PubMan "Schnupperkurs", 9.6.2009 in Hamburg

On June 9th, a PubMan „Schnupperkurs“ for several librarians of the Max Planck Society (MPS) took place in Hamburg. The aim of the workshop was, that the participants get a first impression on PubMan. At the beginning of the four-hour-workshop we discussed extensively; about PubMan in general. After a break, the participants could test all PubMan features on their own.

In nearly three hours, the participants had time to have a detailed look at PubMan and it’s functionalities. Furthermore they created their own test items, fetched metadata, tried out the “copy and paste authors” function, added affiliations, as well as familiarized themselves with authority records for names and journals.

Because of the small circle of participants questions on e.g. submission, search, workflows and export could be asked and answered directly.

Conclusions of the participants:

• It was very nice that we had enough time for questions, tests and discussions – this has also been the goal for the BT in Garching
• Having a small circle of participants was pleasant
• Fetch metadata is a great feature not only for scientists – this functionality definitely should be extended to include the Web of Science and other databases
• The CoNE-service / researcher portfolio will be helpful to convince the directors
• More tools should be made available to help to automates the process of the migration from eDoc to PubMan
• Switching to PubMan and the migration is only possible with additional staff, because most of the libraries are one-person-libraries. Suggestion: the MPDL could hire an additional person, who will assist the migration in all institutes of the MPS.
• The timeout of PubMan should be set to an hour at a minimum
• The differences between the simple and the standard workflow, as well as the functionalities of the QA-workspace are unclear
• The participants are in favor of the implementation of a duplicate check

Andrea Seesko, leader of the workshop