Notes from TSI JSMIN meeting, Nov. 13, 2014
Attending: Adam, Jim, Joyce, Mark, Naun, Robert; with guests Irina Kandarasheva and Lois Purcell
2CUL Technical Services Documentation. Lois presented her work thus far, with input from Irina, on an "Index of Procedures Used in Technical Services at Cornell and Columbia," as well as some challenges and questions regarding the approach she's taking. It was clear from the discussion that we still need to answer broader questions about the purpose of this effort since the change of direction in TSI. If we are no longer aiming to integrate our operations and if we are no longer sure if and when we will be implementing a shared LMS, how much effort should we invest in shared documentation and a common platform for it? While on the one hand, having some kind of mapped inventory may be of general interest immediately and of possible use in preparing to migrate to a shared system, the focus of any documentation effort preparatory to system migration is likely to be on new system documentation rather than on existing procedures. Further, while Cornell has explicitly committed a certain amount of staff time to developing TSI documentation from salary savings generated from the Mellon grant, Columbia has not, and it will be difficult for Lois to create a mapped inventory of 2CUL documents without additional help from a number of staff on the Columbia side.
We settled on two options:
- Create a mapped inventory of our current Columbia/Cornell documentation, perhaps as a Google Doc, along the lines of what Lois has already started. This task will require support from Columbia staff, primarily from Irina but from other staff as well, to identify and provide access to all documentation relevant to TSI for Lois and, to some extent, all Cornell technical services staff.
- Suspend work on creating a comprehensive mapped inventory unless and until we decide to migrate to a shared LMS, and re-evaluate the need for this work at that time.
Technical services directors at Columbia will determine which option is in their best interest at the moment. In the meantime, Joyce will work on getting Lois access to everything she needs at the Columbia side.
Creating a Central Location on the Wiki for Recording Issues Under Investigation. This was a continuation of the discussion from October's JSMIN / Working Group Leads meeting. The Batch Processing group already has a Proof Registry Scorecard in place for its work, but would prefer to maintain it on their section of the wiki. We decided to modify the TSI Proof Registry to include specific work in progress by adding a status field to the entries. Jim and Kate will take responsibility for this task (though Naun indicated after the meeting that he would add the entry for the Korean cataloging project that we suspended earlier this year).
Decison Not to Renew Consortial Edition of SerSol 360 Resource Manager. We talked a bit about the E-Resources Working Group's forthcoming recommendation not to renew the consortial option for our RM systems. As they mentioned in a recent email, through testing they discovered it be an inadequate workflow-sharing tool as designed, and in some cases it doesn't even perform as promised. The few functions that are useful do not justify the $20,000 cost to renew the current subscription in February. Joyce added that Jesse and she plan to meet with Serials Solutions reps at ALA to talk about how ProQuest will be folding this functionality into Intota and weigh in on the limitations they see in the current product. It is important to remember, though, that we have already taken a significant step towards increased collaborative work on e-resources by electing the use the same ERM product and version.
The E-Resources Team will be submitting a formal recommendation regarding Serials Solutions Consortial RM soon.