Notes from CORC team meeting, 9/8/99.
Present: Pam, Don, Martha, Jill, Yumin, Bill, Karen
1. Visit from OCLC photographers and writer on 9/9 (Tom Storey, Rich Skopin, Bryan McKean). Karen explained the purpose of the visit--to take photos at CUL for the OCLC annual report, with a focus on Cornell's participation in CORC. We brainstormed ideas for locations of photos based on the OCLC rep's advance message. Pam and Karen will host the visit and the team will lunch with them at the Statler at noon on Thursday. Jill agreed to make a reservation at Banfi's (done). There will be a two or three page spread on CORC in the 1999 OCLC annual report, due out by the end of the calendar year. Cornell is one of two or three CORC participants being featured. The interest in the CU project stems from the cross-functional makeup of the team. We have final approval rights on content related to Cornell. An example of a past annual report may be found at http://www.oclc.org/oclc/ar98/ar.htm
(Post-meeting report on the visit: it was an enjoyable and successful visit. They took a lot of film; CORC team members were interviewed informally at lunch; the group photo of the team was shot in the AD White Library; other photos were taken at the Engineering library, at Management (I think), at one of the dorms; in Uris and Kroch and Olin; and at the Law Library, whose beauty they'd discovered in their own walk around campus the previous evening. )
2. Suggestion from Ross to post CORC team minutes. We agreed to circulate CORC meeting notes on CU-LIB and make them available via the team Website. (Karen to handle)
3. CORC Participants Meeting at OCLC, Nov. 3-4. Karen noted the spring meeting, which she attended, was highly worthwhile, and that she can't attend the November meeting due to a conflict with the PCC Policy Committee meeting at LC. She asked for expressions of interest from the team, remarking that she would be happy to write a letter of support for any member. Jill, Bill and Pam expressed some interest and said they might follow up by e-mail to Karen.
4. Specs for Selection/Acq Metadata. Bill led a meeting with Scott and David Block met this past week to discuss fields and features that they'd like to see in CORC (or another database) to support collection development and acquisitions of networked resources. Bill distributed the results of their brainstorming session to us--a quick list of fields to be considered. The list is based in part on CUL staff experiences with NetSelect (once used by Mann selectors, now defunct) and a prior project of David Block's, . They are thinking that a very few fields might be mandatory, with many more for optional use and to remind selectors/acquisitions staff of the type of information they might want to record about an e-resource. The group will meet again and may solicit further advice from Susan Currie and Howard Raskin. The end result of the deliberations will be a section of our final CUL report on CORC, which is to be distributed to the library administration and OCLC.
5. Round the Table. Yumin asked a question about PURLs and our CORC records. We agreed that catalogers wouldn't go back to CORC to enter the Cornell-assigned PURL but would follow the CUL procedure as written for NOTIS and Gateway records. An interesting short discussion ensued as a result of Pam's question "Is there an advantage to assigning full LC call numbers to networked resources?" Jill said no, in her view public services staff don't use the call numbers for anything and they actually confuse patrons. Don remarked in his experience there is little or no searching of the LMS by call number, and for networked resources catalogers would be better off using the time they now spend assigning call numbers to networked resources some other way. He felt strongly this practice should stop. Bill noted that some searches by call number are done, in his experience, and that call numbers could be helpful in organizing archival copies of Web sites or databases, should that kind of archiving become routine practice in the future. We agreed that our CORC report should include a recommendation that the need for call numbers in records for networked resources should be considered by CUL staff at large at some point.
6. Upcoming meetings. Various team members will be leading discussions of CORC at the Public Services Forum on Sept. 13, at General Selectors on Sept. 23, at IRPC on October 25, and at Academic Assembly in February (tentative).
7. Work on our report. We concluded the meeting with a focused discussion of two questions for our final report (Pam took notes):
What are the pros and cons of the workflow we are using in CORC over existing functionality/workflows/procedures?
What substitutes exist at CUL for what CORC can do? Why choose CORC over them?
We agreed to continue working on one or two questions from our final report outline at each of our future meetings, writing up the results as we go. We hope this will save time in compiling the final report.
8. Next meeting. Our next meeting is at 9:00 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 20 in Olin 303. Agenda to follow.
Last modified 09-12-1999
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