8th Annual ICAU Meeting Aalborg University, Denmark 8.-10- September 1997

ICAU 97. Opening Session. Monday, September 8th.

Alessandra Bezzi

 

ICAU ALEPH development procedure

 

Status report 1997

 

 

At the 7th ICAU meeting in Jerusalem 1996, the ICAU members agreed to renew and modify the ALEPH development procedure as everybody of us have known from the precious information pages on ICAU server.

It was also decided to constitute an Editorial Board of members specializing in particular Aleph modules, whose members are:

 

Acquisitions Rita Kuemin, SANDOZ, Switzerland

Serials Passana Alexandrowicz, Tel-Aviv University, Israel

Cataloguing Iva Pribramska, National Library, Czech Republic

CLA, Auth. & Ma Katarzyna Nowosad, Sejm, Poland

OPAC (telnet & GUI) Anne Sandfaer, DNLB, Denmark

OPAC (WWW) Lucia Casanova, CSITA, Italy

Circulation Alessandra Bezzi, Bocconi University, Italy

ILL Else Marie Poulsen, Aalborg University, Denmark

 

The requests had been directly submitted via a WWW form running on ICAU server implemented and maintained by the ICAU Secretariat and it was really an hard work made by Martin Svoboda.

 

At the same way the detailed information about number, frequency, distribution of requests by modules, dates and submitters are, once again, available on ICAU server.

The motto of ICAU server is: "As we all know, the insufficient communication is a source of many disappointments...." in this case it means that during the whole editorial process requests have been always available and the most relevant statistical information about ALEPH development procedure and his results are on-line readable from long time to everybody and I think that is not necessary to repeat it to you now.

 

Here I would speak only about our hidden work during past months and the feedback we have received from it.

The whole work was done electronically through a dedicated e-mail list made by Lucia Casanova.

Our work was really ticklish and as everything done for the first time surely it could be done better. By ourselves we think it was a really positive experience and a great opportunity to know better reality outside ours and at the same time we are, just a bit, disappointed by the result.

We feel the new procedure could be the right approach to manage users requests but

we think also there are several things that should be modified to obtain a useful answer from Ex-libris, in fact this year we cannot be really satisfied with the result. Before to tell you our feedback I would only remark that 22 ICAU members have submitted requests and more than double have voted for them.

 

To list some of problems we have encountered, divided into internal problems and with Ex-libris:

 

Internal problems:

 

Duplicate requests
We have received several similar requests or "small" requests that should be part of a unique "big" request from institution of the same country. We think it should be better to put more and more emphasis on role of national groups. According to my experience as Italian user, we have discussed all Italian requests together into a "pre-editing" phase (and it has been very useful) before each one of us will submit their requests. We have made it by the way of an Italian Aleph Users Listserv like Aleph-int.

Cross-requests:
From 125 submitted requests we have obtained 145 requests because some of these were related to more than one module. It has been necessary to define among EB, before to start editing process, who are people responsible to edit cross-requests in order to don’t duplicate editing efforts.

Past requests marked "will be implemented" but not yet implemented
It is necessary to know better what Ex-libris is doing regarding Aleph debugging and development in order to don’t edit or send to Ex-libris as requests to do things have already done or are doing in some patch as it is happened this year.

Time for editing
It’s absolutely necessary to have enough time to handle the requests in a proper way and to have a good coo-operation with EXL.

Unique list of requests
It has been useful to have prepared a "final list" unique and to have sent it to Steering Committee and Ex-Libris in spite of many lists with possible overlaps and so on.

 

Problems with Ex-Libris:

 

We didn’t know what was our interface from Ex-Libris for long time.

We didn’t have any possibility to discuss anything with them and nobody of them had contacted us to clarify nothing but in spite of this everybody of us had had the "pleasure" to read Ex-libris comment like "request unclear".

the agreed time table wasn’t respected

the large number of requests sent to Ex-Libris gave them the "pretext" to don’t examine carefully our needs.

 

On the basis of this problems and of the "empirical" solutions we have found on working we have collect our feedback on a proposal to modify present procedure to discuss with you.

 

 

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