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Hello All. <br><br>
A couple of people have suggested I post my impressions of the Annual
Voyager End-User's Meeting (in Chicago) to Yul-Cat. This year was my
first to attend. The meeting is held annually, in Chicago, at a
hotel very near the O'Hare airport (directly under the landing flight
path, actually). Nearly 900 people attended this year, all from
institutions that use Endeavor products. <br><br>
The conference program included sessions on technical updates (presented
by Endeavor staff), "SIG"s (Special Interest Groups) for each
of the modules and other Endeavor products, and sessions that presented
ideas for getting things done in Voyager.<br><br>
1. The technical updates were about what Endeavor is doing;<br>
2. The SIGs were about what Endeavor is not doing;<br>
3. The other sessions were presented by librarians who found a way to get
something done that couldn't be done by an Endeavor product for one
reason or another. Many of these sessions presented ideas from much
smaller libraries than ours, but I did find three sessions particularly
interesting. <br><br>
On Saturday, April 22, we heard a panel discussion on <i>The Future of
the ILS, </i>with Karen Calhoun (Cornell), Roland Dietz (Endeavor), and
John S. Miller (University of Kansas). They discussed Karen's
report for the Library of Congress, as well as some of the
responses. The panelists discussed the changing needs and
expectations of library users, and the need for libraries to respond to
these changes. They also talked about the increasing economic constraints
many libraries face, the need to retrain catalogers so they could work
with digital collections, and increased need for training support staff
in traditional cataloging tasks.<br><br>
Roland Dietz talked about how these trends are changing Endeavor's plans
for development. The ILS market has plateaued, and Endeavor is adapting
its research and development efforts to meet these changes. They are
developing a "Discovery Suite" that will focus on web and
digital resources. According to Dietz, Endeavor is "becoming more of
a service-based company; less of a product-based company". The
economic model of the industry is changing, and that change is affecting
Endeavor's relationship with its customers. <br><br>
I came away from this session thinking about how we are now also changing
the way we relate to our bibliographic utilities, and the increased use
of vendor cataloging data. <br>
QUESTION: Are we moving from a shared cataloging environment to a market
environment for bibliographic data? <br>
QUESTION: How do we adjust to this new market environment? <br><br>
Also<br>
QUESTION: What training should we have, to meet the metadata needs of
digital collections? <br>
<br>
The two other sessions: <i>Plunging into Perl While Avoiding the Deep End
</i>and <i>Automated Cataloging Statistics Using Voyager MHLD and PhP and
MySQL. </i>The Perl session was very interesting, and would be
valuable for running reports for cataloging. The basic Perl
scripting seems very well suited to the cataloger's mind
(detail-oriented). The second session talked about using PhP and
MySQL for generating reports of cataloging statistics. One library
was recording statistical data in the 9xx tags of the bibliographic
records. Later, a query could be run to pull the statistics. Both
sessions pointed out the value of catalogers learning new skill sets and
having access to information in the Voyager tables.<br><br>
There were many other sessions of interest. All the presentations will be
on the Endeavor website by the middle of May. <br><br>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
Patricia Thurston<br>
Team Leader, Slavic & East European Cataloging<br>
Assistant Head, Catalog Department<br>
Sterling Memorial Library<br>
Yale University<br><br>
Phone: (203) 432-8424<br>
Fax: (203) 432-7231</body>
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