New URSA build scheduled for January 19th
We wanted a new iBorrow build for Christmas, and we didn’t get it. But it looks as though one will come through this month.
Our URSA team at SirsiDynix says they have rolled one off the assembly line and are test driving it now. The planned download date is Friday, January 19. Would you like to know what’s in it? I thought so. Here, in no particular order, are the bug fixes and enhancements you should see on the 19th.
1. Requests advance correctly to the next lender, when the Process By date is reached. This is huge. The broken ‘aging’ process has been making life miserable for ILL staff for months now. The cause of the problem was that the ‘day end’ run was trying to do too many tasks at once and was crashing. SirsiDynix broke the aging of requests into multiple separate passes, and the processor can now handle the entire job without choking.
2. URSA/iBorrow accurately checks Availability status before placing Holds, both Local Holds and “Remote Holds”. We originally set up Availability Rules for every participant, so that iBorrow would go after only books with a status of Checked In. URSA was occasionally ignoring those rules and placing holds on titles whose copies were Out or Missing or Lost or even non-existent.
3. The OCLC Gateway gets several fixes:
It can handle requests that do not have an ISBN or OCLC control number
It no longer chokes when validating ISBN’s
It will not send the same request to OCLC more than once
Requests at OCLC will have a status of “External” rather than “Filled” when you look at them in History in the URSA client.
4. Columns for Author and ISBN have been added to displays throughout Request Manager.
5. There are columns for ISBN and ISSN in Mediated Borrowing and in Mediated Lending.
6. The Portal “Results Bar” displays only the total number of hits for a de-duplicated search. It does not show the number at each target server.
· Search for “Gone with the Wind” in the current version of the Portal, and you’ll see how much space is wasted by the results bar.
7. Request statuses have been re-written in “patron friendly” terms in the My Account part of the portal.
8. The red error messages that show up in the portal when a Z-server is down will no longer appear.
9. If you enter an item barcode in Mediate Lending, the request will go directly to the borrowing library’s Receive Loan workspace, not just to your own Fill Loan workspace.
10. You can push a request up to the Catalog Level from a sub-agency.
In other words, if there is a request in Mediated Lending at (e.g.) Oldsmar that should not be there, Oldsmar can push it up to the Sunline level, so someone else can fill it.
11. Staff notes display in the order they were added.
12. NCIP errors will decrease, because NCIP messaging for handling Local Holds in Horizon has been fixed in a new build of the Horizon NCIP responder.
· I know. That sounds like total gibberish. But, trust me. It’s a good thing.
13. In a mapped system, if an item is already checked in on the local system when you Complete the loan in URSA, URSA will successfully set the status to Complete.
And then for Al and Matt we have:
1. A Brokered agency can inherit Borrowing Sequences from the Broker
2. An agency can inherit Borrowing Policy
3. Availability Rules can use wild cards and will come with a default value.
(These will save us a lot of time when we are setting up a new library system)
Neat stuff, eh? If something comes up to delay the January 19 download, I’ll let you know.
If you have questions about any of this, please email me or call me at 813-622-8252 ext 223.
Al Carlson