Page PageSusan M. Johns
11th Annual CODA Conference
University of South Australia
Adelaide, South Australia
September 30-October 2, 1998
This paper is offered in the hope that it will stimulate discussion and product development to benefit academic reserve functionality in both the current Dynix and Horizon product lines.
The Instructor Reserve Module, described here primarily in relation to the character-based Dynix product, allows the library to track the use of library-owned and personal-copy reserve material placed in the trust of the library on behalf of individual faculty for individual courses at a given institution. The Reserve Module was designed to interface among the Circulation, Cataloging, Media, Serials, and Public Access modules of the Dynix system.
Assumptions from past development enhancements of the Reserve Module include the following:
1) ability to place both monographic and serial (i.e., periodical) items on reserve; these generally fully catalogued using MARC records; as well as the ability to place personally-owned short-bibs created on-the-fly for tests, instructor-owned material, etc.
2) ability to interact effectively and efficiently with scheduling, reservations, and all aspects of both the Media Module and Advanced Booking;
3) ability to use Circulation Module functions such as checkout, checking, shelving delay, lost/missing status changes, notices, purfs, and the full gamut of Circulation functionality
4) ability to use Cataloging Module functions, particularly batch processing, global and local authorities, full-marc features such as the 856 tag; related works and other subject/authority features; session defaults, full-marc display; etc.
5) ability to be fully viewed in all public access modules, including the new graphical products.
As late as 1995 the CODI Reserve Enhancements Committee compiled a fairly comprehensive list of enhancements, many of which have yet to be implemented. Several reflect severe design flaws that continue to plague the new graphical products because the old design has simply been exported over to the graphical versions of the product. While Reserve was given several enhancements in the period prior to 1995-1996, a very obvious stand-still has been observed since that time, largely due to several concerns about "rewrite" and "structure". Among them:
a) Loss of Use Stats. Use stats are not retained after an individual (personal-owned) item is withdrawn (and deleted) throughout the semester, greatly skewering any attempt to get a comprehensive picture of statistics at the end of any given month or semester (CODI-ED#521). Coupled with loss of statistics is the wide array of reports which, in the past, as "canned" reports, have come up about 20% short of individual campus needs. Most of the reports can be worked around fairly well with the customer-designed RECALL reports, with the exception that many statistics, including the use stats, are not saved in date/time stamps, thus prohibiting any comprehensive use of the Reserve data by effective RECALL reports.
b) Bib vs. Holdings Structure. Around R.140, the full MARC record was introduced for Reserve material, but the indexing and retrieval algorithms on the summary displays do not retrieve bibs, but holdings. While it is true that a "holding" is placed on reserve rather than a "bib", the bib records must be searchable and retrievable rather than an ineffectual display of multiple bibs for every holding on reserve. This proves to be a nightmare for those with multiple copies of a single bibliographic entity on reserve.
c) Interfaces with Other Modules. The interchanges among the links and recognition of Media, Scheduling and Advanced Booking transactions against reserve items (and visa versa) seems precarious at best (CODI-ED #116, #149, #268, #570). The interface in the Cataloging Module (UBR) actually allows catalogers to "seize" control of the bib and holdings record while on reserve, permitting global changes to author and subject authorities, call#, even permitting the item type to be altered and the links to the reserve indexes and process to be broken. Similarly, the ability to discard holdings or purfs in Circulation also impacts the reserve holdings links. In a truly integrated system it would appear that fairly clear rules for who (or what) has control of the reserve material should be established and supported by the automated system.
d) Circulation Functionality. A series of circulation requests were bundled together in previous enhancements requests. These ranged from the ability to have full call# display; charge both late fees and lost fees; separate itemized billing; use of alternate campus addresses; hold/recall queue capabilities; default item prices; CIV capabilities; status changes reflecting more accurate statuses at time of checkin, etc. Circulation functionality is critical to the checkout/checkin/billing of all reserve material. Reserve material in the past has been problematic for fines and checkin, due to the fact that it is most-often time-specific. How the system handles these transactions with individual date and time stamps, and retains historical checkouts, is also linked to (a) above.
e) Course and Instructor Authority Issues. Independent course and instructor authority schemes to manage the linked bibliographic files has had some attention in 1995 with distinct passwords for global-add vs. global-modify permissions against author authorities. While this is admirable, the effort to put the course authority and instructor authority files into a pseudo-marc structure has been less successful. In addition to not having clear means of servicing the course authorities (one can only do course authorities from within a given item holding), the instructor authority information in pseudo-marc format remains dubious in its translation for name, campus address, campus email, phone, etc., and has no link of any sort to the same data available within the patron record of a given faculty member through Circulation. Further, the existing pseudo-marc format usually loses all see and see also reference with each new releases of the product. Finally, with the advent of the graphical files, it appears that PAC for Windows and WebPAC cannot handle hot-linking of course/instructor *AND* subject/author authority files. The premise seems to be that one pair of authority files is enough for adequate retrieval of reserve material.
