Beth’s Blog

Users who jumped in early Monday morning and opened up the new iBorrow build that was loaded on Friday evening were heard to mutter to themselves, “This new build sure looks a lot like the old build.”

That’s because it was the old build.  Our weekend testing revealed a deal breaker, so we had SirsiDynix restore the old build Sunday evening.

We’d hoped that our testing would be just a formality, and that we’d sign off on the new version by Saturday noon and go back to Christmas shopping.  But we ran into a problem Friday night that the SirsiDynix engineers were not able to diagnose and fix.  Not that they didn’t try.  We caught Holly at the SirsiDynix Christmas party Friday evening, and she had Keith Poole in on the problems before the first round of canapés was gone.  We all continued testing the next day, but by Saturday afternoon, it was clear that this was not a trivial coding issue.  Peter Fripp restored the build we’ve been using late on Sunday afternoon.

The problem we ran into was a variation on one we’ve seen before:  declining requests.  About a third of the time, we would get a rude and cryptic error message, when we tried to decline a request.  We hoped to find the pattern behind the problem.  Maybe something like, “When the requesting library is their own Lender Of Last Resort and they are set to unmediated, declining will fail.”  Nahh!  Nothing that easy.  I had three requests from the same library lined up in Fill Loan in the iBorrow Training database.  The first declined fine.  The second failed.  The third worked.  Go figure.

So, Holly, Keith, Peter, and Aaron will put the new build up on the rack (Think mechanic, not inquisition) this morning, tear it apart, and see if they can find the cause of this nasty bug.  You will keep using the build you know and have grown to love.  And we’ll let you know when we’re ready to try again.

–Al Carlson

We’ve had the current build of the IBorrow Staff Client in place for quite a while.  It’s not the most exciting piece of software on the planet, but it’s been stable.  And after its early history, that’s counted for a lot.  But, behind the scenes and under the radar—and possibly over the rainbow and through the looking glass—Holly Harvey’s software engineering team has been hard at work to improve it.  Barring the always possible last minute show stoppers, we should see the new version this weekend.

As we’ve done with the past two releases, Matt and I will test it on Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday.  If it breaks or goes catatonic on us, we’ll call Holly and ask her to take it off the server and put the current version back on.  If it survives our rigorous beer-and-pizza-driven testing, we’ll leave it in place, and you’ll see it Monday morning.

If you need help from your IT Department to load new iBorrow builds on your PC, please let them know that one is—probably–due on Monday.  Most of you will see it when you click on the SirsiDynix icon Monday morning and watch the download.

So, what are these new features?  I’m glad you asked.  There are over 40 of them, so I’ll hit only the highlights.

1. When you are pushing requests out to other participants in Mediate Borrowing, the request will actually go to your target location and not hang around in your work space, tempting you to try it again and then generating an error message.  We like a practical joke as much as anyone, but this one has gone on long enough.
2. They’ve added some “hover text” to the Portals, so that “mousing over” choices such as “Volumes Needed” will bring up an explanation of what that means.
3. Many of the error messages currently end with, “If the problem persists, ask a Librarian.”  That’s a nice tribute to our profession’s skills, but not very useful to the patron using his browser at home.  Or even to the patron in the library, because few library schools offer courses in NCIP error message diagnosis.  So, the “ask a Librarian” line will leave iBorrow and go stay with Virtual Reference where it belongs.  Other misleading messages in the Portals have also been fixed.
4. When you are searching in the staff Portal and pick a group of target libraries, you won’t have to pick them again every time you search.  Your choices will persist through that session.
5. When you use Search Requests in the URSA Staff Client, it will be MUCH faster than it has been, even if you do a complex search, such as “How many requests are there with a requesting agency of Pinellas Park, a lending agency of Lee County, and a status of Pending at Lender?”  And the columns you set up to show the results of those searches will now persist, so you don’t have to drag them into place every time you log in.
6. A couple of the tabs or ‘buttons’ on the Home screen in the Staff Client have been relabeled.  Instead of having Mediate Loan mean “either borrowing or lending, depending on how I use it in the rest of the sentence”, Mediate Loan will mean you are borrowing from someone else, and Incoming Loan will mean you are lending to someone else.  If you want confusing labels, you’ll have to shop elsewhere.

There will also be some visual differences that are tough to describe, so I’ll just say “Watch for them!”  I expect to hear at least one “Oooo!” or “Ahhh!” next Monday.

If you have questions or concerns on any of this, please contact me.

