Developing Guidelines for the Bath Profile

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Developing Guidelinesfor the Bath Profile

• John Gilby Fraser Nicolaides
• M25 Link Team

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M25 Link Background

• M25 Consortium established in 1993
• Membership originally within Londons M25 orbital
  motorway
• Now covers larger region
• Activities include-
• access borrowing
• Mutual support/collaboration
• staff development
• etc.
• Consortium identified a need for easier resource
  discovery

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From a project

• M25 Link began in 1998 to create clump of 6
  London HE libraries
• Funded by JISC as part of eLib Phase 3 Programme
• Investigating holdings issues, serials and
  interoperability
• Showed that the clump was feasible
• Evaluation of user issues

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to a service

• Part funding to finish the job
• InforM25
• Go live in November 2001
• Promotion
• Maintain service and provide cascade training
• Continue with technical issues
• All with average of 2 FTE

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Catalogues on InforM25

• 29 Z-servers representing 31 institutions
• 8 to be added when available
• Multi-vendor (7)
• Range of institutions
• from large old new universities
• to smaller specialist colleges
• over 120 site libraries
• over 20 of UK HE provision

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From blueprints

• Blueprints
• to help systems librarians
• to get some standardisation
• same attribute settings (not Bath)
• Z39.50 workshops

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to Bath

• Bath Guidelines
• Bath Profile Concertation Day, London 1999
• Funded by the UK Joint Information Systems
  Committee (JISC)
• Constituted a M25 Link Project deliverable

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Scope of Guidelines
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Content of Guidelines

• A series of system-specific documents,
  describing
• level of current potential compliance
• opportunities for effecting local modifications
• possible future developments.

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Areas covered by the survey

• Functional Area A Basic bibliographic search
  retrieval
• Search types Record syntaxes
• Functional Area B Bibliographic holdings search
  retrieval
• Holdings Schema and associated objects
• Not Functional Area C Cross-domain search
  retrieval

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Methodology

• Direct consultation with vendors
• Advantages
• Information on current potential capabilities
• Information on projected developments.
• Disadvantages
• No information offered
• Hard facts from the fiction department...

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Results of survey

• Variability of Bib-1 support
• Historical lack of a core profile
• Taliss use of MODELS

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Unsupported search typesand available indexes

• Three commonly problematic search types
• Normalized author (Structure attribute 101 Name
  (normalized))
• Standard Identifier (alternative support for ISBN
  and ISSN Use attributes)
• Date of publication (restriction of Relation
  attribute to 3 Equal)
• Index availability or creation

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Default behaviours

• Replacement of submitted attribute(s) with
  Z-server default(s).
• A now redundant pragmatism?

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Support for preferred syntaxes

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Holdings Schema

• Commitment to achieving compliance at Level 0 of
  Area B.
• The easier migration path from the OPAC syntax to
  the Level 1 Holdings Schema, etc.

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Statements of commitment

• Strategy 1 Attaining full(er) compliance
• Strategy 2 Conditional, partial adoption
• Ex Libris (Aleph), Talis

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Push and Pull factors

• Push - customer demand
• Horizon customers
• An extremely influential Voyager customer
• Texas State and Unicorn.
• Pull - vendors Z-client gateway products
• Ex Libris MetaLib
• SIRSI iLink/iBistro
• Endeavor ENCompass
• Talis UnityWeb

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Conclusion

• Ongoing activities to enhance levels of
  conformance.
• Perceived stability of the Bath Profile.
• Demands from vendors customer organisations.