SFX/ Metalib Day School - 20 Oct 09

As with last year's day school this was a really interesting and useful day, especially being able to speak to people who actually work on the systems and see what other institutions are doing.

Metasearch through Xerxes (Graham Seaman - RHU)

RHU have implemented Xerxes on top of Metalib to provide a improved user interface following negative feedback from the NSS. Set up had been fairly straightforward - at RHU it was done over one summer and knowledge of PHP and XSLT was needed. No formal feedback from users as yet but informal feedback suggests users like the new interface (and although not promoted the old Metalib interface can still be accessed). I think it's a definite improvement on the current Metalib interface but as someone in the audience pointed out - why are we having to user Xerxes to do this, why don't Ex Libris improve the Metalib interface? You can see the RHU implementation at http://xerxes.rhul.ac.uk/

SFX & Shibboleth (James Fisher - Coventry Uni)
Coventry Uni moved to Shibboleth from August 09, they've not yet shibbolised Metalib so the presentation focused on the issues with SFX and e-journals. They'd come across problems linking to resources authenticating by Shibboleth, particularly off campus: inconsistent terminology in resources meant that finding the correct page for login was difficult and lead to an increase in queries from users. They took a few steps to solve this locally: creating a web page for login info for each resource, ameding the authentication note on the SFX menu and making it more prominent. In the longer term they were looking at using WAYFless URLs. Although this would mean log in was needed on and off campus users should only need to login once each session (and not all providers use WAYFless URLs to article level yet). Parsers in SFX could be changed to make WAYFless linking possible, one parser for OUP has already been created by a customer which Ex Libris said they could add to the Global KB. Ron Lozinsky said that Ex Libris were committed to implementing Shibboleth authentication in SFX but it is very problematic.

bX at Manchester Uni (Andy Land)
Manchester have committed to a trial of bX (reccommender service) for 1 year - it was supported by management as it met a number of objectives including exploiting usage data (maybe this was where we went wrong with bX - trying to sell it to the subject librarians first rather than the managers!). It emerged in their initial trial that SFX data needed to be completely up to date (again something that affected our trial on our test instance) for it to work well and that customisation was needed to the SFX menu design. It's still early in the trial so no formal review has been carried out but it's felt it will be good for researchers starting out on a project. Evaluation of the suggestions found that you were most likely to get recommendations for articles in leading journals, appearing high in results in Google and popular databases and from subjects with a strong US interest (poss because the initial usage data was mainly from US institutions?).

SFX KB updates reports (Anna Grigson - RHU)
Anna reported on the way that they'd found worked best for dealing with the KB update reports. As Anna is the only member of staff who uses the SFX admin interface they use the text reports. These are imported into Access (the reports got too big to deal with in Excel) and is then filtered against a spreadsheet which details how each target is dealt with (e.g. what needs to be checked, which ones auto-active). The reports are then sent out to staff for checking and any changes are sent back to Anna to make on SFX. Processing and filtering the reports takes about 2 hours.

Importing SFX records into LMS
Various speakers presented on importing SFX records into various LMS (Millenium, Voyager, Aleph, Talis). The overall impression was that whichever system you're using and whether you use MarcIt or MarcEdit it's not a straightforward process. Talis being our LMS I was most interested in the talk by Chris Keene (Uni of Sussex). They had managed to import the records into Talis (using Marcit) which seemed to be a slow process which required lots of testing and editing. However, they hadn't developed processes for keeping the records up to date and as they has now moved to Aquabrowser where you can upload a file which is updated every night this was no longer a problem. We've already accepted that whilst not ideal having no ejournals in the catalogue and directing users to the SFX AZ list isn't ideal at least they're (fairly) accurate but these talks confirmed it's not a path worth pursuing (unless we suddenly have lots of time).

Telstar Project (Owen Stephens - Open University)
The Telstar project is looking at how references are integrated into the VLE (moodle). They are considering how to provide persistent links to web resources, including websites and investigating using OpenURLs and SFX to do this.

Finished off the day with a quick look around the British Library, including looking at the ebook readers they had on display (unfortunately a couple were broken but screens were nice and ) and a delayed journey back to Manchester.