Network Connectivity Problems Update

Sirsidynix and MTM Technologies are working to find the issue in regards to network connectivity problems that the public libraries in Kent and Sussex counties have been seeing this morning.

Preliminary information from Sirsidynix indicates that they are experiencing some type of network attack and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible.

I’ll will provide further updates become available.

Thank you for your understanding while we work to resolve any issues as quickly as possible.

Ben

UPDATE: Connectivity has been restored, according to SirsiDynix, and systems should be behaving normally at this point.

Staff Email Temporarily Out

The Exchange server for lib.de.us email is temporarily down this morning.

South Coastal Public Library Closing Arrangements

For those who don't know, South Coastal Public Library is closing to the public this weekend to prepare to move back to its expanded former location. Last day of public service is this Saturday Jan. 31st, and the temporary site will be closed on Mon. Feb 2nd.

South Coastal will not be receiving holds and none of its items will be available to fill holds for the duration of the move, which is expected to be completed by mid-April. Currently, South Coastal's items have been set to a status in Workflows of 'not available' to the holds processes. However, it is possible for a staff member, using the director password, to over-ride the holds block. Everyone will be very grateful if you all make sure this does not happen.

Over-riding the holds block will not make the item magically appear, it will just create a patron hold that will never be fulfilled. This over-ride is only available in Workflows- patrons cannot hold South Coastal items using the holds process in iBistro- attempting to do so will give a "hold not allowed" response.

In any case, patrons will not be able to find South Coastal in iBistro as of this morning. There is a new location of "temporary storage- not available" in both holdings records and public drop-down menus that is masking the South Coastal location. In Workflows, the S_COASTAL location is still active, since presumably the staff there will be doing some work in between the next two months of spa visits and afternoon high-tea.

To reiterate some info from the DOL and DDL websites- the old South Coastal location will be served throughout the duration of the closing by the Sussex Co. Bookmobile, which is coming to the Giant parking lot three days/week. Patrons placing holds can designate the bookmobile as a pickup location, if that is more convenient than treavelling to Rehoboth or Selbyville.

LibraryThing Update

Today is the 'soft opening' for the LibraryThing for Libraries patron review module. In full item records in iBistro, you will notice 'see reviews/add a review' link between "similar books" and "user tags", along with a 5-star rating and a count of reviews.
Clicking on the link will bring up a shadow box with "reviews at my library". This content is harvested from moderated reviews submitted by librarything users. Any locally written reviews will be featured first.
Patrons can submit a review by signing up for a free use account- they need to select a username and a password, and supply an email address for password recovery. As soon as they do this, they can write a review and DDL staff will receive a notification that a new review is awaiting moderation. Once the review is approved, it will appear in the item reviews online.
Why not set up a reviews account for your own library, and share the account details with your staff?

We'll be working on some announcement and brochures over the next week of so, and will notify library staff before we publish the announcement on the lib.de.us website.

Directors Station Circ Counts Clarification

In the last couple of days of last week I received several inquiries about apparent discrepancies in Directors Station circulation statistics for December. Based on troubleshooting these inquiries, there were a couple of points that I would like to take a moment to clarify:

Take a moment to check which FY measure you are filtering on: Remember that if you are set to a June-July FY, the first six months will be in the calendar year preceding the financial year. (the December of a June-July FY 08 is December 07, for example) I always need to take a moment on this one- if you are just doing a monthly count, you may want to set the Jan-December FY for your report, so this isn't an issue for you.

Remember that there are different measures for filtering by LIBRARY, and they will give different results- equally valid numbers but measuring slightly different things-

STATION LIBRARY: filters the count to those transactions which occur at the specified library.
ITEM LIBRARY: transactions that are recorded with items belonging to the specified library. This includes the count for your items that your library sends out through holds which are checked out at another location.
USER LIBRARY: transactions that are recorded by users belonging to a specific library. If a user habitually uses several libraries, all of their transactions wherever they occur are recorded to this measure.

Directors Station Fixed and Upgraded

Checked this morning and saw that the circ stats for December have returned to Directors Station. An additional plus: while discussing this problem with SirsiDynix yesterday, they noted that our data update cycle was out of sync, and that a minor correction would result in the data in DS being up-to-date. I requested that they make the correction, and indeed, DS now contains yesterday’s statistics. This means that you don’t have to wait until 3 days into the month to get accurate info for reports, and can now start these on the first day of the month.

Ask-A-Librarian Searchable Transcripts

This was just posted to the e-resources page of the catalog portal. If it seems effective and useful, it could appear in other places, or I can give you the code for your own library's website.

Search the QuestionPoint Global Knowledge Base

QP's Ask-A-Librarian service provides libary users with access to global expertise, providing real-time answers to research and reference queries by librarians from public and academic institutions
around the world. The answers to all of those questions are indexed and entered into the "Global Knowledge Base", and QuestionPoint has recently made available to users through a simple search-box interface.
Try it now!

Search Here:

Migration Wrap-Up

First- thanks to everyone for making this process go exceedingly smoothly! The process was completed on time by SirsiDynix and the quality control appears to have been excellent. System downtime was kept to the bare minimum and full service was restored without any problems. They did a great job in making sure that patrons were able to continually access as much information as possible during the downtime.

Library staff and directors, volunteers, and all also did their part to make the transition smooth. Not only did all of the libraries successfully set themselves up for the migration in a timely fashion by preparing their computers for offline mode and making sure their staff were up-to-date on the available procedures and service restrictions, but library staff across the system were highly observant and made sure that we were made aware of potential glitches and issues that had been overlooked, and we were able to communicate these issues to SirsiDynix for timely resolution.

