Acquisitions/Serials meeting, Glasgow, Oct 1996
Tony Kidd (T.Kidd@lib.gla.ac.uk)
Mon, 11 Nov 1996 15:25:39 GMT
Attached are some notes on the meeting on III Acquisitions/Serials held in Glasgow last month, followed by a list of enhancements suggested by those present at the meeting. I would be grateful if those sites represented, and others interested in Acquisitions/Serials, could 'vote' on these enhancements, by emailing me back, ranking each suggestion from 1 (low priority) to 5 (high priority) [one set of votes per site]. Please also contact me if you think anything has been omitted, or is unclear. Once votes have been received, by Fri 22 Nov if possible, I will forward the results to the Acquisitions and Serials Enhancement Co-ordinators in the States, and prepare a report for the EIUG meeting early next year, and for possible direct transmission to III.
Tony Kidd.
Innopac EIUG Acquisitions/Serials meeting, Glasgow University Library,
Friday 4 October 1996
Present: Malcolm Ferguson, Christine Purcell (Durham); Colin Galloway, Tony Kidd, Karen Stevenson (Glasgow); Jenny Harrison, Christopher Moll (Hull); Lesley Young (Inst Advanced Legal Studies); Luke Davey (Inst Commonwealth Studies); Julia Burke, Mieko Yamaguchi (Univ Wales Bangor).
Apologies: Margaret Harvey (City); Christine Stockton (Univ College Chester).
1. Introduction
Tony Kidd explained that the purpose of the meeting was a) to exchange experiences of the III Acquisitions and Serials modules, and b) to consider enhancements for these modules, and discuss the most efficient way to promote these enhancements.
2. Site reports
a) Glasgow
Acquisitions: 65% of monograph orders were being sent by EDI, using the US BISAC format (and not the UK Tradacoms format). UK/European suppliers used by Glasgow that have been able to adapt to BISAC include John Smiths, Dawson, Cawdor and B&MBC, with Houtschild of the Netherlands soon to follow. US suppliers used by Glasgow for electronic ordering are Coutts and Ambassador. The possibility of suppressing 245|e and 260|a from EDI was under investigation, as this additional bulky information was causing problems for some suppliers. Acquisitions staff download records at the order stage from CURL, RLIN, or OCLC, or, where necessary, create records.
Serials: Electronic invoicing had been successfully implemented with Blackwells and Swets. Electronic claiming was under development with the same agents, and should be implemented shortly. Conversion of serials receipt and financial data from the previous system had worked well, although with various problems. The serials claims system had various shortcomings - see Enhancements below. Glasgow found the easiest way to claim systematically was to create a list based on the CLAIMON date, then use that review file to update records and claim where necessary.
b) University of Wales Bangor
Acquisitions: Bangor use output accounting vouchers to pass details electronically to their Finance Office for payment - this works well, although intricate offsetting entries due to errors, etc, are sometimes necessary. Monograph orders are keyed in, then overlaid on receipt by OCLC records. One major problem is the inability of III to cope well with single-copy orders where two or more funds each pay for a percentage of the order.
Serials: Bangor have implemented electronic invoicing with Blackwells and Swets, but have had to exclude titles with VAT, which is otherwise spread across all titles on an invoice. Serials have been given the order status g, to allow encumbering (and disencumbering) each year: from this year, the order statuses c and d will be used for renewed orders, so that encumbrance will be at the title/order level. The majority of other libraries use status f, as serials encumbering is not required. The report to estimate next year's subscriptions, based on two years of payment history, was not working well. Bangor might be interested in using RoweCom, who require a commitment of £10K of orders before setting up UK pricing, etc; and also may be interested in SISAC barcode checkin.
c) Hull
Acquisitions: All order data (but not bibliographic details) had had to be rekeyed at time of going live with III in August 1995. Hull were using EDI for orders with one supplier, but with problems. Standing orders were being dealt with on III, with details of what was received being entered as a note in the payment line.
