Patron Phone Numbers

All, as many of you have noticed the phone numbers are still missing from patron records. Since the people at Sirsi created this mess they are also fixing it. I’ve been told we can expect the phone numbers back tomorrow or Thursday at the latest. I’m still pushing for today. In the interest of keeping you informed here is what happened. (Actually it is what I believe to have happened based on what I’ve seen and been told.)

We contracted with Sirsi to provide a custom report that would give us addresses in three lines instead of four. This will help with the cost for the libraries using bulk mailing. The report was finished last week and run for the first time. It didn’t work. That was why some of you had notices with the library’s city, state copied over several times. The person who worked on the custom report found the errors and fixed it, then had to clean out our database. Also on Friday many had the problem with patron records being locked and unable to be modified. This is tied to that. Every night, a little after midnight we run a report to reorganize the patron and item database. The one that ran on Friday morning errored out for some reason I am not entirely sure of but is tied to the custom report. Either way since that report was not able to complete it locked all the patron records, which this report does when it starts. Normally when it finishes it unlocks the records but that morning it never finished it errored out so the records remained locked. Our report writer fixed this Friday afternoon when the cleanup was initiated. The problem with the clean up was when we went live we agreed (and to facilitate the SVA telephone server) that all phone numbers would be entered into the system as 10 digits only. We then set a max number of characters for the home phone number field of 10 digits. We had had already migrated the existing users data over and many of those were in the database with phone numbers with hyphens or parenthesis, all numbers over 10 digits. When the clean up ran it took those and since it could not put them back in the fields that only had room for 10 digits it removed them. Who ever said computers were smart. That is where we are now. So we have to run a load report that contains those users and their phone numbers to add them back. I’ve been told Sirsi has the file with all the old phone numbers on it and will be running that tomorrow or Thursday at the latest. I am pushing hard for today, but we need to make sure the database is clean. So as soon as the report runs I will let you all know.