New Life For IBorrow
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