A Holiday Present

We had our usual weekly Koha Task Force meeting today. And while we still have some outstanding issues, this week we were able to check some items off the list.

1. New Patrons are now being limited to only five items for check-out. (At first, it was unlimited charges.)
2. Patrons are now limited to only five movie DVD's. (At first it was unlimited)
3. Receipts for check-outs are now available. (For the first couple of days, we were unable to get any.) We still need to tweak them but much better.
4. We now have items/holdings attached to bibrecords for on-order material. This was a big problem for us. Now patrons/staff are able to place holds for these titles.
5. Authorities are working!! This is a big one. Cathi assured me that new authorities were being added to the catalog when we first migrated to Koha however that hasn't been the case for the past two weeks. The catalogers have been tearing our their hair in frustration and the reference staff has wondered why new books haven't come out of Technical Services. Today, we finally have resolved this problem.
6. It looks like discarding is working as it should though not as we want it to. If we delete the last item/holding attached to a bib record the bib is not deleted as well. We must delete that bib record manually. We don't understand why it takes awhile for this to show up in the catalog. Does it have to do with the zebra indexing?

So, this week's accomplishments were an outstanding holiday present to Cathi and me. Now we have three days off from work... no thinking about Koha!

Jackie

Koha - 2nd week

Look! It's now official... we made the news services Arcadia Public Library Goes Live With Koha.

We still have some issues to iron out, but we are making progress. As with the last post, many of the problems we face are not knowing that what we put in the initial profile for the "test" system may not act as we really want it to in the "live" system. For instance, we "thought" we had set up "Circulation and Fine Rules" correctly only to realize that the system wasn't limiting DVD charges to 5 per patron for seven days. After trying a few combinations, we now have that working correctly. We are a single library so thought using the "default" settings that we'd created was correct, but we actually needed to create settings and select the configuration our specific library.

We have a problem with adding new bibliographic records from the Marc Import. It looks like Koha doesn't automatically attach a holding or item to the new records so our patrons (and staff) haven't been able to place holds on newly purchased material until they are cataloged. We have come up with a work around for this, at least until this issue is considered by development for an enhancement, by using MarcEdit to add the necessary 952 fields (a, b, c, y) to the Marc Import file before it is staged so that the temporary item record is created when the new bib record is imported into the catalog.

Authority records are not showing up in the catalog. Cathi has been downloading files from Technical Services but these records are showing as available authorities when the catalogers need them. We have a ticket in for this with our consultant team, ByWater Solutions.

The most troubling problem is that titles that were migrated aren't always searchable in the catalog and then in most cases reappear after the item is checked in even though it isn't actually checked out. This is puzzling to us. We know that a small percentage of our titles didn't migrate correctly from our old system, SirsiDynix Symphony, for one reason or another. For example the item barcodes that ended with a $ didn't migrate over correctly--the trailing $ was omitted. We are able to add the $ to the barcodes and this corrects the problem. This is an issue that we are fixing as the items turn up on a one-by-one basis.

I give kudos to the staff. Luckily the Christmas school vacation days are a slower time for the Library; it allows us to work out some of the kinks with the system. And while the staff continue to pass on problems/issues to Cathi and myself, they are still positive about the system.

Jackie

The First Week

Well, now it's Friday. We have been on Koha since Monday morning. The consensus is that our migration has gone very well. Our patrons seem to be taking the change in stride. Most of their issues have been not being able to login because of a password/PIN issue (PINs that start with a zero didn't migrate over correctly.) Once we reset their PIN they have found their way around the site with very little staff intervention. Several patrons have commented that they like the new format and features.

Staff are feeling their way along, many are wishing they'd spent more time "playing" with it when they had the chance, but have adapted quickly and their comfort zone expands daily.

We have found that there are 3 levels of issues - Discovery, Nuisance, and Problems.

1. Discovery issues are nothing more than the staff finding their rhythm and when there is more than one way to do something deciding which way is most natural for each person.
2. Nuisance issues are things like the "0" as the preceding digit in a password and the trailing "$" in an item barcode which didn't migrate to Koha in an orderly fashion. Both of which we've learned what we need to do to resolve the issue on a one-by-one basis. This too is becoming a familiar routine.
3. The Problem issues are those things we will rely upon ByWater Solutions to fix or educate us on, and there aren't many of those. But we've even found ways to cope with most of them in the short term. There are other problem issues that we created for ourselves. Staff error at work! These had to do with the marc imports and not setting the instructions for the loads correctly. For a while the catalogers thought they were losing their minds. Bibs and items were disappearing right and left! They would catalog material and the next day the titles were gone. We could appreciate their concern. We believe this is all under control now.*

The bottom line is there are few complaints and that makes any change easier to adjust to.

We thank ByWater Solutions for their excellent job and for the pleasantly surprising level of support we have received so far. And I want to thank Cathi Wiggins, our Information Systems Specialist for all the long hours she has given and her commitment to the Arcadia Public Library.

*(Most of this message was composed by Cathi in an email. She came up with the three levels of problems.)

Jackie

Go Live!!!!

Arcadia Public Library's new OPAC is up and running! The Library Board of Trustee's chose the name "Arcadia Searchlight" for our catalog.

Are you curious? Check-out our new catalog at

http://catalog.ci.arcadia.ca.us/ or by linking through our website.