Serials: Order and Checkin records were being added to III, with the expectation that all titles would have been dealt with before too long: dailies and weeklies had been added first, and the letter S had now been reached working through the alphabet. Problems were being experienced with predicting expected dates. Hull will shortly begin to use the III binding system.
d) Inst Commonwealth Studies
ICS had been active since January 1996, and were importing records from OCLC via CURL: some problems with this might be eased by re-examing the MARC load tables. ICS were having problems with title key order checking with some duplication not being discovered, due to differences in punctuation or hyphenation.
e) Inst Advanced Legal Studies
Serials: IALS noted various checkin record problems e.g. only one line of the NOTE field appears when checking in issues. There is also a limit of three lines in the OPAC display for the LIB HAS field. In the binding system, pull slips print out just one title per page.
f) Durham
Acquisitions: Training for Acquisitions and Serials was due later in October. Durham asked about use of order and checkin codes: advice was given to leave at least one code free in each record for various temporary uses.
g) City [Email correspondence]
City went live with Acquisitions in January 1996, and are preparing to go live with Serials. City asked for enhanced displays of orders when using the combined receipting and invoicing procedure, and during claims/cancellations procedures. These were discussed by those present, who could offer no immediate solution to City's problems, although it was felt that a future session, particularly on claiming procedures, would be useful.
h) University College, Chester [Email correspondence]
Interested in training and sharing experiences of downloading records from OCLC, especially using the Windows interface. Also asked about attending the IUG in California. The feeling in the meeting was that this was worthwhile, despite the expense, because of the training that was available at the IUG, as well as the contact with other III libraries and with III staff. Room sharing was sometimes possible to reduce expenses, and could perhaps be arranged via the EIUG or IUG lists.
3. Enhancements
The meeting felt that the question of enhancements, in addition to requests by individual libraries, should be pursued both through the US coordinators of requests (Doina Farkas for Acquisitions, Aimee Algier for Serials), and via the EIUG, with perhaps direct discussion with III staff at the IUG Meeting in March 1997.
The meeting felt that enhancements were most urgently needed in the invoicing/financial information area, although other areas were also important. A list of enhancements is given below, with cross-references where appropriate to the existing lists of enhancement requests co-ordinated in the US, available via the IUG home page at http://exlibris.colgate.edu/InnovativeUsersGroup/
These enhancements are not at present in prority order.
ACQUISTIONS
1. Provide ability to retrieve an invoice (and give title by title information, including purchase order number, price, and note; plus discount, carriage, etc) by keying the invoice number or vendor. [AQ6]
Priority?
2. Allow searching of Order records by fund, vendor, or invoice number. (Some of this can be done through Create List, but often a faster, direct check would be helpful).
Priority?
3. Allow a single copy order to be charged to more than one fund, on a percentage basis. [AQ15, AQ72]
Priority?
4. Partial receipt: during receipt, there is no indication of partial receipt for multiple copy orders, therefore problems with claiming any remaining copies.
Priority?
5. Vendor searching by "text in vendor records" often gives several hits. Facility to look at brief vendor address details from the list of hits, without having to quit and search each hit by vendor code in order to identify required vendor, is highly desirable.
Priority?
6. Order Record: display Paid lines in reverse chronological order.
Priority?
7. Order Record: ability to link an order record to more than one bibliographic record. [AQ35]
Priority?
8. Order Record: provide a fixed-format date field (CANDATE?) to store the cancellation date, rather than putting it in an INT NOTE, to make it easier to select Order records by cancellation date, e.g. for archiving/deletion.
Priority?
9. Provide ability to perform a "rapid update" type operation on a review file of order records, in order to Write orders or generate Claims - at present, each record has to be updated individually.
Priority?
10. Provide ability to add more than one payment to an Order record without having to post after each update - at present, this is only possible for Order records which have no encumbering.
Priority?
11. Enhanced display of data e.g. during invoice processing and claims/cancellations. [AQ17]
Priority?
