LINKcat News

Our First Development Project Approved--Migration Report Weeks 5-8 (June 1-24)

These past few weeks all of the Implementation Committee members have been juggling one or more development projects which entails participating in conference calls and reviewing written specifications.  They've been learning how to use Google Groups, Google calendars, gmail and the LibLime Google App site which are the tools LibLime and Automation are using to manage this project.  AND, everyone is learning how Koha works.  It's been busy, confusing, and exhilarating all at once!  We really appreciate the commitment and dedication that everyone is putting into this project.

We've submitted our first acceptance for a development project specification today--"Finding Items and Patrons with the Significant Digits of the Barcode".  This will give staff the to ability to enter only the significant digits of patron and item barcodes.  For example, if the prefix for an item barcode is 39078, the library staff member does not need to enter the 39078 or any zeros between it and the significant digits.  This is a simple project, but an important one.  Even this simple project required the effort to read and respond to the written specifications which took us about a month to do!

 

Our Newest Development Project--Migration Report Weeks 3&4 (May 18-29)

We have decided to move ahead with the project to allow patrons to inactivate and reactivate holds.  An inactivated hold allows the patron to move through the hold queue without losing their place, but the hold will not be filled until it is reactivated.  Patrons use this to manage their holds when going on vacation or to make sure they don't receive later episodes of a television series before earlier ones.  It can also be used to keep a lot of holds from coming in all at once.  This is a biggy for us!

During this two-week period, we had several development calls with Daniel Sweeney.  We've decided to table the project that had to do with displaying the status of holds in the PAC.  The problem we had was with the wording.  In the current version of the PAC, the status said "Item waiting to be pulled" even if the item was checked out which didn't make sense to us.  We've since learned that the status will say "Pending" in a future update which is satisfactory for now.

The Implementation committees are getting used to Google Apps.  By the end of next week, all of the committees except Acquisitions will have met with Daniel Sweeney for at least one development call--some more than once!  We have over 50 people involved in this process which is a lot to coordinate.

Heidi and I are working on how we will set up the test database to simulate things here at SCLS as much as possible.  My biggest worry is how we will handle our 4740 collection codes!  But, I think Heidi has a lot more to worry about as circulation rules are incredibly complex.