| ZIG October 2001 | Developing Guidelines for the Bath Profile John Gilby & Fraser Nicolaides M25 Link Team

| ZIG October 2001 | 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

| ZIG October 2001 | 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

| ZIG October 2001 | …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

| ZIG October 2001 | 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

| ZIG October 2001 |

From blueprints…… Blueprints –to help systems librarians –to get some standardisation –same attribute settings (not Bath) –Z39.50 workshops

| ZIG October 2001 | ……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

| ZIG October 2001 | Scope of Guidelines

| ZIG October 2001 | Content of Guidelines A series of system-specific documents, describing: –level of current potential compliance; –opportunities for effecting local modifications; –possible future developments.

| ZIG October 2001 | 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

| ZIG October 2001 | 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...

| ZIG October 2001 | Results of survey Variability of Bib-1 support Historical lack of a core profile Talis’s use of MODELS

| ZIG October 2001 | 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

| ZIG October 2001 | Default behaviours Replacement of submitted attribute(s) with Z-server default(s). A now redundant pragmatism?

| ZIG October 2001 | Support for preferred syntaxes

| ZIG October 2001 | 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.

| ZIG October 2001 | Statements of commitment Strategy 1: Attaining full(er) compliance Strategy 2: Conditional, partial adoption Ex Libris (Aleph), Talis

| ZIG October 2001 | ‘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

| ZIG October 2001 | Conclusion Ongoing activities to enhance levels of conformance. Perceived stability of the Bath Profile. Demands from vendors’ customer organisations.