Notes from 2CUL JSMIN Meeting, January 23, 2018

Attending: Adam Chandler, Sarah Elman, Kate Harcourt, Jesse Koennecke, Jason Kovari, Jim LeBlanc, Mark Wilson

  1. Kate and Jim updated the group on the results of the "Future of FAST" survey, developed by representatives from Brown, Columbia, Cornelll, Harvard, and Yale, with OCLC.  Overall the survey revealed significant interest in FAST as a fully-supported OCLC service, especially if OCLC commits to maintaining it.  Kate will be giving a preliminary report on the survey results at the Heads of Cataloging meeting at ALA.  In the meantime, the "FAST Five" will be meeting on Monday to discuss next steps for rolling out the survey results and follow-thru.
  2. Columbia has been begun adding retention policy statements to newly received Albanian, Hungarian and Romanian material, in part to determine the best approach to workflow.  They've concluded that rather than adding these statements at the point of processing, they should develop an automated script to perform this task to be run periodically (e.g. annually).  Cornell has not yet begun this work, given that the MOU for retention of these materials is still awaiting Harvard's signature, but they will benefit from Columbia's preliminary investigation into how best to handle these statements.
  3. Mark and Jim talked about the request they received from Rob Davis, Thomas Keenan (Princeton), and Lidia Uziel (Harvard) to provide information on policies regarding record loads, copy cataloging, and foreign language literacy within our respective technical services areas.  Harvard and Princeton have also been asked to submit this information.  While it is certainly a good sign that collections staff are consulting with technical services about things like this, we're still unsure about what they're going to do with this information.  We recognized the usefulness of broadening the scope of this language survey to include all languages that our respective (or collective) departments can cover and possible shared cataloging arrangements.  We also remarked that it was good to have already gone through this kind of exercise as part of 2CUL TSI, though the current request is both more focused in its scope and more nebulous in its ultimate purpose.
  4. Jesse and Mark provided shelf-ready updates.  Cornell has just begun a regular workflow with Coutts, and hopes to make arrangements with Casalini, Harrassowitz, and AmaLivre later this year.  Columbia already has an arrangement with YBP and is hoping to expand Casalini and get AmaLivre going next.  Both institutions report some problems with selector acceptance of such arrangements.  Columbia correlates funds with unit locations, which seems to be a more accurate way to determine appropriate locations than Cornell's method of mapping LC class numbers to unit locations.
  5. Columbia is investigating more streamlined cataloging processes for new material as part of their strategic Hidden Collections Initiative.  They will share with Jason documentation regarding local definitions of various cataloging "levels" and what kinds of material will go into which bucket as their discussions progress.
  6. Columbia has been using ideas gleaned from Cornell during the 2CUL TSI project to inform the initiative described in #5.  They have also been consulting workflow descriptions included in the 2CUL TSI Print Serials Study from three years ago.  Cornell has been following Columbia's lead on the development of institutional branding for e-resources.  Both libraries participated in an LD4P Art/Rare Materials ontology meeting, held earlier this month at Columbia.  In other words, the Strategic Alliance continues to gain benefit from its lightweight collaborative association as 2CUL.  JSMIN plans to continue getting together quarterly and to share pertinent ideas and information via its listserv.
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