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July 2000 Volume 2 Number 3 Page 7 |
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 In His Own WordsDavid Ritchie, Coordinator of Library Systems, SUNY College at Cortland |
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Cover Story Features Contract Signed; Hardware Selected! SUNY Universal Borrowing: Libraries Wherever You Are Ulster and SUNYConnect: Working Together for Information Literacy In His Own Words |
Impressions of the First NAUUG Meeting (David Ritchie and Nancy Van Deusen (Cobleskill) were selected by SUNYLA to represent SUNY librarians at the initial NAUUG meeting.) May 30-June 1, 2000, South Bend, Indiana -- Arrival: I rolled onto the Notre Dame campus in an orange station wagon claiming to be a taxi. The dorm was just behind the university's Morris Inn, where some of the more well-heeled library representatives to this first NAUUG (North American Aleph Users' Group) meeting stayed in wood-panelled luxury. Most of us, though, stayed in the dorm. Contact: Wandering about the floor I struck up a conversation with a guy also at loose ends in one of the lounges, and asked if he were going to attend the OPAC discussion session. That session leader had been the only one to post a tentative agenda for the two meetings. He said, "I wrote that! I'm Sacha, from McGill." I asked how his experience had been in developing the look and function of their ALEPH OPAC web pages: http://aleph.mcgill.ca:4535/ALEPH/. He explained somewhat apologetically that he'd just been hired in late 1999. Sacha had to set the basic design by early March to "go live" in May. As a result he only had the chance to make minor adjustments in the month since then. I asked Sacha how they'd decided to deal with the 3 frames that the ALEPH web OPAC software presents. He said first that there are really 4 frames - one at the very bottom that is invisible to the user. This frame holds the session info, as Sacha had found out when he'd deleted it experimentally. Sacha explained that one no longer had to have a left-side column frame (see Notre Dame's catalog at http://lib1.nd.edu:4505/ALEPH0/. This eliminates much user confusion according to McGill librarians. The list of catalog services along the top of the page is one frame. These set up the main frame containing a keyword search choice and a browse search choice for the catalog selected. He said they had not found a suitable synonym for the "Basket" label at the top. (This is where users can stash citations for resources they've found during their session.) They're hoping that most users have been exposed to enough internet shoppers' lingo that they'll get the drift. It got to be midnight, and we said good-night. "Bon soir." Alexander Sacha Jerabek was one of many librarians I met at NAAUG who were eager to share their experiences with the ALEPH software. This sharing was done both in the spirit of helping others soon to be in the same situation of learning a new software and in an effort to hear of other ways to configure the software. As I said at the SUNYLA conference, some librarians at NAAUG - especially a group from Iowa - seemed concerned with when SUNY would be implementing ALEPH. This gave the impression that they were concerned that SUNY would monopolize all of Ex Libris' resources. But individually, most of the folks I met were open, challenged by their tasks, dealing with software workarounds, and happy to be making personal contacts with whom they could share. Future: For SUNY librarians, I think that NAAUG will primarily prove to be a useful forum for advice, particularly on software functions, and secondarily a way to lobby with other North American users to gain software enhancements. The greater benefit for us, however, will be to cultivate easy ways within SUNY to share, organize, and convey Ex Libris information as we move forward to a fully implemented SUNYConnect LMS.
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