Catalog Naming Contest

During our recent Koha Task Force meeting, Children's Librarian Heather Cousin came up with the idea of having our patrons name our OPAC. This idea was quickly approved by other members of the Task Force. We hope that this will bring excitement and attention to our new catalog.


Entry forms will be available at any of our public service desks and on the Arcadia Public Library's website. These entry forms can be turned in to the "Suggestions" box at the Front Desk or from the form online. Posters, press releases, and special mention of this contest will be publicized throughout the community.


Each contestant needs to have a valid Arcadia Public Library Card (with the number written on the form,) to be eligible. Patrons can enter as many times as they like. The deadline for submission is Tuesday, November 16, 2010. The winning entry will be chosen by the Arcadia Public Library Board of Trustees at their monthly meeting on Thursday, November 18. Besides the honor of naming our catalog, the winner will also receive a cool, special prize.


The winner will be announced on Monday, December 13, 2010, our Koha "go live" date!

Jackie

Staff Comments

For the most part, I received positive comments from the library staff on our training last week. They appreciated the additional functionality of the OPAC... including patron comments, tags, creating lists, and the ability to rss a search for new items as acquired by the Library. Many other staff functions will reduce time and effort.

• There were some comments that need addressing. Not everyone received OPAC training. I had left this up to each supervisor to decide what training was needed by each staff member. Now I'm finding out that they all could have really used this training.


• There is concern on how certain staffers will transition to Koha. The learning curve for some will be bigger than for others.


• Learning that how we currently do tasks in Symphony will be very different in Koha. And this is still a big question. Staff is eager to explore the system and want our own patron database available for practice...not just creating new patrons to play with.


• Searching the catalog has brought unexpected results for staff. At this point I don't know if it's that we are missing the authorites or if the system isn't set up for a more sophisticated searches. For instance, a librarian typed in: ti,phr=the end thinking that she would be searching by title phrase, but she got 250 results, and it is clear that the search was not what she had expected. Another librarian wanted a "browse" feature for searching, this would be helpful if you only know a couple of words of a title and then you can select from a list. Also, it would be helpful to sort the search results when logged on as staff.


• Reports. Staff is concerned about running the reports that they need. (Brendan from ByWater Solutions promised to set up some reports if we get stuck, so I'm not too concerned about this.) I think with practice, we will get the hang of it. Since we don't have our patron database yet, it is difficult to explore reports that will help us with statistics.


• My big complaint is that the "due date" is shown right in the detail record on the OPAC. I would "prefer" that the system just say it was "checked out" and leave it at that so patrons aren't confused when it still isn't available to check out on that date because of existing holds that aren't accounted for in the "due date". However, the Reference and Children's Librarians were fine with the date showing. So, I'm going to let this one go.

Jackie

3 Days of Training

We started our training on Monday, Oct 4. We spent the first day working on administrative issues. Cathi, Reference Librarian David Dolim, City IT staff member Alan Chow, and myself attended this training. Brendan Gallagher from ByWater Solutions was our patient trainer. We worked on patron and item types, patron attributes, authorized values, and setting permissions for staff. Initially those attending were set as "superlibrarians" meaning they can do everything with the system, we also discussed setting up the permissions for rest of the staff. We talked about how we would handle power and/or hardware failures, backing up data, and Linux commands. The morning went by quickly... I wished I had time to practice what I had learned but then in the afternoon, it was on to writing Reports. Several additional staff members attended that session. We learned about the wizard procedure for creating reports in six steps and then using the already created SQL Reports. [This was a little bit confusing at this time since our patron database has not been added yet.] Some of the reports we decided to run didn't give us the expected results.

On Tuesday, Oct. 5, we had training for the Technical Services staff. There were many questions... what we do now and how will that work with Koha. In fact having procedures accomplished in Symphony handled differently in Koha were stumbling blocks for all sections of the Library. Things will need to change and change is hard! The catalogers were dissappointed with the authorities in Koha. The system doesn't alert the staff if an authority is new, so to be safe they need to check each one. This will add to their cataloging time (more steps in the process.) We found out that improving the authorities is in development however it will take some time and money to work it all out. We talked about adding bibliographic records to the database but didn't actually try it. (A procedure will need to be set up.) We then checked out the Acquisitions module. We found out that this is not useful to us in its current iteration since we are not able to order directly from the system so we would need to enter the bibliographic information in both the catalog and the acquisition module. We will use it for patron purchase recommendations. (Maybe in the future releases we will be able to use this module. (Please note, that we don't use an Acquisitions module now so we aren't losing anything.) Our final module explored on Tuesday was Serials. This will take some time to set up but will be very useful. Currently we have an excel spreadsheet for check-in but soon we will have the ability to be alerted for items to claim.

We held Wednesday's training in our Tech Center. We were closed to the public so we could devote our time and attention to training. The morning session covered Circulation. We all added patrons to the database, checked out

to them, placed holds, and then discharged the items. The issue of partial payments not being a clear cut procedure was discussed. Our Circulation Supervisor Andre Gonzalez will be devising a standard procedure for our staff to follow. We then went to the Circulation Desk to make sure that our scanners and receipt printers would work with Koha. (A little tweaking is needed with the receipts so we don't waste paper; we think that we will need to use different printer drivers.) The afternoon was devoted to the OPAC and searching the catalog as a staff member. We liked many of the features of the OPAC... adding comments, tagging, RSS feeds, the possibility of adding a link to New DVDs, etc. that will change as we add new titles.

I was pleased that staff asked so many questions during the training. Now we need to practice so we feel comfortable with the system. We are scheduled to go live with Koha on Monday, Dec. 13.

Jackie

Time Passes Quickly

Well I know that I'm getting older since time is just whizzing by. Next week is our Koha training!! The previous blog talked about our arrangements. I had asked Brendan from ByWater Solutions how we should prepare for the training. He suggested:

• Have 15 marcfiles from OCLC that we could use to practice uploading to Koha.
• Bring a few serials from the shelves that can be used
• Have your staff create their own patrons
• Bring a copy of our printer paper if we do our own label printing
• Have a look at: the Koha Wiki to get familiar with finding the Reports section and the JQuery section
• Know how to find the Koha manual.

And so, at our latest Koha Task Force meeting we discussed the assignments so we would be ready to go. I'm hoping that staff will do a little exploring ahead of the training.

We do have several questions to ask during our training.

• Do we have the option of not migrating over the records of material "Lost and Paid"?
  
  
• We know that the status text can be changed, but we haven't decided the ideal terms. With SirsiDynix we were limited in what we could use... "available" "material has been checked out" "lost" "available soon". We are excited to explore this added functionality. Is there a status for just returned material? And if so, does it automatically revert to another status after 24 hours when the item is on the shelf again?
  
  
• At the present time, the copy order is random. And, are we able to delete the copy number for items in the OPAC?


• Will some of the items be automatically shadowed in the OPAC? For example: lost, repair, discards-- or is this something we need to decide to do?


• During the training, will staff learn search strategies using the staff side, not just the OPAC? And, will this training be held on Wednesday with our OPAC training?

I'm hoping that staff will come to the training next week with all their questions. This is our opportunity for clarification.

Jackie