Beth’s Blog

Congratulations!  We are 20% larger than we were a few days ago.  No, this is not a Weight Watchers issue.  I mean that we have added an iBorrow participant, and URSA/iBorrow now searches six servers instead of five.  (If you count specific library buildings, it’s not as big a deal.  I’ll let you do the math on that)

Palm Harbor Library and East Lake Community Library are now pretty much full iBorrow participants.  They bumped up from Horizon 7.2 to Horizon 7.3.3 on Monday and came up on iBorrow on Tuesday and Wednesday.  I think an appropriate comment is, “Wow!”

We and SirsiDynix are still tweaking various parts of the software to get everything working right.  As of ten minutes ago, a Portal search would show their titles, but the ‘availability’ tab would show only the Location and the Due Date.  By the time you read this, that will probably be fixed. 
As other New Participant glitches emerge, we’ll pounce on them and fix them as quickly as we can.

And, speaking of fixes, SirsiDynix said in today’s Conference Call that the new build will be here tomorrow (Friday) and should have all the promised goodies.  Except one.  The ‘user friendly’ status messages in the “My Account” part of the portal go lost in the software conveyor belt somewhere.  They’ll have to wait for the next build.

If you run into new build problems Friday, please let us know.

If the new build works wonderfully and makes you want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, tell us that, too.

Al Carlson
 

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
 

We are happy to announce that Palm Harbor and East Lake will migrate to iBorrow on Tuesday, January 16th.  We welcome them to the iBorrow family!

We have two flavors of ILL in the TBLC iBorrow universe.  Hillsborough County and Lee County have centralized ILL shops that do all their ILL work, whether it is iBorrow management or old style ILL.  In SunLine and in the Polk County Library Cooperative, ILL is done at the individual library.  Whichever form you use seems “right” and “natural” to you.  The other is, of course, weird and strange.Until the latest build, iBorrow acted as though every library was the SunLine/PCLC flavor.  ILL staff at Lee and Hillsborough had to jump through unnatural hoops to get their work done.  The latest build let us “centralize” ILL activities at Lee and Hillsborough in URSA’s eyes.  URSA now has very little awareness of the branches in those two counties.  From its point of view, all meaningful ILL activity in Lee County and Hillsborough County now takes place at the designated ILL location.

We recommend that you use the regular DLLI mailing labels to mail iBorrow items.  Stamp the DLLI label with the iBorrow stamp so the receiving library can identity the bag as containing iBorrow items.  The DLLI labels are available here: http://www.tblc.org/delivery/documentation.shtml.  The iBorrow stamps are available from TBLC. 

If you use labels other than DLLI labels please be sure the label contains a complete mailing address. Velocity Express will not deliver without a complete address on the label.

A new Local Holds in a Nutshell document is available on the iBorrow staff website at: http://www.tblc.org/iborrow-project/policies.shtml

The document describes the process iBorrow uses when a local hold is placed, with screen shots.

As we certainly hope you know, you downloaded a new ‘build’ of the URSA/iBorrow client on August 10th when you clicked on the SirsiDynix icon. This build was designed to solve several problems. It didn’t get them all, but it got some, and the rest should be coming soon, but without your having to download a new build. Here’s the summary.

On August 8^th SirsiDynix will release a new build of the URSA client for iBorrow users.  When you access the client on the morning of August 8^th you will download a new client.  Staff at TBLC have been in contact with systems administrators and/or IT staff in the five systems on iBorrow to provide information about the download.   

The fixes in this new client are described below.   

1. Centralized workflow will be implemented.  This means Tampa-Hillsborough and Lee County will be able to process all requests from the catalog agency rather than the individual agencies. 

In training you were all trained to do these steps to Receive a loan:
1. Go to Receive Loan in Request Manager.
2. Locate the item in the list in the top pane and highlight it.
3. Enter the barcode in the barcode field and in the local barcode field.
 
These are the CORRECTED STEPS to Receive a Loan in iBorrow:
1. Go to Receive Loan in Request Manager.
2. Locate the item in the list in the top pane and highlight it.
3. Enter the barcode ONLY in the local barcode field.
 
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

TBLC staff have worked with SirsiDynix to improve the login procedure on the iBorrow portal. We have heard your concerns about the user name and password login requirement on the portal and have a solution.

The portal can now be accessed without logging in. Users can search the portal anonymously. When they choose to request they are prompted for their user name and password (and given the prompt to create one if they do not have one).

We have implemented this change on the staff portal accessible here: http://iborrow.asp.dynix.com/uPortal/Initialize?uP_tparam=props&props=TBLC_STAFF&uP_reload_layout=true or through the iBorrow staff website by clicking on “To search the iBorrow staff interface, click here” On this page: http://www.tblc.org/iborrow-project/search.shtml.

We will implement this change on the publicly accessible portals at 8am on July 26^th.

As a result, the Guest login located on the www.iborrow.org page will no longer be necessary.  We will remove this when the change to the publicly accessible portals is complete.   We are also planning some redesign of this page.  Look for that change in the coming days.

We continue to work with staff in iBorrow participating libraries and with SirsiDynix to improve iBorrow.  All of your feedback is a help to us.  Please continue to communicate with us.  You can email us at iborrow@tblc.org.