Minutes for 09/29/2015

• Karen Neville will take minutes for this meeting
• Minutes will be posted to the Marmot Wiki

Purpose of the Marmot Academic Committee (MAC)

• Formalize communications in our messages to Marmot; develop a strong consensus;strength of purpose ; Marmot has a large public library contingent--ensure that the Academics have a strong voice; empower the Academics; use the meetings to create a better means of communication between libraries and between the libraries and Marmot
• Explore the possibility of group purchasing
• Facilitate exchanges (of staff between libraries)
• Develop best practices
• Pika issues are our current priority, but do not need to be formalized in the charge as we hope to move beyond them soon
• Martha will write up a statement of purpose and send it to the committee for review.

Voting Protocols

• Each voting member will be able to rank priories when dealing with lists that need prioritization
• Other issues may be single-institution votes
• Caution about needing to vote on issues without seeking input from library staff not on the committee; need about a week and a half to be able to take issues back to internal staff meetings
• Martha Talman will revise the list of Pika issues and send it to the committee for review before putting together a Survey Monkey poll for each voting member to rank the issues.
• Discussed adding additional library staff to the MAC email list; decided to use Marmot Academics for communicating to a wider audience (and encouraged all members of this committee to do so) but will keep MAC list for committee business

 Pika issues

•  A number of the items on the list are search related
• Tammy Poquette will set up a Google document that all can use to add searchesthat don’t produce expected results
• We often use Classic; Sierra; Prospector because we are unsure of the results that Pika will return
• Need an OPAC that acts like an academic catalog: phrase searching, Boolean searching
• Search needs to take scope into account when returning results (e.g. if publication date is limited, do not return grouped items when the item that meets the publication date is only held at another library)
• Advanced search - needs to be easier to find; should not require the user to build out the search (display more search boxes at once), should include all facets as options in building the search
• Pika wants to read minds & always give lots of results - often burying the appropriate results deep in the list of results - few and even zero results are sometimes appropriate answers

More control of item display

• Crazy statuses
• Pika does not prefer the circulating copy when displaying statuses (problems with special collections, microform on serials records)
• Want to be able to highlight call number or other parts of the record
• Each library should collect ideas on needs for the display - can be discussed on the listserv and also at the next meeting
• Need to know what things we are capable of changing already