The final things to be dealt with from DDL are being concluded now and over the weekend:

• Email notices may have been glitchy over the last two days and SirsiDynix are working to make sure this does not affect that service going forward.


• Holds that were placed by patrons during the time the system was taken down and before we noticed the place holds button was still live are being re-placed in the new server. There may be a handful that we are not successfully able to replace and we hope that this doesn’t inconvenience your staff or patrons too badly.


• Some libraries reported that their offline default due date had not updated since the Dynix system migration. The vast majority were caught and corrected at the time, and any that snuck through have been updated.


• Patron renewals placed in the OPAC during downtime have been migrated to their live records. Fines that were incurred on these items for this time have been cancelled. Some items had been returned and checked out again by new patrons and have been renewed without their knowledge. Please have a free hand with over-rides in these cases as they arise in-person.


• Offline transactions that were not able to be synchronized with patron records have been extracted and listed, and will be corrected by hand at DDL. This may take a few days and patrons may notice that items they have checked out are not on their records, or staff may notice patrons returning items that are not checked out to them. The default explanation for the next week in this type of situations will be clear, I think.


• Academics and state agencies may have connectivity problems due to more complex IT and security environments. These are being worked on and we will work on formulating a procedure for future upgrades to make sure that ‘outside’ IT staff are brought into the loop throughout the planning process.

Thanks again and have a great weekend! Let me know about any opinions you have about the process and ideas for improvements. Post in the comments or send me an email.

FIne Free Discharge Settings

For those libraries that are doing fine-free discharge this week: the default settings for this wizard do not configure printing transit or any other receipts. I have updated these settings but they will not take effect until tomorrow. For today, a supervisor account must be used to access the properties settings by right-clicking on the fine-free wizard. Bring up properties and check the boxes for printing transit slips and any other notices you need for these transactions. If you don't have anyone on site with this access, email sirsi.support to have your account upgraded temporarily to get access to the properties.

What to do at the End of the First Day

At the end of the day, you can close your workflows session as normal.

• All transactions recorded during the day will be stored on a file on the computer. When you open workflows in offline mode tomorrow, it will append that days transactions to the existing file.



• When the server is back online, we will ask you to log the computers on to WorkFlows online, and the stored transactions will upload automatically.



• Once everyone has connected to the server, DDL will run a series of reports that consolidate all of the separate libraries’ files and apply the transactions to the patron records. After that, DDL will manually fix transactions that didn’t go through

ATTENTION: at least one library has noted that some transactions may have been recorded with an incorrectly set due date. You may wish to review your offline session default settings and let us know if there is anything unusual. You can view the defaults by clicking the “offline session” link in the common tasks pane of the offline wizard. This will show you the current settings for user access, library, and current date and time. Once the transactions are uploaded to the server the due dates will be applied based on what was showing in the current date field, so if something is wildly inaccurate here, let us know so we can look out for any sequences we need to fix en masse, and please take a moment to review the date and time settings on workflows when it is logged back in tomorrow in offline mode.

According to SIRSI, the migration is still on-schedule. We’ll give a fresh update tomorrow as soon as we know more. Richard and Beth-Ann will be out of the office tomorrow, so it would be better to email any urgent requests for assistance to sirsi.support@lib.de.us, or call Ben, Jane, or Vince.

SaaS Upgrade is Progressing

We were just notified by SirsiDynix that the migration is proceeding as planned, with files being written across to the new server and access to the online catalog and patron authentication servers restored.

Last minute clarifications:
The instructions for setting the configuration settings to be able to run workflows in offline mode (Preference: Configuration: Show this window) were to make sure libraries would be able to access workflows during the migration. We didn't include the step that once you are in offline mode, you then need to select Offline from the green menu bar to be able to access the wizards that you can use- even if you are in offline mode, you still can't use the regular checkout wizard from circulation.

You won't have access to the patron database during the migration. I may be able to access the old database if you have an urgent need for a patron ID.

SIRSI had forgotten to turn holds off in the catalog until a couple of minutes ago. We'll get a count of holds that were placed today once things settle out and replace them in the new server when it is up and running.

Another Review Option

LibraryThing has also just released its patron review module for iBistro catalogs. It's not yet installed in either of our environments yet, but you can see what it looks like in our catalog here, or here.
Currently all of the reviews are from LibraryThing users, but you can feel free to add your own reviews in this test mode to see how the system works.

Patron announcement re. SaaS upgrade

I just posted the following on the lib.de.us front page:

A scheduled upgrade to the Delaware Library Catalog's main computer system will affect the availability of some library resources in the early part of next week.
Between Monday January 6th and Wednesday January 8th, library patrons will not be able to place new hold requests, and libraries will not be receiving new holds and transfers until the upgrade is complete. Access to computers and the internet from within the libraries is not expected to be affected, and all libraries will continue to check out books and other library materials to patrons as normal.
Several libraries in Kent and Sussex Counties have announced amnesties for the return of overdue materials to coincide with this system downtime. Please contact your local library to see if they are participating and for information on specific policies governing fine amnesty for long-overdue material.

At this time, Dover and Laurel are both having some kind of fines amnesty during the first part of next week. Please let me know if your library is doing amnesty and I will update the announcement with more specific information.
UPDATE: I corrected the dates for Monday and Wednesday.