number for the CP patron feed into Aleph; we are supporting the re-issue of all i.d. cards (with new barcodes) and planning ways to continue to restrict access to the SSN in all our systems.

Communication:We continue to experiment with "wiki" software as one means of improving communications within the consortium. The User Interface Task Group wiki is a great source of information about that groups activity. We have added a wiki page for the Circulation, Reserves and ILL Community of Interest.

Personnel:

• Tom Wilson resigned as Director of ITD. Carlen Ruschoff was appointed Interim Director for one year.

Meetings:

• Aleph team members in ITD met with Carmit Marcus to discuss the new PDQ service, which will be available in Version 18(?). This service is very similar to our current PPH service, although it is not the same. PDQ would allow title level holds across multiple adms (we currently have one adm).

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