[Yulcat-l] Voyager End-User Meeting

[Patricia Thurston]

Hello All.

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.

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.

1. The technical updates were about what Endeavor is doing;
2. The SIGs were about what Endeavor is not doing;
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.

On Saturday, April 22, we heard a panel discussion on The Future of 
the ILS, 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.

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.

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.
QUESTION: Are we moving from a shared cataloging environment to a 
market environment for bibliographic data?
QUESTION: How do we adjust to this new market environment?

Also
QUESTION: What training should we have, to meet the metadata needs of 
digital collections?

The two other sessions: Plunging into Perl While Avoiding the Deep 
End and Automated Cataloging Statistics Using Voyager MHLD and PhP 
and MySQL.  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.

There were many other sessions of interest. All the presentations 
will be on the Endeavor website by the middle of May.


Patricia Thurston
Team Leader, Slavic & East European Cataloging
Assistant Head, Catalog Department
Sterling Memorial Library
Yale University

Phone: (203) 432-8424
Fax: (203) 432-7231 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yulcat-l/attachments/20060503/5d813dc5/attachment.htm