Training Prep

On Thursday, September 16, the Library Board of Trustees gave the staff permission to close on Wednesday, October 6 for one day of the training on our new ILS. We will have training on Monday, October 4th to Wednesday, October 6th. Below is our schedule:

• Monday, Oct. 4 - Conference Room, 9 am - 4 pm. Koha Administration, Server Administration and Reports.
• Tuesday, Oct. 5 - Conference Room, 9 am - 4 pm. Cataloging, Acquisitions, and Serials.
• Wednesday, Oct. 6 - Tech Center, 9am - 4 pm. Circulation and OPAC

We chose the Conference Room for the smaller training sessions since we can get 8 laptops around the table, plus there is a projector and screen so that the instructor's examples will be seen by all.

The Tech Center has 27 workstations so that all of the staff can be trained at once for these more heavily used modules.

Now, we need to inform the public on our closure. Library Services Manager, Darlene Bradley, sent out a press release. Cathi placed a blurb on our website and posters and handouts are being designed.

In anticipation of this closure we set our current ILS system to bypass October 6th as a due date for any materials...and we have planned a pizza lunch for all staff on the day we are closed.

Jackie

Patron Privacy

One of the features available to our patrons with Koha is "My Reading History" to keep track of the items that they have previously checked out. See the Koha 3.2 OPAC Demo Video by Nicole Engard. On the surface this feature is very convenient for patrons that can't remember if they have read all of the Lee Child's or Jeffrey Deaver novels... or whatever. (My husband is always saying that he should keep a list of read books because I often bring home a title that he's already read but he doesn't realize it until he's well into it.)

However, staff has concerns about holding on to patrons' borrowing history since we are committed to protecting their privacy. We are bound by the Public Records Act, California Govt Code Section 6267 Our Director, Carolyn Garner-Reagan, queried library law expert Mary Minow about our concern. "The law forbids libraries to disclose circulation and registration info, unless they have patron consent. This type of feature sounds like circulation info. So long it's not disclosed to anyone without patron consent or court order, it's probably ok." In her opinion this feature should not be turned on by default. It should be offered to those who are informed about who has access and that the Library should receive patrons' explicit consent to keep and disclose the lists. Mary also said in her email "this does not constitute legal advice."

Would it be too easy for law enforcement to access these records if we went this route? We wouldn't want to take that chance... especially if a patron didn't realize that we were holding on to this information. We understand that a patron must login to their own account to have access to their borrowing history but would law enforcement have easier access to this information?

We talked to Brendan, from ByWater Solutions, concerning this feature and whether many libraries are using it. He understood our concern and said it was a policy decision -- some libraries allowed the feature and others didn't.

An option is to take advantage of the personal "lists" that patrons can create once they login to their account. These lists could be about anything... from material on a certain subject, author, or even books they have read. These lists are set up by the patron -- not the Library holding on to their borrowing history. This might be an option. However, would they be subject to California's confidentiality laws?

Our current system, SirsiDynix's Symphony, allows for favorite authors or subjects to be kept on the patron's account so that a patron is notified when a new title by that author is ordered. We opted to turn this feature off since it took up too much room on our server.

The jury is still out on how we will proceed. We have some time to ponder the issues before turning the feature on or off. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.

Jackie

Viewing Our Catalog

Last week ByWater Solutions staff installed Koha to our server. After that the item records were imported on to the server! We were excited about the process and discussed this project update at our Koha Task Force meeting on Thursday, September 16. All members are now checking for any problems / questions that arise from doing random searches.

Initially we tried a search for a title that was unique to our collection. We wondered why that when we did the search the subtitle didn't show on the bibliographic record. "Arcadia: where ranch and city meet." Cathi, upon further investigation finding that only the title was displaying and not the subtitle on all the records, contacted Brendan. He explained that this was the default settings and could be changed by adding a subtitles rule to the "Keyword to MARC" mapping. Cathi added the subtitle rule under Koha Administration: the keyword to MARC mapping section (a rule needs to be created that matches the subtitle to 245 subfield b). We were a bit apprehensive to make changes right away, but with Brendan's encouragement, (Brendan said "Feel free to do anything you want to do. I'm not going to hold you back- and if it doesn't make sense-ask me-of if you get stuck we're here. This should give you a good chance to play and break :-)" ) Cathi went into the software and was able to remedy our subtitle problem. She was pleased to make her first edit.

Towards the end of the week, Cathi ran a job on the Symphony server to create flat files of the patron database. On Friday, September 17 she then FTP'd these files to the ByWater Solutions server so that Brendan could work on converting it to a format that can be uploaded into our Koha ILS. We'll be interested to see how that turns out too.

In the meantime we continue to work on deleting missing items, changing patron codes, and making other "tweaks" to our current Symphony database. Before we go "live" on Monday, December 13, our data will be migrated again to Koha to reflect these changes that we are making to the original records.

