HEADS OF TECHNICAL SERVICES (HOTS) GROUP

LAUC STATEWIDE REPRESENTATIVE'S REPORT TO LAUC FALL ASSEMBLY

Prepared by Tony Harvell (UCSD) - LAUC Statewide Representative to HOTS

Since the Spring Assembly, HOTS has had two conference calls and one in-person meeting in Oakland on October 16. A number of issues are being dealt with the by the interest groups reporting to HOTS:

Acquisitions Common Interest Group (ACIG - established in 2004) and the Cataloging and Metadata Common Interest Group (CAMCIG - established in July 2006). In addition, the Shared Cataloging Program Common Advisory Committee also reports to HOTS.

The major issues that HOTS is confronting are coming out of recommendations from the BSTF. SOPAG and the UL's have charged the BSTF to prepare "core specifications" for a shared UC catalog by end of the year. The BSTF group (some of whom are HOTS members) have turned to HOTS to identify specific functionality and services that are needed in the next generation of a shared catalog. In addition to the "value added" features identified in the BSTF report and the more robust ways of searching - HOTS is recommending that the following issues be addressed in these specifications: the coordination of selection for collection development, the inclusion of order records in the database, the ability to provide FRBR functionality, authority control, “get help” assistance for users, the ability to manipulate data for ingest and export, the ability to repurpose records rather than to load records multiple times from the campuses, the ability to provide detailed holdings information, real-time update of records, and a full range of user services, including “request.” HOTS was also charged by SOPAG with looking at OCLC as a single cataloging tool/data source for the new shared UC Catalog. This issue has been delegated to CAMCIG for exploration and they are being asked to report back to HOTS by November 15.

In addition to the BSTF related activities, a small group within HOTS is looking at developing a prototype for cooperative technical processing of specialized materials (especially for languages where expertise might reside at one or two campuses). Currently, they are exploring a small pilot project for Japanese language cataloging.

HOTS has also established a CONSER funnel to allow greater participation of all UC campuses to contribute CONSER-level records to OCLC. This project is being coordinated by UCLA's Valerie Bross. HOTS has also continued to provide guidance to the UC Shared Print Program, the UC ERMS implementation of Verde, and for providing URLs in Melvyl for works digitized by the Open Content Alliance project. They also explored two projects to cooperatively license Marcive's "Documents Without Shelves" product and the "ISSN Portal."

October 12, 2006