Minutes of TRELLIS PAC Group

Agenda:

1. DECISION to leave all Voyager defaults for limiting by language (about 401 languages), since we do collect (will collect in future) in many different languages, and it is hard to predict when a user will want to search this way. The inconvenience to users of having such a big list should not be great, as most searches do not require language limiting.

2. DECISION to add z sub-field (unspecified, multiple format material) to Medium limiting. This is used for archival collections with multiple formats.

3. DECISION to add a message on the limit help screens to indicate that some (a lot) of material has an undefined date of "19uu". The help screen message could read: "Not all materials will be found when limiting by date, as older materials may have an unspecified publication date of 19uu."

4. DECISION to all summary holdings and index holdings for serial records to display in a wrap-around, rather than a line-by-line, format. Some of the records involved have extensive notes in these fields, and displaying line by line would lengthen the record display considerably. The number of users who need the detail in the summary holdings and index holdings fields is not large in comparison with the number of users who would be confused and inconvenienced by excessively lengthy serial records displays.

5. DECISION not to expand the keyword index options at present. The default options are extensive enough to meet known user and staff needs, and we cannot identify the true need for additional access points for keyword searching until we have extensive experience with the "live" system.

6. DECISION to recommend that the Reserve course listings be sorted by subject rather than by institution. Since the system only sorts on the first letter of each entry, users would have to sort through many more records if they are searching by institution (all of Guelph's Reserve holdings, for example) than if they are searching by subject (all TUG courses starting with Biology, for example). The owning display field should quickly help students to sub-sort by institution within any subject grouping. Diane will discuss this further with Vera at WLU.

7. The response (a message on TUGALL from Debbie Tytko) to the PAC group from the Acquisitions group about serials publications patterns was detailed and useful. Inputting of serials publications patterns is now well underway.

8. DECISION to add an example in the help.ini file to show that the symbol ! can be used to indicate "NOT" in boolean search syntax. Jan Brett's suggested example of "concertos !Mozart" is a good one. Similarly, Deborah Wills has suggested the example of "world wide web" AND libraries for the advanced boolean help screen. Both these examples should be added.