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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 London’s 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

• Talis’s use of MODELS

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Unsupported search types…and 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 commitmentStrategy 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.