OK, there follows below a summary of the responses I received to the
'Questions for CALM 2000 Plus Users' message I posted a few weeks ago. 

Thank you very much for the time and thought people put into the responses I
received, and for all the offers of further help/advice - I may well be in
touch soon!

Please note, there were only 10 responses in all, 6 from local authority
archives and circa one each from university, specialist and business
archives, so it is hard to judge how representative of CALM Users the
experiences and opinions are...

Anyway, it was reassuring to hear that others are suffering from the same
dilemmas/problems with regards thesauri and IT support, and we are not
alone!

Thanks again, and I hope this is of some use to others, 

Jennie


UNESCO/Subject Thesauri
While opinion on what is the right course of action re subject thesauri does
still seem quite varied, the repositories that responded seem to have mostly
made a definite decision about the use of UNESCO, for at least the moment.
Most respondents do seem to believe the use and/or development of national
standards in thesauri is important and desirable, but not many seem
convinced that UNESCO is necessarily the right one. Complaints with it that
were voiced included that it is too high level and has more European than UK
terms. It seemed particularly unpopular amongst business and specialist
repositories, who stated that it was too simplistic and broad, and poorly
structured in their area of interest. The fact that UNESCO is developed and
maintained by an authority outside the UK, for their own specialist purpose,
and that as it exists now, it is very small when compared to other
specialist thesauri (e.g. ROOTS or Getty) and for a much wider remit were
voiced as concerns by one respondent. One respondent thought that UNESCO
might be of more use to Local Authority Repositories, who generally have a
wider usage and broader range of material, but in fact, only one of the six
Local Authority archives that responded has decided to use (and add to) it.
Other reasons repositories were not using UNESCO included they felt they had
their own, perfectly good subject index, they wanted/needed to conform to
other county-wide (libraries or local studies centres) use of a subject
index, or UNESCO had not been such a major consideration/available option
when their funded projects began. Most repositories were hedging their bets
and suggesting that they would in the future look at the possibility of
'hanging' their subject index within the UNESCO framework, or using UNESCO
at Collection level. Finally, other points worthy of note include the
adoption of the same subject thesaurus by three repositories in
geographically close areas of England, and the possible establishment of a
working group looking at specialist repository needs.  

Mail Merging
Few offices that responded seem to be worrying about hard copies for
security/back up reasons. All (however advanced they may be) are still
printing out catalogues for public use in the search room, as well as for
depositors, the HMC/NRA etc. One repository also expects to have to do this
for some time to come, regardless of the development of DServe and the fact
that catalogues will be electronically available, due to expected
pressure/resistance from users! None of the respondents are printing out
every single field of the record entries - they seem to be mostly following
their own best examples from previous word processed lists or selecting the
main fields thought to be required for interest/information by searchers
(title, description, dates, extent, physical description, reference/finding
numbers, etc.) A fair amount of work seems to have gone into customisation
of the templates, for aesthetic appearance or practical purposes, with some
offices having separate ones for gifts or loans in the accession register,
as well as a few varieties of different templates for the catalogue saved
for different possible requirements. It was generally thought that mail
merge was a fantastically useful facility, particularly for the way it
provides the ability to save different templates with a consideration
towards different levels/needs for information and access. 

IT Support
It would seem nobody has had an easy time with their IT Departments (except
one lucky repository, that seems to have a very efficient set up, and a
county-based DS person to boot, responsible for the maintenance of CALM and
the county libraries' Galaxy package...) Pinning down specific IT staff to
take an interest in CALM and establishing some kind of
relationship/understanding between IT departments and DS seem to have taken
a lot of most people's energy and time. Most Archives/Record Offices seem to
be working on the principal that the more they can deal with themselves,
through direct contact with the DS Helpdesk, the better. (Though some
offices, with outside contractors as their IT Department, didn't have any
active choice in this, as their contractors will not maintain anything they
have not provided.) In general, there are certainly clear divisions between
hardware and software issues and for specific problems with the CALM
package, people seem keen to work it out themselves, and are happy with the
support they get direct from DS. If IT Departments are responsible for
anything, it seems the most popular issues are work on the server, (in the
case of a client/server set up) installations, fixes, re-indexing and
backing up, though there are also cases where the Archive staff do all this
themselves too. 


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