The focus of the meeting was the changes being made to Gobi, the Yankee Book Peddler ordering website, where the librarians and acquisitions staff are able to view the books being automatically ordered as per their approval plans, the books recommended to the libraries on "slips", and are able to firm order titles. The website is getting a virtual facelift, being launched in June 2012. The new interface will be more aesthetically pleasing and contain a great deal more graphical elements. The "slips" for the books will now contain book jacket scans, and all of the action buttons will be replaced by graphics; for example save will become a floppy disk, email becomes an envelope, and so on.
Perhaps the most important feature that is being changed, however, is the search feature. The current search methods are "Quick Search," which appears on the main page and is a general keyword search of title and summary fields, and "Standard Search" which must be chosen, and has a great deal more options for paring down the search. The new interface will involve faceted searching, meaning that on the main page, the user can select from a drop-down menu the type of search they wish to perform -- allowing the user to narrow their search without taking the additional steps to reach the "Standard Search" page. The user will be able to choose from a Subject search, which searches the Library of Congress Subject Headings as well as Interdisciplinary subjects, an Author/Editor search, a Keyword search which will now be able to search all of the fields of an entry, so that the Table of Contents and other notes are accessible by the search (and to note: the Keyword search will now also be able to use Boolean terms), a Title search, and an ISBN number search. Once a search is performed, the new left sidebar will have categories in which a user will be able to par down the search. For example, it will be much like Amazon.com, where if one would say, search for "Neil Gaiman" it would list "Movies & TV (43)" and "Books (1,973)". If one of these categories is selected, the top of each page will list the user's "breadcrumbs" or how they have pared down the search results.
The last changes the YBP representatives discussed were changes to DDA or Demand Driven Acquisitions. These changes are uniquely related to E-Book purchasing through EBL and Ebrary, which are two areas the Music Library does not really fully embrace as of yet. Thus, this update was not as important to our collection development.
The presentation itself was informal, and many of the IU Librarians asked questions intermittently, making suggestions to further enhance the new interface (such as allowing narrowing by edition) and the ability to highlight certain fields when going over a slip list. All of these suggestions were met with honest and interested responses by Suzanne and Mike, which made the dialogue that much easier.
After the formal presentation was over, after about an hour, myself and my Internship Adviser had a private meeting with the representatives. In this meeting, we confirmed the meaning of some of the language used in the Music Library's approval plan as well as addressed a glitch in the "slips" system, since at the end of every "slip" list, we were being recommended books on Art, not music. This was easily noted and hopefully fixed. We also gained the ability to see of our fund's invoices on Gobi, which will make finding out what was shipped when much easier for us -- since all of our new acquisitions go to Wells Library first for processing.
Overall, the experience was very enlightening for me as a student. Seeing the relationship between vendor and Library firsthand was eye-opening, and I was able to learn quite a bit more about one of the vendors which I will be firm ordering from this semester.
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