LINKcat News

LINKcat downtime and the 4.16 LibLime Koha upgrade

The LINKcat PAC will be down for the 4.16 upgrade starting at 9 pm on Monday, July 22. Users who try to access LINKcat while it is down will see a "downtime" message. It will come back up by 7 am on Tuesday, July 23, barring any unforseen problems with the upgrade.

A slide announcing the downtime has been posted as part of the slideshow on the LINKcat home page. The downtime will also be publicized using the LINKcat Facebook and Twitter accounts. Messages will be posted prior to the start of the downtime and will also be posted when LINKcat comes back up.

4.16 LibLime Koha Upgrade Scheduled

We are pleased to announce that the 4.16 upgrade to LibLime Koha has been scheduled for the evening of Monday, July 22, 2013 with the changes available to libraries on the morning of Tuesday, July 23.  The primary purpose for this upgrade are changes in the code to improve authority control, making authority links functional and allowing SCLS to return to full authority control maintenance. There are a number of additional improvements and bug fixes in this release, which are described in full in the LibLime Koha 4.16 Release Notes.  Here are some highlights:

• Phone and email labels on the patron record are now more generic
• Patron session checkouts will be displayed on the Patron CheckOut screen for 10 minutes
• The Ignore button problem on the Hold-found pop-up is fixed
• Patrons are no longer incorrectly blocked from placing a hold when they are in the library
• The RSS feed button in the PAC works
• Patrons can no longer place more than 75 holds when using the Cart or List features
• A Subscriptions tab has been added to the PAC
• Some improvements have been made to the fuzzy matching (aka stemming) search results
• A format limit for scores has been added

 

 

Previous patron report available in Crystal reports

We have developed an on-demand report in Crystal Reports that will provide staff with the last three issues (checkouts) of an item barcode, regardless of return date.  We developed this report to assist staff with locating previous patron information for items that are damaged or missing a part.  This report has been posted to your Crystal Reports dashboard.  If you have any questions please submit them on the Koha Support form (aka Koha Questions and Comments form).

Thanks to the Circulation User's group for their input and everyone who did testing.

Authority Control - Step Two

In preparation for our Koha upgrade to version 4.16, we have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes. The next phase begins this afternoon.

For the past couple of weeks, our authority control vendor has been updating nearly all of our bibliographic records.  (A large number of authority records for names, subjects, series, and genres have changed with the adoption of a new cataloging standard called Resource Description and Access, or RDA. The authority control vendor has updated our bibliographic records to match the new standard. ) Now, the second step of our authority control project is to receive applicable changes to our bibliographic records. Today LibLime will begin loading the changed bibliographic records that came from the authority control vendor. This will take several days as 900,000+ records will be loaded. This means that most bibliographic records with biblionumbers up to and including 972129 are unavailable for editing for the next couple of days. Madison TS will track Problem Bib Record Reports for records in this range and will make the changes when the loading is complete.

You can still edit, add, and delete item records attached to these bibliographic records. You can still add BSEs, GEN, PERM, LOCAL, and Acquisitions BSEs to the database. However, we ask that you refrain from sending Purchase Orders with more than 100 titles from GetIt Acquisitions for the next couple of days.. Also, new BSE records may take longer to index because of the large number of bibliographic records that are being re-loaded into the database.

After the 4.16 upgrade, subject, series title, and author links will be more reliable and we will be able to resume regular updates to our database on the back end.

If you have any questions about this process, please contact Joanna at jmesser@scls.lib.wi.us.

Linking Manual Revisions Posted

Several large revisions to the Linking Manual have been posted to the Linking Manual page on the ILS Support Website. If you still use printed copies for your staff reference in your library, please print new copies of the following sections:

• Section III - Searching and Matching Guidelines
• Section V - Books Bibliographic Short Entry
• Section VII - Sound Recordings Bibliographic Short Entry
• Section VIII - Videorecordings Bibliographic Short Entry
• Section IX - Software and Video Game Bibliographic Short Entry
• Section XII - Linking Items

Sections have been updated to reflect bug fixes that have affected functionality, new policies regarding matching on multipart audiovisual items, labeling rules for multipart items, and new rules regarding descriptive cataloging practices under RDA (Resource Description and Access).

If you have any questions about changes within these manual sections and what they may mean for your library's technical services workflows, please contact Joanna Messer at SCLS.

"Fines/Financial - standard rules" policy revision

Based on a request from library staff, the Circulation Services Subcommittee recommended and the ILS Committee approved revisions to the "Fines/Financial - standard rules" policy.  Please require your staff to read the revised policy, located in the Circulation section of the Policies tab, ILS Support page. 

News Summary for 5/1/2013 through 5/31/2013

News

• 5/30/13 In preparation for the upgrade to 4.16 and associated authority control development, bibliographic records added between 4/19/2011 and 4/1/2013 are being extracted this evening. For more details, see the LINK 2.0 Koha blog post. 106764 records were extracted in this process.
• 5/30/13 In the monthly process for batch deleting withdrawn items, 21534 items and 3658 bibs with only withdrawn items attached were deleted.
• 5/23/13 The second round of Problem Item Reports have been run in the Annual Batch Deletion sequence. Read last week's Blog post and also today's post about an additional Problem Item report to help with your 'spring' cleaning.
• 5/23/13 Circulation Best Practices blog posts: What to do if you don't charge overdue fines for "Check in/Check out" transactions, What else needs to be done after changing a patron's barcode? and Using Notepad and Receipt printers for Problem Item form patron information.
• 5/21/13 The minutes from the Circulation Services Subcommittee May Meeting are available online.
• 5/7/13 The monthly LINKcat.info and LINKcat Mobile reports are posted.

Known Problems:Recently Added & Updated

5/31/2013 New. In the PAC, if patrons click the Submit button (on the holds confirmation page) more than once, then duplicate holds are placed. The holds transaction is not complete until the patron is brought to the list of holds in their patron account. If the button is clicked again before the initial transaction has completed, then the browser sends a new transaction and this results in duplicate holds. This is a browser issue and also happens on commerical web sites. There is a notice on the holds confirmation screen instructing users to click the Submit button only once. Fixing this problem would require development to make the Submit button disappear after it is clicked. (SCLS Support Ticket 45068)