12. EDI: adopt international EDIFACT standard when available.
Priority?
13. Finance: allow online access to information on appropriations, etc for funds - dates, amounts, notes (this information is printed out with payfiles at the time, but is then not available online).
Priority?
SERIALS
14. Serials claiming: retain claim note with relevant checkin box, so that note can be referred to in future.
Priority?
15. Serials claiming: allow more than 21 characters for claim note: need for, say, 200 characters [AQ56].
Priority?
16. Serials claiming: allow differential time periods for first and subsequent claims (e.g. first claim may be necessary within 30 days of expected date, but a second claim may not be relevant until 60 days later), as is possible for monograph claims. [SC40]
Priority?
17. Serials electronic invoices: allow allocation of tax (e.g. VAT) to only some lines on an invoice.
Priority?
18. Serials electronic invoices: allow invoice number to be changed during processing.
Priority?
19. Amend method of calculating next year's EPRICE for serials using payment history: present method assumes that if there is more than one payment in a year (for an additional charge, etc), there is more than one copy on order.
Priority?
20. Serials checkin: allow display of more than one line of NOTE during checkin.
Priority?
21. Serials checkin: allow for alphabetical 'numbering' of serials issues during checkin. [SC1]
Priority?
22. Serials checkin: increase maximum number of boxes per checkin card to, say, 100. [SC5]
Priority?
23. Serials checkin: when modifying boxes, allow backspacing on single line (for dates), and to previous lines, without having to start again. [SC24]
Priority?
24. Binding: allow printing of more than one title per page on pull slips.
Priority?
GENERAL
25. Enable use of Display Previous Search option, now available for OPAC, in Acquisitions and Serials modules (and would probably be useful throughout system). Even more useful would be a Previous Screen option, to allow backtracking through the last, say, six screens displayed.
Priority?
26. Ability to download files from Create List of Order and/or Checkin records to database or spreadsheet software, through, perhaps, providing comma delimited files, and stripping currency signs from acquisitions reports.
Priority?
27. Create List: allow combination of data from all different types of record, starting from any type - at present can combine any type of record with Bib Record, but cannot e.g. combine Checkin Record data with an Order Record list (presumably because several Order and/or Checkin records can be attached to the same Bib record, but enhancement would still be very useful).
Priority?
28. More lines of LIB HAS info should appear in the OPAC.
Priority?
Contact details of participants (email, telephone):
Julia Burke (j.m.burke@bangor.ac.uk, 01248 382915)
Luke Davey (lukeday@sas.ac.uk, 0171 580 5876)
Malcolm Ferguson (m.j.ferguson@durham.ac.uk, 0191 374 3013)
Colin Galloway (c.galloway@lib.gla.ac.uk, 0141 330 6775)
Jenny Harrison (j.m.harrison@lib.hull.ac.uk, 01482 465441)
Margaret Harvey (m.harvey@city.ac.uk, 0171 477 8000 ext 4009)
Tony Kidd (t.kidd@lib.gla.ac.uk, 0141 330 6778)
Christopher Moll (c.moll@lib.hull.ac.uk, 01482 465446)
Christine Purcell (c.w.purcell@durham.ac.uk, 0191 374 3030)
Karen Stevenson (k.stevenson@lib.gla.ac.uk, 0141 330 6724)
Christine Stockton (c.stockton@chester.ac.uk, 01244 375444 ext 2255)
Mieko Yamaguchi (m.yamaguchi@bangor.ac.uk, 01248 382970)
Lesley Young (l-young@sas.ac.uk, 0171 637 1731)
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Tony Kidd, Head of Serials, Glasgow University Library,
Hillhead Street, Glasgow G12 8QE, Scotland, UK.
Email: t.kidd@lib.gla.ac.uk
Tel: 0141 330 6778
Fax: 0141 330 4198
HTML document created by Mieko Yamaguchi from the original message sent to lis-eur-iug by Tony Kidd