Keeping Busy, Keeping Up

Just a quick update on some of the things I've been doing to keep busy since my last post:

I ran another set of scripts against the Symphony databases to retrieve all the holds, charges, bills, and authorities data. Some of the files that were created were pretty large so it took awhile to upload them to the ByWater Solutions server. Brendan has spent the last week or so preparing a good portion of this data for import onto our server.

I have also been doing some additional configuration in our Koha system to setup a custom framework for Catalogers so that only the MARC fields they use will be in the first tab on the "Add a MARC record" screen; to add calendar entries, item types, authorized values, circulation fines and rules, and patron attribute types; and experimenting with Notices and Reports.

Most recently I have been in conversations with City IT, Brendan at ByWater, as well as Jackie and David Dolim on what our options are for a browser on the staff stations to use with the Koha Staff Client. There are compatibility "bugs" with Internet Explorer and Koha in regards to receipt printing in the Circulation module, managing baskets in the Acquisitions module, saving new subscriptions in the Serials module, viewing the Help files in general, and possibly more that we've yet to discover--thus making IE an unusable browser with the Staff Client. I was exploring using Chrome, but there appears to be a receipt printing issue with that browser as well. Looks like we'll be using Firefox as our browser on the staff stations. Because IE is the "City sanctioned browser", and it is tied in with our web filtering, web statistics, automatic software updates, etc., we will be installing Firefox only on staff stations and restricting it to only access the URL for our Koha Staff Client. At this point it looks like both the staff and public stations will continue to use Internet Explorer as the browser to access the OPAC.

There is a lot of work to setting up a new ILS....more than I think we remembered from our last migration from Taos to Unicorn, but it is at the same time very exciting to be part of the "shaping" process and to watch it evolve.

Cathi