–Al Carlson

I don’t yet have the details on what went wrong or what the specific fix was, but RPA seems to have been pummeled into submission and is now validating patrons throughout the iBorrow realm again.
The most complete explanation I’ve gotten so far is:  “..the cookie setting in RPA has to be at least ‘5’”.  I have no idea what that means.  Or how it got to be less than five.  But I’ll keep asking.

The other news involves iBorrow/URSA updates and the next build.  The target date for the next release is early December.  We’ll see if they can convince us that Matt and I don’t need to pre-test it over a weekend.  So far, we are still a mite skeptical. 

As was the case with the previous build, the next one will focus on stability and reliability rather than flashy new features, but there will be some nice new stuff.  We should get a list next week, and we will pass it on via Email and post it here on Beth’s Blog.

–Al Carlson

Just so we wouldn’t get complacent, iBorrow has decided to mess with us again.

If you try to log in as a patron from East Lake, Palm Harbor, Sunline, Lee County, or Hillsborough County, you’ll get the error message that says:
“Invalid username and/or password, please login again”
Or you may get some variation on that wording.  The bottom line is that you won’t get in.

(If you log in as a Pinellas Park user, or one from Citrus, Hernando, or Collier, you’re fine.  Go figure.)

This seems to be a problem with RPA.  Peter Fripp and Sandy Schlueter have been working on it since yesterday (November 12), and we hope—but cannot guarantee—that they’ll have it fixed today.

Stay tuned for updates.  Contact me if you have questions.

–Al Carlson

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

If this were a movie, we’d be saying, “It’s quiet out there.  Too quiet!”  But we’re Librarians, and we like it when it’s quiet.  Especially where iBorrow is concerned.  Since the download of the latest build, Matt and I have been doing daily checks of the Mediate Loan and Fill Loan work spaces, looking for requests that  have failed to age properly.  There was one the very first week.  Since then, none.

We’ve been keeping track of complaints that requests passed on to OCLC were failing.  We’ve had maybe three, and Peter Fripp figured those out.

So, what we finally have is a borrower driven InterLibrary Loan tool that works.  (And I can hear you muttering under your breath, “Well, it’s about time!”  Amen to that!) 

If we were dogs, we would go lie down in the grass, let our tongues loll out, and just enjoy this for a long time.  But, we’re not.  We’re the species with the opposable thumb and the low boredom threshold.  And after about five minutes of satisfaction, we have to go out and poke something with a stick, just to see what will happen.  So, what’s next for iBorrow?

Well, first, we’re waiting (tapping our feet and glancing impatiently at our watches the whole time) for SirsiDynix to ‘officially’ announce that URSA/iBorrow is a “core product” and that they will commit the resources needed to turn it into an ILL tool that makes you say “Wow!” rather than, “Well, I guess it does sorta work OK.”   As soon as we get that word, we can start working with their Product Development team to implement the suggestions we’ve been putting in since Day One.

And we can start bringing more libraries into our current group of participants.  With a little final fine tuning, we could bring Hernando, Citrus, and Collier in right away.   Then we can move on to Polaris and the other systems we haven’t really worked with at all, yet.  Progress there, of course, depends on cooperation from the engineering teams of those other vendors.  We want SirsiDynix to make them an offer they can’t refuse.

Eternal optimists that we are, we have hopes that we will see this official announcement from SirsiDynix this week.  When we do, we will share it with you while it is still warm and giving off that fresh baked bread smell.

Meanwhile, enjoy working with an ILL tool that, um, well… works!

–Al Carlson

The entertainment newsletter Variety doesn’t cover iBorrow developments.  I have no idea why not.  Talk about entertaining!  But, if they did, their headline for the most recent build would look a lot like the one above.

Matt and I did our best to break it this weekend, but it survived everything we threw at it.  Normal functions work.  OCLC transitions work.  And–finally!–aging works.

Despite what you may hear, Matt and I are not Certified ILL Guys, so you may find flaws in the new build that we missed.  If you do, don’t keep them to yourselves.  Tell us, so we can get them corrected.  And if the new build really is as good as it looks so far, all I can say is, “Enjoy!  Enjoy!”

–Al Carlson

iBorrow is fresh and innovative. So why not have a Web page that expresses that? Now we do!

We are proud to announce the launch of our new iBorrow homepage. Recently redesigned, our new page is bright, clean and user friendly, and it flows seamlessly into the subsequent SirsiDynix site.

Check it out! We hope you like it.