Jackie

Gathering Data for the New Server

Last week I ran the MARC export reports to create the first set of "item record" files to be sent to ByWater Solutions (BWS). We have a total of 160,745 records, so I configured the report to include 50,000 records in each of 3 files and the remaining 10,745 records in the fourth. I clicked the check boxes to include the "999 holdings tags", the "local and junk tags" and to export the Symphony catalog key to MARC tag oo1". The files were very large, 190 mb in total, but they are the bibliographic records for every item in our catalog.

This week, using PSFTP (PuTTY's secure FTP utility) on my workstation and the remote connection instructions from Brendan, I was able to "put" (that is the Linux command to copy files from my local location to a remote location) all the files into a folder on a BWS server. BWS will convert the data into a format that is usable in Koha and then will import that new data format onto our server.

In the mean time, BWS has connected remotely to our new server and installed the remaining components for Debian server and the Koha software. It is an empty shell at the moment, without any profiles, properties, patron data or item records, but it is exciting to watch each step of this project unfold.

Cathi

The New Debian Server

In our conference call on August 19th Brendan gave me some pointers about the installation that I would be doing of the Debian 'Lenny' Linux software onto the new server. He said it would be fairly straight forward...and parts of it were and other parts of it weren't.

Before I left on vacation I configured the server with a static IP, a single partition, and no printers or email--just the base system. I needed only the first DVD of the 5-DVD set that is the full 'Lenny' package. This was luckily a "bootable" DVD since there was absolutely nothing installed on our new Dell server up to this point. Once the Debian software screen came up I clicked on "Installation" and the procedure was pretty automatic, a standard "installation" routine...answering the questions, selecting options, and entering the requested information. It is a good idea to have this information handy prior to the installation:

• the IP that is to be used,
• the name of the domain,
• a username/password for an alternate login to the default "ROOT" login.

The first "glitch" in the installation was when I received an error message that there were "missing non-free firmware files". I Googled this message and discovered that this version of Debian no longer delivers all the network card drivers bundled into it. I then Googled the file name I needed--bnx2-09-4.0.5.fw--and found a site that offered it "free" and downloaded it to my thumb drive. This allowed me to complete the installation by selecting "load file from external device", which is an option that obviously needed to be included in the installation since it no longer provides everything to do a successful build.

The second "glitch" I came across was after the installation completed successfully when the default monitor resolutions was too high for the desktop display. After the system would load, the monitor would go blank and the message "Can't display in this video mode" would appear. I had to connect the server to our portable projector to see the GUI desktop. After a little research I found that I could break out of the GUI desktop by pressing ALT-CTRL-F1. This started a new shell in the command screen with the command prompt. I reset the display to VT100 terminal emulator and I could see everything on my monitor once again.

Also, I had problems seeing the new server on the network and seeing the rest of the network from the new server. I wasn't able to successfully PING another IP or to PING the IP of this server from my other servers. I discovered that the network cable had been put into the secondary NIC port rather than the primary port. Once I switched the cable to the other port then everything connected and PING-ed and worked very well.

When I returned from vacation I needed to finish my part of the installation and to do that I needed to be at the command prompt to perform the last set of tasks. The first two tasks: "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" instruct the server to access a "mirror" of the software on the Internet and to pull down the latest update and upgrade of the loaded components. The final task was to load "openssh" which would allow BWS to make a secure remote connection to our server. After a little experimenting to discover the exact name of the application I needed, I ran "apt-get install openssh-server" and the software installed successfully.

I installed PuTTY on my Windows workstation so that I also could connect "remotely" to the new server to test it. It is free software, available on the Internet, very easy to install and fairly easy to use. It opens a terminal emulation box very similar to a Windows command box, which is almost the same as being on the server itself.

On September 7 I sent Brendan (ByWater Solutions) the login information for our network and he was able to access our Host server (where the Symphony software resides) and to PING the Debian server. With the installation completed and "openssh" installed he is also able to connect to the Debian server remotely.

So....our server is up and running and ready for ByWater Solutions to log into to complete the configuration of Debian and the installation of Koha.

Cathi

Moving Slowly

As mentioned earlier, our Koha Task Force is meeting weekly on Thursday afternoons from 1:30 to 2:30. It has taken us three meetings to get through a review of all our current (SirsiDynix Symphony) policies. Each Task Force member was given a stack of policies to review before the meetings.

I personally thought that we could go through all of these policies in an hour... no, this wasn't the case. As we worked through each list there was always a question on why did we have this?, is anyone still using that? And, can we delete it? It was surprising to me that I couldn't answer all the questions asked since I was there from the beginning of our SirsiDynix experience. I guess as time goes by staff uses what they need and nothing more.

As we reviewed the policies, we thought... "I wonder if Koha will do this?" (an example: we wanted to have the ILS automatically charge a fee to a patron's record when a hold was available for check out. We never could get this to work the way "we" wanted with SirsiDynix) so we have started making a list of questions to ask Brendan during our next conference call.

Once we went through each policy list, either Cathi or myself ran reports to see if we had items or patrons in the policy name that we decided to delete. These reports were made available to the members. Items and Users were moved or deleted. Staff is also searching for material that has been marked "Missing" in the database. There's no use moving over material that we no longer have on our shelves. Hopefully we will soon have a sleek database ready to migrate to Koha.
Jackie