PSAG Conference Call Sep 25, 2007

Agenda and Resulting Actions

1. Action follow-up from Aug.10 meeting
   •  UofT discovery layer RFI process has concluded. A few people from other OCUL institutions attended the demos either in person or virtually:  Waterloo, Windsor, Queen's, Ryerson, York.  In the end it seemed that a working group including PSAG members was not needed at this point.  Alan Darnell will draft a report back to directors, including questions/comments about approaching the discovery layer OCULly, and there will be discussion of this at the SPOD meeting on Sep.27.  Alan had suggested that this could be an addendum to the Scholr 2.0 paper and discussion, but PSAG sees this is a separate report. 
   • Scholars Portage white paper is receiving comments, and Leslie Weir will encourage discussion amongst OCUL directors.
   • SFX:  Statistics are on the wiki as a child of Public Services Advisory Group Terms & Members.  Kate and Dana will send out information about the SFX survey.
   • User panel:  The UofT development is on hold pending privacy policy approval.  Scholars Portal staff began looking at Joomla and Moodle as alternative options but there would still need to be development work, and given that they're still missing a programmer that's not possible at the moment.  Kate estimates it will be at least a couple of months before a user panel system is ready for us to use.
   • Kate has posted on the wiki the answer to the question about discrepancies between databases on native platforms and Illumina, and sent a message about it to the Scholars Portal list. 
   • RACER:  Dana is working on getting a meeting planned with Sue and/or Amy concerning PSAG's connection with RACER EUIWG.
   • PSAG meetings:  Dates circulated by Martha (Sep.25, Oct.22, Nov.16) ok except for Nov.16, which will be changed.
2. OCUL-IR evaluation
   • At the May 3/07 OCUL-IR meeting, there was discussion of undertaking careful evaluation of content gaps and overlaps.  Faye Abrams checked with Martha regarding involving PSAG in an evaluation process.  PSAG members agree that they could have a role in designing a process that asks users what they want, ideally with the proposed user panel.  In terms of involvement of public services librarians in content evaluation, PSAG members think that would/should happen at the institutional level.
3. Scholars Portal Day
   • PSAG suggestions:  discovery layer session involving a group from Denmark with a Peter Binkley connection (see Mita's comment below), and/or something about the Oakville Public Library (Gail Richardson) implementation of Bibliocommons; a discussion of the ideas presented in Scholr2.0.  In general terms, the purpose of the day needs to be made clear; some feel that if you're on top of things you should already know about what's being presented... is it intended as a forum to update those people not closely involved, or to discuss future directions, or both?  Feedback on location:  good that it's in downtown Toronto, too hard to get to if it's somewhere like Guelph-Humber.
4. MyResearch feature in Illumina
   • Martha had circulated to PSAG the issues that Alan and Kate have identified; PSAG members have not heard any feedback at their institutions.
5. Subgroup updates (if any in addition to actions covered in #1 above):
   1. User panel
   2. Discovery Tools / Scholars Portage
      • Martha will send PSAG the catalogue interface requirements included in Queen's RFP. 
      • Kate will respond to the query of Sep.24 regarding data missing from the ejournals@scholarsportal index.
   3. RACER
   4. RefWorks
   5. SFX  Actions: ##* All PSAG members look at the SFX statistics information posted on the wiki and send questions/comments to our email list before our next conference call.  Dana and Kate will query the SFX list regarding any questions about these stats and what else would be useful for individual libraries and for OCUL as a whole.
      • Mita will speak with Dana about an SFX-RACER connection implemented at Windsor, to see how it relates to other SFX-RACER development, and then with Art Rhyno about sharing the Windsor development via the SPOT wiki.
6. Next meeting:  Tue, Oct 16, 9:15am