YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
CIRCULATION SUPPORT GROUP

PRESENT: Rick Bean (Chair), Pam Jordan (Recording), Marybeth Bean, Susan Burdick, Patrick Butler, Sue Crockford-Peters, Victoria Gardner, Cindy Greenspun,
Carol Jones, Bev Lett, Larry Martins, Lorine Murphy, Judy Parker, Dana Peterman, Anthony Riccio, Lisa Thomas, Melissa Wisner

GUEST: Audrey Novak

ABSENT: Lauren Brown, Martha Clark, Ken Crilly, Suzanne Eggleston, John Gallagher, Matthew Glickman, Carla Heister, Stephen Jones, Chris Kilheffer,
Beatrice Luh, Shashi Luthra, Janice Weyant

AGENDA:

Introduction of New Member

Victoria Gardner was introduced to the group. She is a new supervisor in Access Services but previously worked at the Divinity Library. She will be handling duties formerly carried out by Judy Parker and Lisa Thomas while they are handling the logistics of the CCL move into SML while CCL is renovated.

Announcements

Judy Parker and Sue Crockford-Peters announced that the moving of books within the SML stacks to accommodate the influx of CCL books had begun. 7M is a model floor for anyone interested in seeing what has been done. There was discussion about where
Judaica and Near East materials would be during the CCL renovations and afterwards.

Susan Burdick announced that all students had been hired and all reserves had been processed for the Divinity Library.

Bev Lett announced the same for the A&A Library and also mentioned the refurbishment of the library including the new circulation desk, reference desk and carpeting and the restoration of the Rudolph tables.

Pam Jordan reported that in the Drama Library reserves had been processed but the
student hiring and training was not quite complete.

Mary Beth Bean explained how Kline had received an overabundance of wire hanger bookends from Mudd and urged anyone who needed some to contact her.
Anthony Riccio told about the retrieval of surplus SML shelves and bookends from the machine room under SML and their storage for future use during the CCL renovations.

Lorine Murphy reported on the Social Science Library renovations.

Sue Crockford-Peters announced that so far 90,000 books had been moved out of CCL.

Lisa Thomas said that Access Services personnel were picking which books went to SML and which to the LSF.

Sue added that the date of CCL's closure had not been set but that it would be after the end of exams and before Commencement in May 2006.

Scheduled Agenda Items:

Books Out Limit for Patron Group "Staff"

Sue Crockford-Peters had proposed that a new patron category of "research staff" be created in Orbis. This was in order to accommodate patrons who were designated as staff but had research responsibilities and give them a higher books out limit and a longer loan period. Audrey Novak and the ILTS staff has pronounced this impossible. After consulting with Danuta Nitecki, an alternate proposal of extending the books out limit for all staff from 50 to 200 is under consideration. It is also proposed that the loan period for staff be changed to the same as graduate students. The books out limit would be a global change affecting all libraries, but the loan period change would not affect all libraries. Also staff would still not have reserve rights. Dana Peterman questioned why reserve rights needed to be restricted. Some discussion followed but it was agreed to table this to some future meeting. Sue asked for the group's support of these proposals if the group could not see any real problems that might result from this change. The group did agree. At present there is no decision as to when the changes will happen or whether both will happen at the same time, since ILTS is very busy preparing for implementation of Unicode and the 5.0 release.

Unicode/ Voyager Release 5.0

Melissa Wisner of ILTS assured the group that Unicode would not impact circulation workflows but the 5.0 release would. The changeover to Unicode and the new release would take place sequentially over semester break. September 30 is the target date by which ILTS has to decide whether to go ahead with the 5.0 release.

Melissa asked for testing volunteers. There are testing sessions scheduled for SCML September 20th through 22nd from 10-12 a.m. and 2-4 p.m. Or the Voyager 5.0 testing client can be downloaded to individual desktops from PC Amigo where Ernie Marinko has loaded it. Various testing strategies were discussed: most notably scripting various workflow actions or duplicating actual workflow scenarios.
Melissa said that Yale is one of the first 10 sites to commit to the 5.0 release. They would rely on Princeton's and Columbia's prior experience with the 5.0 release to some extent and would schedule conference calls with them.

Sue Crockford-Peters reminded everyone that during the downtime for the changeover those libraries who are operational during semester break would be using offline circulation. Various other public service functions such as Eli Express and LSF retrieval would not be available.

Melissa reminded the group that the downtime might extend past the opening of the other libraries on January 3rd and that all libraries may have to use offline circulation.
Sue advised getting as much end-of-term business completed before the downtime.

Sue also asked Rick Bean to update the documentation that he wrote for the initial use of offline circulation for Voyager implementation in 2002. Sue said that it might be necessary to return to twice monthly meetings of this group in order to prepare for the new release.

Audrey Novak joined the group towards the end of this discussion to help answer any questions about the new release.

Calendars

Melissa reported that the problems with checking out books to faculty at the beginning of the semester was due to the Orbis calendar not extending the full year ahead necessary for the faculty one year loan period. She proposed having an open-ended calendar which would eliminate this problem. The exception dates for closed periods would still have to be entered and might not be available far enough in advance to assure that books didn't come due on closed dates. But it was agreed that having books due on the wrong day would be preferable to not being able to check them out. Entering the exception dates for two years in advance may be implemented in future.

The meeting was adjourned at 3:30 p.m.