f) Agency Issues. Various agency issues in multi-campus sites with multiple reserve accounts continue to plague the larger libraries, particularly with various display and scoping issues. The Reserve module needs to have sufficient robustness in order to fully utilize "other location" or "same location" strategies in display, indexing, and (locating) of material for the larger sites. Distinctions and management of instructors who teach at more than one site, as well as having material available at more than one site should also be more adequately addressed.
g) Cataloging Issues. Separate from authority issues are the wide variety of session defaults, call# verification, spine label prints, and a myriad of other requests which parallel the use of the bib and holdings in an efficient manner similar to UBR.
The Near Future, depending on which semester one might find one's self in, looms large in comparison to previous enhancement requests, which Dynix customers were often able to work around albeit not conveniently. Within the last 3-4 years new issues have drastically altered much of what we put on reserve and why, among them the following:
1) Copyright. More stringent copyright enforcement has become the norm in the past several years, despite the fact that the Copyright Act actually went into effect in 1978. Copyright free-text fields were added to the char-based reserve, but proved problematic to get at through customer-written RECALL reports, and proved useless on personally-owned items which the system deletes in stats and in structure on their withdrawal. Of course, it is the personally- owned items which have the heaviest concentration of need for copyright monitoring from semester to semester.
2) Electronic Reserve Systems. In addition to copyright, standalone electronic reserve software has permeated campuses, particularly for the use of personal material and image-based documents. While it may be advantageous to not simply duplicate the services of such software, some clear focus on how the library system can interact or interface with such systems is needed, not only for discussion, but for practical installations.
3) Smart Card Technology, Patron Authentication, and URL. Patron authentication, with all its pitfalls and lack of established standards within the smart card arena, has made some progress into the ILL/RSS modules. Patron Authentication is no less an issue, however, in accessing electronic reserve material. This is particularly true with the advent of the MARC 856 tag and the use of it to be able to direct a patron to one of several sites: perhaps a faculty home page, faculty notes, or, more importantly, journal articles placed on reserve which are readily available through fee-based services such as UnCover, FirstSearch, IAC, EBSCOHost, etc. which already have contracts with the host library for access.
4) Backlinking. For the purposes of this discussion, I define backlinking as the ability to take an html document, such as a bibliography, and provide urls as a part of the bibliographic citation, enabling the student or faculty member to immediately link back into the catalog at the bib or possibly the barcode level, immediately allowing for status (accessibility) information for a given item. It would be a boon to many bibliographic instruction librarians and faculty to be able to do this on their web pages and have the citation immediately hotlink to the bib record it represents. Use of this is really only limited by our creativity with it.
5) Imaging. I defer in knowledge to the many sites that have already implemented various strategies for the Dublin Core Metadata tags, particularly for images and visual items. The future of the Reserve (as well as the overall online catalog) needs to more robustly address, identify, and support imaging indexes, mapping, and multiple interfaces. Reserve functionality of the future may well be more akin to a roadmap, simply opening the gates to various routes where the information is stored, rather than identifying the physical shelf on which the books and notes are located. It will most likely be the Reserve module which will forge these paths under a coherent structure, based on course and instructor relatedness. We know from current experience if the Reserve module is not at the center of the development, external software (even that outside the library, perhaps at a departmental level), will quickly replace the functions of the Library Reserve philosophy.
At the moment, Dynix character-based module users, in particular, are suspended between two worlds: ease of use by students for temporary bibs, and the benefits of complex MARC formats for library-owned material. Moving toward a client-server environment, it would appear that we continue to want the best of both worlds. We cannot, however, simply import our past product designs into the new graphical environment. Our brave, new world should learn from our past shortcomings in the module, fully embracing the new approaches to information access and management.
To this end we look forward to opportunities which will enable us to design and use Reserve functionality with each and every module of the Sunrise product. Reserve module users will be called upon to provide JAD and other resources for design, development, and comprehensive testing in all the new modules associated with Sunrise. While the individual features and bugs of Horizon Reserve may differ from those of Dynix Reserve, we share with our Horizon partners a singular, focused need for a comprehensive and effective Reserve module, fully integrated among all modules and workflows.
It is hoped that this document will serve as a preliminary guidepost toward identifying both the old and the new functionality, spurring on others to participate in creativity and functional brainstorming. The evolution of the new Reserve needs to firmly support the needs based on past functionality, but also be able to provide durable and flexible interfaces for future reserve projects throughout the years to come.
Send comments to: suzyq@pittstate.edu
Susan M. Johns-Smith
Axe Library
Pittsburg State University
1605 South Joplin Street
Pittsburg, KS 66762
Phone: 620-235-4115
This page last updated Monday, 28-Oct-2002 15:58:27 CST