Silverplatter visit

[Kimberly Parker <kimberly.parker@yale.edu>]

This is something of a belated followup to the SilverPlatter visit on Monday.

Andy Bush gave those of us who attended his update session a nice summary
of the capabilities of the features  we don't have turned on.  These
include SDI, the related Alerts function, and the Document Delivery option.

There are the obvious advantages of turning on SDIs, but we (as a group)
need to weigh them against the current drawbacks.  The most pertinent of
those drawbacks is the fact that (at least in the current version of the
interface), any SDI strategy is publicly accessible, editable, and
deletable by everyone else at the university.

Charlie indicated that while at Columbia, they survived a similar situation
without any problems.  The question is, are we willing to do this (which
would of course mean a certain amount of warning materials available and
presented in instruction sessions.

The second question is the related ALERTS feature, which allows certain
authorized people to set up standard SDIs (say for courses?) and then
allows anyone at the university to "sign-up" to receive those SDIs.  Only
authorized people see all the ALERT SDIs to edit or delete them.

Finally, we were reminded of the Document Delivery feature, which can have
citations automatically forwarded to an email address for ILL processing,
but would require sending the info from all our databases to one email
address.  At present, our distributed ILL isn't set up to handle this kind
of processing.

So, please discuss on this list (mailto:spyul-list@pantheon.yale.edu)
whether you would recommend turning on SDIs despite the public-ness,
turning on the ALERT feature, and discuss with your ILL people the
requirements of any document delivery turn-on.

--Kim