Thanks to all the hard work of Cathi Wiggins (the Library's IT support specialist), the ByWater Solutions team, and the City of Arcadia's Information System's Staff, we are able to move ahead.

Go Live Day (minus one)

Tomorrow we go live with Koha. On Saturday evening, after we closed at 6:00 pm, Cathi migrated the last of our circulation transactions from Symphony and placed them in a file(s) so that ByWater Solutions could install them into our new catalog on late Saturday and all day on Sunday. We appreciate that our consultants are willing to work on the weekend, allowing us to stay open to the public.

The staff has been practicing the new system, publicity is out, and we feel ready for the new system. Not everything is perfect yet. The OPAC needs some tweaking, the authorities are not perfect, the receipt printers are spewing too much paper, and the Syndetics book covers are not consistent however none of these problems will hold us back from our new system.

Wish us luck!

Jackie

Talking Points

On Monday, December 13, 2010, we go live with our new Koha catalog. Cathi, our IT Specialist, is putting in all sorts of extra hours trying to resolve problems with our vendor, ByWater Solutions. It is nothing to receive an email from her at 2:30 am! I think she is eating, drinking, sleeping and dreaming Koha!

I have been on vacation for the past few weeks and was surprised with all that has been accomplished in my absence. With the help of the Koha Task Force, our new OPAC has been designed, a new name for our catalog has been chosen, and a new logo developed.

Staff has worked on a list of talking points so that we can present a positive position to our patrons:

Why We Like The New Library Catalog!
• It’s simple! The new catalog offers simplified searching. Misspelled or mistyped words won’t end your search!

• You can suggest new titles for the Library to purchase right from the Catalog.

• You can add items to a personal, private list. This could be used for keeping track of books you’ve read or want to read.

• You can place your own comments or reviews for items in the Catalog.

• You can add tags (personally meaningful terms) to items in the Catalog.

• You can set up an RSS feed and be notified when new items are available by authors or about subjects you select.

• You can place requests on different items at one time without having to retype your Library card number!

• You can receive notices by e-mail and decide for yourself when you want to receive them!

• Book reviews are available right from the Catalog.

• You can browse the shelf virtually by looking for other books in the same area.

• It features book lists including new books for adult, teen and children, DVDs and Best Sellers.


Jackie

T Minus Three Weeks

Six months ago when we began this journey the "go live" day seemed so far off...and now here we are less than a month away and there still seems so much to do and so much to learn. Recently I have been focusing on customization on two different levels--the OPAC and the Circulation notices, slips, and receipts--and how 3rd party products and services interface with Koha--OCLC, Baker & Taylor, 3M, Envisionware, and Unique Management Services.

The OPAC customizing involved putting our name and logo in a banner on the top, adding navigation tabs below the banner linking to our Library Home Page, eResources, Hours & Location, and Contact Us pages as well as Help. I've also been experimenting

with different content in the main area of the OPAC page and the left navigation sidebar. The Koha Task Force has browsed and studied other Koha sites, refining and defining what we'd like our OPAC to look like. I think I've come pretty close to the committee's initial ideas in my first pass, but certainly the customizing is not complete and may always be somewhat of a work in process as new lists and new titles and new services become available and deserve "face time" on the OPAC home page. When we go live there will be a different banner, one that will have the new name of the Catalog, but the new name is still being kept a secret and the new banner is not yet completed.

The customizing of the notices, slips and receipts was mostly just a lot of cut and paste from our current notices, as well as a lot of cutting out excess information from the delivered slip files that we don't need in our finished product. I haven't been able to print these yet to make sure I haven't left anything out or cut too much, but that will follow in the next day or two.

I am still struggling with understanding how MARC imports and Authority imports files from OCLC and B&T work. I have spent time with Tech Services staging MARC files and managing MARC records, but the new items are not showing up in the catalog. We are obviously still missing a critical step. As for the Authority imports, we haven't yet tried to import new data files, but the authorities from our current system haven't even been linked with the bib records in Koha yet so we've got an incomplete picture of how they work on every level. Hopefully this will be an issue that I will be able to get a better handle on early next week.

This week I'm focusing on those services that involve three other 3rd party vendors--3M for our self check stations, Envisionware for our PCReservation and LPT:One, and Unique Management Services for our Account Collections. Today's conference call with UMS was enlightening--while they apparently are considered completely compatible with Koha, the only customers they have are on the Harley version of Koha. We will once again be blazing new trails with our version of Koha by creating reports and support fields to deliver valid data to UMS. Both 3M and Envisionware products use the SIP service to validate patron information against the database. The SIP service will be started on the Linux server this week so that I can test these other two services to make sure we're ready for prime time before we go live.

We will be closing the Symphony Catalog on November 24th for the final time. There will be no more cataloging or tech activities in Symphony after the Thanksgiving holiday. I will be running the Bibs/Item and Authority scripts once again on Wednesday night to capture all the current data in Symphony. I will then upload those files to ByWater Solutions so that over the weekend the data may be imported into the clean, empty databases of our "real" catalog. Our test catalog will no longer be available. Going forward, after the holiday weekend, all new items will be entered directly into the "real" catalog, with these new items being held in Tech Services until December 13th when we finally unveil our new Koha Catalog.

The count down has begun...

Cathi