This year’s PWG team met for the first time during ELUNA 2014 in Montreal, Canada. At that meeting new members Abigale Baines, Barbara McArthur, Greg Gosselin and Kevin Collins were welcomed to the APWG. Bill Slauenwhite, Jeffery Sowder and Shelley Neville completed their terms on the working group, as did Carrie Currie our former Aleph Program Track Coordinator for the past few years. We thank them all for their service.
Members and positions for 2014/15 are:
* Felicity Walsh (Emory) – Chair
* Steve Bischof (Five Colleges) – Past Chair
* Kevin Collins (City University of New York) – Enhancement Coordinator
* Greg Gosselin (City University of New York)- Chair Elect/Vice Chair
* Corinna Baksik (Harvard) – Enhancement Coordinator-Elect
* Terri Winchcombe (Saint Mary’s) – ELUNA program committee ALEPH track coordinator
* Abigale Baines (Hampshire College) – ELUNA program committee ALEPH track coordinators
* Barbara McArthur (Texas Tech University) – Secretary
The PWG spent the first part of the year organizing and conducting this year’s ALEPH enhancement voting cycle. Thanks to Steve Bishof for providing unfailing guidance on this process, which enabled the group to complete this year’s enhancement cycle. Based on the success of last year’s process, we again used a more robust submission form to collect enhancement requests and we were able to deliver this year’s requests to Ex Libris for pointing by the end of August. This allowed us to have the second round of voting during the late fall and we were able to deliver the final lists of enhancement requests to Ex Libris by January. This year each IGeLU voting round followed shortly after the ELUNA round, and the two groups were able to ensure there was no overlap in their enhancement requests. In coming years, as we move to a Joint ELUNA/IGeLU voting cycle close communication will be necessary between the two groups. Given that the size of the voting pools are roughly equal, we a!
nticipate that this merger should be a smooth one and allow most widely needed enhancements to rise to the top of the future voting ranks.
The PWG provided feedback to the Ex Libris product development team on the following enhancement design specifications, which were the result of this year’s (2014-15) voting cycle:
* 3321 Cat – Create item records based on holdings
* 3025 Cat – Character conversion and non-filing indicators
* 3040 Sys – Access the Service Form from the Batch Queue node
* 323 3Auth – F3 or Ctrl+F3 on fields 100, 110, 111 and 700 710 711 should ignore subfield “e” an
* 3038 Sys – Allow the placement of “Alerts” on individual jobs
* 3043 Acq – Field validation for Order fields
We were lucky to have Abigail Baines and Terri Winchcombe volunteer to be the ELUNA 2015 Aleph Program Track Coordinators, taking over for Carrie Currie. We’re anxiously awaiting the final line up and hope that one or both will be willing to continue in this capacity in the next year(s). Finally, I would like to thank the Product Working Group members and the Steering Committee for making this a very productive year. I look forward to participating as Past-Chair for 2015-2016.
Respectfully submitted, Felicity Walsh Chair 2014-2015