Minutes to be rotated, alphabetical order. Draft to group.

Current membership: Nicole Bouche, chair. Steven Arakawa, Susan Crockford-Peters, Tobin Nellhaus, Rich Richie, James Shetler, Kalee Sprague, Paul Stuehrenberg, Joan Swanekamp. Adjunct/advisory: Carol Jones, Fred Martz, Alan Solomon.

The Bibliographic Access Group is part of a trend in process improvement. SQIC sees the issue as how readers gain access to what we have. Work has been done on physical access, but intellectual access needs to be considered. Orbis is the focal point, but the group also needs to think about how Orbis might be defined beyond its function as an electronic card catalog, taking in such issues as access to items outside the administrative jurisdiction of the library, or the university. "Bibliographic access" is seen as impacting on how we display and what we display. BAG would be a place where this can be discussed, reviewed, decisions made, where different perspectives of technical and public services, broadly understood, can be brought together. We have standards and techniques, but we need to think about who our users are and how to state what we have for them, what users can reasonably expect, and how to measure how successfully we have met their expectations. Short-term, BAG needs to coordinate with the Orbis migration group, but the migration is not the primary long-term focus of the new group.

P. Stuehrenberg. User expectations are not met if new services are added but basic services are not performed successfully. BAG should consider as basic services: how do people find out what you have; how do you know you really have it. Performance of basic services is inhibited to some extent by departmental compartmentalization; recent attempt to design replacement volumes workflow as a case study.

N. Bouche. A general strategy/function for BAG: identify the problem, identify the people who can solve it; get those people together. D. Nitecki comment: BAG also needs to obtain data about what people need, work out evaluation procedure for basic services, monitor services periodically to make sure they are still needed. BAG needs to consider role of non-tangible resources (electronic, human) when evaluating the basic services.

F. Martz. Library has had a number of ad hoc cross-department basic services groups, e.g. the implementation groups for MATPS, NOTIS, and Crossplex. BAG is needed because we no longer have the equivalent of one of these; presumably it would also have more continuity. One function of BAG would be to liaison with such groups as Frontdoor, Metalib, Orbis Pictus, ITS portal, and to identify and liaison with other access groups as they are formed. A basic services example case study might involve re-thinking and improving the yellow request cards. Would a web form attachment improve accuracy? What are user expectations for success rate? A key question for the near future is how BAG would work with Voyager implementation groups. How does the OPAC implementation group interact with BAG?

N. Bouche suggested that BAG take a look at the OPAC demo group documents and ask OPAC implementation group (once it is formed) to forward policy questions. She cautioned that BAG’s policy oversight not become an impediment to the OPAC implementation group’s work.

P. Stuehrenberg commented that the charge seemed to be too focused on the online catalog but given the immediate concerns re Endeavor implementation, it is understandable. In the long run, he would be interested also in questions of nitty gritty, physical navigation and orientation, e.g. signage, or clarifying for users what to do if something is not where it is supposed to be.

D. Nitecki commented that the group can decide where it wants to go, but the immediate concern centers around defining the scope of the online catalog.

N. Bouche. Process for working out additions to and revisions of the charge needs to be worked out.

S. Arakawa commented that since database maintenance was a significant aspect of the charge, should a representative from Database Management should be included; he acknowledged that with Martha Conway leaving it was not entirely clear how this work in the near future.

D. Nitecki commented that BAG could not be entirely representative of various constituencies and that a function of the group, to a certain extent, is to allow members to think outside the box of their constituencies.

Nicole will distribute a process improvement chart used by SQIC which D. Nitecki passed along to her, which we can consider as a model for how the committee might pursue its work of ongoing assessment of the effectiveness of bib access strategies..

F. Martz reiterated that groups like the OPAC implementation groups have a fixed duration; BAG has to evaluate and manage long term satisfaction.

P. Stuehrenberg asked whether there was a group working on the issue of non-library holdings, such as Film Studies or the Linguistics Seminar.

D. Nitecki said she was not aware of any group; it is unclear whether there is a master list of non-library contributors to Orbis.

Next meeting will be in Beinecke, in August.