INNOVACQ: Serials control at Boalt Hall

Many changes in the Law School Library have occurred during this past year because of INNOVACQ. Within the Serials/Acquisitions Section, almost all the routines and procedures have been radically redefined to allow for the computerization of serials control. There have been some staff reassignments and shifts in responsibility, and in most instances, old tasks and manual file maintenance have been done away with completely and replaced by work at a VDT. Naturally, the impact of INNOVACQ has also been felt in the Cataloging Section, and the instant availability of serials check-in and routing information in public services has certainly added a level of service that was never possible before. In addition, the immediate and up-to-date fiscal information has been a boon for both the library's collection development officers and the Library administration.Various staff members throughout the year have been working to clean up and upgrade different parts of the serials files and to add or exchange better information in a number of fields in each record. Past payment history has been keyed into over 2/3 of the records in the file. The records for all the loose-leaf services contracted for by the Library are not fully online.All the records for our California documents have been edited and check-in cards have been created for this large and obviously important part of the file. Conversion of the U.S. documents which had been deferred at the very beginning of the fiscal year, has begun and most entries now can be checked-in and claimed online.All invoices (both serials and monographs) for this fiscal year have been processed on INNOVACQ, and while there are still some vendor and fund anomalies, Boalt has better, more comprehensive — and certainly more accurate — financial records than ever before.A massive editing and claiming project has recently gotten under way. All titles on INNOVACQ are being checked against the shelf list to make sure that all the bibliographic elements in each record are in sync and are presented in a standard, retrievable (punctuation and spacing count in INNOVACQ) format. Routine claiming (as part of serials check-in) has been in place for some time now, and that activity was begun when that feature was delivered. A second part of the editing project, is however, to get the thousands of blank boxes out of the check-in screens where they will remain as claimable items until some sort of purging action is taken. The files are now being gone through (a simple command in INNOVACQ can allow one to review every check-in record in the system), our holdings are being checked on the shelves, and decisions to claim or replace the missing pieces are being made. We anticipate that this editing/ claiming project will take approximately half a year.The INNOVACQ system was pretty exciting when we first saw it demonstrated, and we were eager then to incorporate it into our technical processing activities here at Boalt. If anything, our enthusiasm has grown as the capabilities of INNOVACQ have been realized. Enhancement and refinement — some at our prompting, others by the design staff at Innovative Interfaces — over the past year have resulted in what we believe to be the most comprehensive and easy-to-use serials control system available. Our confidence was manifested when we shifted all of our acquisitions activities from RLIN to INNOVAQ at the beginning of our fiscal year in mid-1984.Many tasks remain for the Law Library in making the best use of the INNOVACQ system. The rapid acceptance by the public service staff and users has been heartening, and the continuing work to clean up the Serials Records has proven fruitful. System performance and maintenance have been outstanding, and we are excited about various possibilities for future growth. It has not been a simple nor uncomplicated process, but the gains realized by the Law library have been substantial.     

Telecommunications and the customer—Prospects for the 1980s

There will be major changes in the telecommunications system during the next decade and computing and broadcasting technologies will contribute to the advances in telecommunication. The author describes the prospects for the customer and the improved systems that will become available.     

The Shifting Sands of Open Access Publishing, a Publisher's View

This paper sets Open Access (OA) publishing in the context of today's scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishing trends. Four areas are covered: (a) a brief overview of STM publishing and its value today; (b) OA's place in the industry; (c) the underlying economics of OA, particularly its author-pays model; and (d) directions in moving towards “universal access” to STM information, where both researchers and the public have access to the scientific information they need.     

Risk and value at risk

Increasingly complicated tools known as financial derivatives have been introduced in recent times to manage the market risk arising from floating exchange rates. The rapid development of the derivatives markets has in turn introduced new risks into the business of finance - witness the highly-publicised trading losses at Metallgesellschaft and Procter and Gamble. A principal method for measuring and reporting market risk in the portfolios of banks and their clients is ‘value at risk’ (VaR).Fred Stambaugh explains the concept of ‘value at risk’ and describes three principal approaches to calculating it - correlation matrix, historical simulation and Monte Carlo simulation; they are alternatives, not competitors. As well as setting out their uses, he considers those situations that go beyond ‘value at risk’, i.e. dire events that lie beyond the confidence level of VaR. Techniques for portfolio stress testing are discussed.