New Players Added; Some Current Players Sidelined
You may want to take notes. There is a lot happening right now.
Let’s start with the good stuff. Citrus County is now an active iBorrow participant, and Collier County will join us on Monday morning, May 5. Did I hear an “Ooooo!” or perhaps an “Ahhhh!”? Well, I should hope so.
Both systems are easing in rather than jumping in, so here are the complications. Citrus will begin by lending only. That’s right. Citrus County has been added to your list of lenders, and you should find yourself getting loans from them any day now.
For a while, they will request only out of Tech Svcs HQ. These will mostly be staff tests, but for real items. No more sandbox testing for them! When they get used to that and work out any bugs, they will open it up to Reference Desk staff as a tool Reference can use when the patron’s needs suggest it as the best option. When that is going smoothly, they’ll open it up to their borrowers for direct access.
Collier County will be doing pretty much the same thing. They will begin lending right away on May 5. But they will ease into borrowing a little at a time. So, for a while, you may have to put up with both Citrus County and Collier County lending you more than they borrow from you. Try to be brave about that.
Now, let’s do the not-so-good-at-the-moment stuff.
East Lake, Palm Harbor, and Pinellas Park have all completed their migration to Polaris. That’s good for the citizens of Pinellas County, but it moves them to a library system that URSA/iBorrow cannot—at the moment—talk to. So, as I write this, they cannot fill any new requests for you. (They can still fill requests they got before the migration, and they will return your stuff. They promised.)
But we are working with Rob Gray at Polaris on getting it and URSA to talk to one another. Earlier this week we were able to get past a major hurdle on their test server. We were able to go to the iBorrow Portal as a Polaris patron (which the Palm Harbor, East Lake, and Pinellas Park patrons now are), create an iBorrow user, and request a title. If we can get that same thing set up on the ‘real’ Polaris server, East Lake, Pinellas Park, and Palm Harbor borrowers can start requesting again. I think there is also a way they can fill iBorrow requests, but we haven’t had a chance to really test that yet. Remember all the glitches and strange errors that you went through when you were first coming up on iBorrow? Well, it’s now Polaris’ turn for all that.
Check in here from time to time for updates. I’ll also put them out as Email.
–Al Carlson