Beth’s Blog

You’ll be excited to hear that Holly Harvey was here Monday and Tuesday of last week!

Well, maybe not so excited, if you don’t know who she is.  So, let me explain.

Holly is the new Product Manager for iBorrow.  And she’s not some new kid they’ve hired to try to make that goofy ILL software project work.  Holly has been with SirsiDynix since they were just “Dynix” (The first time around.)  She has the experience, skills, knowledge, and clout to get this stuff working the way it should. 

When she visited TBLC early last week, we mercilessly exposed every flaw we knew of in the current product, as well as listing its strong points and the potential we felt it had.  We had also solicited input from many of you, and we shared that with her.  We didn’t pull any punches, and she didn’t blanch or get defensive, when comments like “slow and clunky” and “our patrons hate it” kept coming up.

“So, then, (I hear you ask) how soon will iBorrow be perfect?”  Oh, come on!  You know I can’t answer that.   But here’s what I can say.

We laid out three main goals for iBorrow.

1.  It should work flawlessly all the time.

2.  It should work with all the major vendors’ ILS systems. (e.g. Polaris, Carl, Triple I)

3.  It should work so smoothly with OCLC that OCLC feels like a ’subroutine’ within iBorrow.

In addition we want several features to make life easier for ILL and public service staff and a way better portal.

Holly knows SQL (the Structured Query Language you use to get reports from a Horizon or URSA system).  On her first day back in the office she figured out how to turn a search in the client that ran for seven minutes and then crashed at Safety Harbor into a search that gave the correct results. 

In ten seconds!! 

To quote Jim Carrey in The Mask:  “Smokin!”

She and I went over the Mediated Borrowing work space in the URSA client and came up with an idea that we hope can cut work by ILL staff there down by 80%.  We don’t know if it will work when it gets to Engineering.  But if it does, we’ll name it after ourselves.  (Actually, we came up with several ways to improve the client, but this one is just a killer.)

The short version is that she seemed to agree with us 100% on what iBorrow ought to be able to do, and we hope she has enough clout at SirsiDynix to get the engineering resources to get it done.

As soon as we hear what’s coming in the next build, we’ll share it with you.

So, hang onto those iBorrow T-shirts.  They may soon be worth something.

–Al Carlson

Its location and appearance vary, but somewhere on your online catalog each of you has a link to iBorrow.  This enables your patrons to use iBorrow’s search and request powers, when they don’t find what they need in your own catalog.  We’ve uncovered a problem with this link, and we’d like to work with you to correct it.  Here’s the issue. 

Some of you use OCLC as your Lender Of Last Resort.  Some of you don’t.  If you do, you want your patron’s searches to include OCLC.  If you don’t, you want to exclude OCLC.  So, we actually have two different public portals.  They look alike, but only one of them searches OCLC.

To guide your patrons to the right portal, we listed all the participating libraries on our main iBorrow page in two distinct groups and–next to each group–put a Start Your Search button that takes the user to the right public portal.  You can see this at http://iborrow.org

This will come as a shock to you, but some people don’t read the list before clicking on a Search button.  So, they wind up in the wrong portal and get either too many or too few results when they search.

We’re redesigning the page to make it harder to choose the “wrong” library.  But the simplest solution for most of you is to simply skip our page altogether.  If the link on your own online catalog has an explanation of where it is sending the user and why it’s doing that, you could send them straight to the correct portal and skip our page.

Here’s how you’d do that.

If you use OCLC as your Lender Of Last Resort, you can send your patrons directly to:

http://iborrow.asp.dynix.com/uPortal/Initialize?uP_tparam=props&props=TBLC_OCLC&uP_reload_layout=true

If you don’t use OCLC as your LOLR, you should send your patrons to:

http://iborrow.asp.dynix.com/uPortal/Initialize?uP_tparam=props&props=TBLC_PATRON&uP_reload_layout=true

This may look confusing to you, but your Web person will know exactly how to use this.

If you have questions about this, please give me a call.  But, if you are clear on the problem and the solution, you can just go ahead.

–Al Carlson

TECO experienced a power outage on Saturday, September 8, at about 11 a.m. that took out several office complexes in the vicinity of Falkenburg and Windhorst.  TBLC was one of the complexes that was hit.  Our APC UPS carried our servers for almost an hour, but then it had to shut down.  At that point, Sunline, SunCat, RPA, SIP, Help Desk, and any other service that depends on a TBLC server was down for the count.

TECO took responsibility for the problem but was unable to give us any prediction on when the power would be restored.  It turned out to be about 4:30 p.m.

I have restarted all the servers that did not restart automatically.  So far as I can tell, everything is working as it should.  But I may have overlooked something.  So, if you run into problems on Sunday, September 9, call the Sunline weekend number (813-476-1725).

–Al Carlson