Patron Phone Numbers Are Back

Yes, some of you have noticed that the phone numbers are back. Most of them anyway. There is one small chunk to be loaded. You may have noticed that they came back with their dashes and all. This is how the data was imported when we migrated and how the numbers were in the system before we lost them. I never said it before but these really should be cleaned up. So just as Kim’s and my work (well mostly Kim’s) of restoring the phone numbers is coming to an end your work of cleaning them up and making sure they are ready for our SVA system is just starting. The easiest way is also the most direct. When you look up a number to call a patron, if it has dashes make sure it doesn’t have dashes when you finish. I cannot run a report to tell you or give you a list of which numbers need work. Nor can I run a report to automatically clean up the numbers. And after the last couple of weeks would you even want me to try that? Also remember any new numbers that you enter should be numbers only.

Missing Patrons

I’ve seen in the email that we have some disappearing people. The good news is you are not going crazy, the other good news is I am not going crazy. Remember last week when all of the library logins stopped working? Well, this is tied to that. The report that removed those logins did so because they had an expiration date of NEVER. There are other profiles that have that same expiration date, and one inparticular is the PUBLIC profile. I had brought this up at a directors’ meeting this past summer and even used it as an example in my reports training. The PUBLIC profile should not be used for patrons. I am attaching a spreadsheet showing which libraries still have patrons with this profile. The good news (see all of this is good news) is you do not have to worry about many of them since they have been removed. The other good news is patrons who owed fines or had items checked out were not removed by the report. I set the report to do that and confirmed that is what the report did. So you do not have to worry about patrons who have materials being deleted. You do have to worry about putting back the patrons that were removed and this time use the correct profile for them. This was covered in training and is in the circulation manual that I created. It is also possible that some patrons may have the ADULT profile but still have an expiration date of NEVER. When the account was first created the expiration date is set by the profile that appears in that first pop up when you input the barcode number. It was set by default to PUBLIC but can be changed in the preferences to any profile; I’d recommend making it ADULT or DTCC_STU if you’re an academic. You can change the profile later as you add in the other information but that does not change the expiration date it will stay set at NEVER. You will have to do that yourself, which is why it is a good idea to put in the barcode and select the profile from that first pop up. The second spreadsheet is a list of all users with the Adult Profile who have an expiration date of never. I remind you these patrons have library accounts that will never expire so they should be changed along with all the patrons with the public profile. I hope this clears up the confusion of what happened to the patrons, with your help we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Directors' Station vs Unicorn Reports

All, I’ve fielded some questions about the difference between the numbers obtained in Unicorn Reports and those obtained in Directors’ Station. The attached excel file demonstrates this. I ran a circ report for November by User Profile in both Directors’ Station and in Unicorn Reports. The fist tab of the spreadsheet shows the results from Directors’ Station where we have a total circ of 145,466. The second tab shows the same report in Unicron Workflows with a total circ of 138,255. That is a difference of 7,211 or 4.96%. You can see both reports compared in the third tab. If we factor in the profiles that the Directors’ Station report is counting that the Unicorn one is not, such as Discard and Missing or Display along with the number of reserve item checkouts which also are not captured by the Unicorn report we get a difference of 12 or 0.0082%. Where did these 12 items slip through the crack? I cannot be certain from these numbers but since the only two profiles that don’t match are Del Tech Student and Faculty I can assume that these are reserve items that may have been renewed and not counted in the Unicorn Report. I can’t be certain because I cannot see what these 12 items were nor do I know if Del Tech allows renewals on reserve items. The fact still is we are not talking about a very significant number. If you have any other questions about this please email me.