Circulation Services Group Minutes May 20, 1997

Circulation Services Group (CSG)

Minutes of May 20th, 1997 / Curtis M Brown, Recorder
Rick Love, Chair

AGENDA

1) Announcements (R.Love)
2) Systems Office Report (P. Bertrang)
3) Circulation Services User's Manual (M. McDonald, A. Bourgeois)

I.  ANNOUNCEMENTS

Rick Love told the group that everyone on the circsupe reflector will be
receiving an updated version of the CARS Training Documentation written by
Giulia Sacco-Trujillo. 

Joyce Ford:

1.  Joyce informed everyone that patrons can now apply for their
Berkeley-Stanford Cooperative Library cards directly through the Web,
without having to go to the Service Desk. The card would be available the
next working day, to be picked up at the Service Desk.  The URL is
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/stanfapp.html 

2.  Summer session begins on May 27th.  Summer session students can come
to the Service Desk (or the Circulation Desk on the weekends) to be
entered into Gladis Circulation.  The library will be receiving lists of
enrolled students from Sproul for each of the sessions. 

3.  Joyce stressed that if you e-mail her to manually block a patron, make
sure to follow up and unblock the patron when the matter is resolved. 
Rebecca Vesterfelt pointed out that an easy way to remember to do this is
to place a *n note in Gladis Maintenance for Circ staff to remove the
manual block upon receipt of the book. 

4.  Joyce pointed out that a common mistake on the part of Circ staff is
to recall items or place searches for Reference-Use Only patrons
(Exception:holds/recalls should be done for gov. doc items.) Rick Love
commented that this has been a difficult training issue. With the
revolving door, everyone is constantly training new batches of student
employees and students without much experience tend to overlook such
technicalities; this rule is especially confusing since Gladis lets them
do it.  Penny pointed out that there is a legal issue involved: the
library houses government documents, which the public by law has access
to.  Rick suggested that Systems change Gladis Circulation such that circ
staff could not place a hold or search for Reference-Use patrons without a
supervisory logon.  Penny said to go ahead and propose it. **Please note:
The leaflet given out to Reference card holders explaining their borrowing
priviledges includes the following statement: "No recalls may be placed
on items charged out to other borrowers with the exception of government
documents, which may be recalled after circulating to another borrower for
one month." 

Marianne McDonald:

1.  Marianne and several others observed that there are more summer
courses placing things on reserve than there used to be.  Bernie responded
that if a branch notices an increase in library activity with respect to
previous summer sessions, it should be documented.  The Library receives
money from the University to support library services during the summer
sessions, and if we identify an overall trend we can use it in negotiating
future budgets. 

2.  Marianne gave Joe Catalano's regards to the whole group.  A musician
friend of Joe's is organizing a benefit activity for him at Hearst Hall. 
Marianne promised to keep the group posted. 

Norah Foster informed the group that PERI will be moving to autocirc this
summer.  A temporary trial period will begin shortly, during which manual
charge cards will be used as backup. 

Matt Offenbacher wanted to know what it means for Sundry Debtor Invoices
to be "charged back" to individual departments.  Loans and Receivables
pays for these bills before they've even collected from patrons.  If the
bill is not successfully collected within a certain time, it is charged
back to the department.  This is not of direct importance to circulation
staff; they should go on cancelling bills when items are returned,
regardless of whether said bill has been "charged back." 

Due to discharge backups common at the end of the semester, the CARS bill
holiday will last until June 16th.  Overdue notices and bill warnings will
continue to be sent out, however, and manual bills will be unaffected. 

Penny noted that the NRLF/Gladis merge is progressing, and that NRLF
barcodes are continually being added.  Once everything is in place, there
will be automatic tracking of NRLF items upon being discharged. 

Lea Mascarro asked what can be done with items on reserve for consecutive
semesters, to avoid the time-consuming work of res'ing on and off
extensive lists.  This is an especially cumbersome process when dealing
with non-library materials, as the created record is lost when the item is
res'ed off.  Marianne said that prepping for consecutive semesters could
be made possible in Gladis, but it wouldn't be a priority.  The most
efficient way to deal with this currently is to make a note, either
physically on the item or in Gladis, and then when the semester ends prep 
the item for the next semester before res'ing it off for the first.

II.  Systems Office Report (P. Bertrang)

March 24: Circ code, "L" (non-circ), assigned as default for four new
locations: ABI, COMP, MAGS, and WEB.  Also, all non-UCB NRLF items being
loaded into Gladis are being given the circ code "X" (1 year faculty, 2
months others), which will be the generic NRLF circ code. 

April 2: New program versions put in to support electronic resource
location codes (ABI, MAGS, COMP, WEB) and location codes for non-UCB
locations using NRLF. 

April 3: In March, an error was introduced that on a charge of a duplicate
barcode item, an erroneous message would appear that the call number could
not be located.  This was fixed. 

April 7: RFR command was putting garbage into the V/C in the *nX 
note.  This was fixed.

April 16: Paid CARS bills will be now be held in the system for 90 days
instead of 30 days, giving more time for payment reversals to be reflected
on the patron's inventory.  Records for any bills paid within the thirty
days prior will still be deleted on the 30-day schedule. 

May 1: New version of BRIEF display displays enhanced circulation 
statistics in V/C's.

May 5: In support of PERI/NEWS/MICRO coming up on autocirc, circ code
default for NEWS changed from "F" (semester all) to "G"(one month all). 
MATH circ code default for serials also changed from "M" (semester for
faculty, one week for others) to "W" (7-day non-renewable all).  Effective
May 22. 

May 8: In preparation for P/N/M unit going up on autocirc: 1) Grace
periods for NEWS and PERI changed to match MAIN's choices.  2) Security
checking changed to allow MAIN staff to do autocirc, reserves, holdings
edit, etc. for NEWS and PERI items, as they already can for UNDE and GRDS. 
Effective May 22. 

May 19: New versions of SHORT and LONG with corrected handling 
for the 856 field, plus accomodation of 530 and 555 per PSAG specs.

III.  Circulation Services User's Manual (M. McDonald, A Bourgeois)

Marianne McDonald, Ayana Bourgeois, Kate Fletcher, Laura Ng, Nensi
Braillo, and Rick Love have already mounted parts of the manual onto the
Web.  Several sections have yet to go up; they are working on them
currently.  Reserves will constitute a large part of the completed
project.  There will be links to online CARS information, and there will
be a guide to Circ subfields in Gladis Maintenance.  Gail Ford will be
doing the HTML'ing. 

Before he was hospitalized, Joe Catalano was working on mounting a
description of the various postcards Gladis sends out automatically. 
There were paper copies of this floating around some time ago; Kate asked
if anyone can get their hands on one of these that they forward it to the
manual committee.  It would be useful in completing Joe's project. 

If anyone has something they'd like to see in the Table of Contents, links
that they think should be added, or any suggestions in general, they
should be e-mailed to circmanu@library. 

The completed manual will be helpful in training employees, and will also
be a valuable reference tool both for library procedures and for policy
issues.  It will include multiple links to the Public Service Policy
Manual. 

**Next Meeting:  Tuesday, July 22, 1997  Location to be announced.

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