I am delighted to report that Mary Chapman was elected to a two year term as the new Chair of the RLIN Committee at AALL in Baltimore!

Other highlights from the RLIN Committee Open Discussion in Baltimore:

» RLG's area code is changing; the new area code 650 will replace all numbers formerly in the 415 area code. (Please note, though, that RLG's 800 numbers will remain the same.)

» Since RLG will cease supporting RLIN Terminal for Windows 1.0, many institutions are trying to decide just how far to upgrade. Many institutions are still running 2.0, and most like to run the same version on all machines to ease troubleshooting. Versions higher than 2.0 contain command buttons, CJK, and ILL enhancements. (E.g., barcode scanning for ILL is included with 4.0.) For more information, see http://www.rlg.org/rtfw.html and http://www.rlg.org/commwin.html. (Do read the "4.0 Problem Alert" about the character-jumping bug on the latter page as well).

» Currently, version 4.1 is in beta testing and in use at the Library of Congress. Enhancements include a fix to the character-jumping bug (as mentioned in the "Problem Alert"), and much-needed improvements to the Arabic font.

» DOS users of version E3d will need to upgrade as well; version E3e is available. Tables input, which was done with E3d & Windows 1.0, will now be handled by RLG. Contact the RLIN Information Center with any requests for Tables modifications.

» Error reporting was also discussed. One can still do a "PRO ERF" command on RLIN to produce an error report, but disseminating the error reports is so labor intensive that it's on a bit of a back burner right now. Rather than wait to see error reports, some of us at the meeting discussed trying to let each other know when we see an error. We will be creating a Web page listing e-mail addresses of catalogers to whom one can send an error report about an RLIN record; stay tuned to this space, and to RLIN-Law** for further developments! It was also pointed out that with RLIN's clustering algorithm, if one record in the cluster has a corrected access point, but all other records contain an error in that field, the whole cluster is still retrievable. So, just correcting your own record goes a long way towards enhancing the retrieval of that cluster's records.

» And, speaking of clusters, RLG developed a new generic title clustering algorithm. It was developed a while ago, but there are some clusters with older records that could benefit from this new algorithm. If you see, for example, a cluster containing the title "Proceedings," and the records in the cluster contain different corporate bodies in the 1XX, RLG can run the cluster through this algorithm. If you see such a cluster, please report the record ID of a record in the cluster to the RLIN Information Center.

A report from the RLIN Law Forum will appear in the RLIN Focus (see http://www.rlg.org/r-focus.html for the online version) and will be posted to RLIN-Law).

As mentioned above, my term as Chair has come to an end. So many people made my term so very easy, especially everyone who participated in 7:00 a.m. RLIN discussions! Also, my thanks to RLG staff for all their hard work, most especially Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Win-Shin Chiang.