Item Statuses in GIL Catalogs

There are a lot of item statuses that you will see in GIL Classic and GIL-Find, but here are the most common you'll encounter and what they mean to you. (The statuses that an item goes through from ordering to reaching the shelf are listed chronologically.)

On Order
Items that are on order look a little different in GIL Classic versus GIL-Find. They will both have an “on order” location, such as “Alpharetta On Order” or “Decatur On Order”. In GIL Classic, an additional “On Order” line that reads something like “1 Copy Ordered as of 03-21-12”. Sadly, we cannot currently display this information in GIL-Find, so it will just have the on order location and a line that reads “status information not available”. Items in this state have been ordered, but have not yet arrived in Technical Services. When they do arrive they will enter a “Received” state.

Received
In GIL Classic, items that have been received, but not yet cataloged, will still display the on order location (e.g., Decatur On Order) and will have an additional “On Order” line that reads something like “1 Copy Received as of 04-17-12”. Like items on order, GIL-Find cannot display this information and will just give the on order location and a line reading “status information not available”.

If you see something in a received state, we’ve got it in hand, but it still needs to be cataloged and processed.

In Process
Items with the In Process status have been received and cataloged, but may not have reached their campus yet. This status is applied when the item record is created by a cataloger, so there are a few more steps that the item still has to go through before being sent out. If the In Process status remains on an item for more than a few months, there is likely a problem. Please check for these items on the shelf and discharge them if you find them (to remove the In Process status). If the items cannot be found on the campus, contact a catalog librarian to run a check in Technical Services.

Not Checked Out
Items with this status have been cataloged, processed, received by their home campus and they should be available on the shelf.

Checked Out
Someone has charged this item. It should not be on the shelf.

In Transit
These items are on the move! They’re being sent to another campus/institution to be picked up by a patron who requested them or they’re being routed back to their home campus/institution after being returned by a patron.

Returned to Circulation
These items have made it back to their home campus and have been discharged by someone in the Circulation Department. They’re about to be, or have recently just been, shelved, so they might not be on the shelf yet if the discharge date is very recent. This status clears itself automatically after a few days.

Missing
This status is applied manually by librarians or staff. The item did not appear to be charged to a patron in Voyager, but it couldn’t be found on the shelf or in the library.

Lost
In the backend of Voyager, there are actually two lost statuses, “Lost--Library Applied” and “Lost--System Applied”. The former is applied by librarians or staff when we know that someone has an item, but it was not charged to their account for whatever reason. The latter is, as it states, applied by the system after an item has been overdue for an extended period.

Items go into Lost at different rates of time, depending upon item type. See the circulation matrices for more details. (http://guides.gpc.edu/content.php?pid=56654&sid=469494)

Withdrawn
Withdrawn doesn’t actually display in the item status line in GIL Classic, so withdrawn items are also put in the temporary location of WITHDRAWN. This item status does display as “Withdrawn” in GIL-Find though.

Scheduled
In GIL Classic, this status displays as “Scheduled (Requests: 0)” and just plain ol’ “Scheduled” in GIL-Find. It means that this is an item from the nonprint faculty collection and has a booking request on it in the Media Scheduling module.

Recommended Reading & Links From Apple Executive Briefing

In February, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend an "executive briefing" at the Apple HQ in Cupertino, California. I'll be presenting on it at the Reference Committee meeting tomorrow, but I wanted to post my list of readings and links from briefing, in no particular order.

iBooks Author (digital book creation app)
http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author

Abelard to Apple : The Fate of American Colleges and Universities
http://gilfind.gpc.edu/vufind/Record/366378

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns
http://gilfind.gpc.edu/vufind/Record/305584
(We also have a copy of this at Newton & in eBooks on EBSCO)

7 Things You Should Know About Challenge-Based Learning
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutChall/244525

Apple Distinguished Educators Program
http://www.apple.com/education/apple-distinguished-educator
Created to recognize K-12 and higher education pioneers who are using a variety of Apple products to transform teaching and learning. ADEs work closely with Apple, participating in and often presenting at education events.

ACOT2: Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow - Today
http://ali.apple.com/acot2
This is the evolution of the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) project which started in 1985 to study how routine technology use influences teaching and learning. In 1995, it was replaced with the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow-Today (ACOT2) program, with the stated goal “to help high schools get closer to creating the kind of learning environment this generation of students needs [sic], wants [sic], and expects [sic] so they will stay in school.”

GPC’s iTunes University Site (in development)
https://eapps.gpc.edu/itunesu

Enabling Desktop Notifications in LibraryH3lp

LibraryH3lp's recent upgrade added a couple of snazzy features to the webchat client, one of which is Desktop Notifications.

This feature is native in the Google Chrome browser, so all you have to do to us it in Chrome is log into webchat, open the Actions menu in the top right of the screen, and click "Enable Desktop Notifications".

Desktop Notifications will also work in Firefox, but you do have to install an add-on. (You should not have to be an admin to do this. We've tested it on a power user machine and it worked just fine.)

Go to this page and click the "Add to Firefox" button.

Just follow the prompts after that. You must to restart Firefox to enable the add-on.

After Firefox has restarted, log into LibraryH3lp webchat, open the Actions menu in the top right of the screen, and click "Enable Desktop Notifications".


At some point during the process, you will also be notified that libraryh3lp.com is asking for permission to show desktop notifications. Click "Allow".


At the moment, Desktop Notifications don't work at all in IE. So, remember, don't click on the blue E!

If you have enabled Desktop notifications correctly a little window with the blue LibraryH3lp question mark should pop up in the lower right hand corner of your monitor, if there is chat activity and the webchat client is minimized or not on top. Don't worry about the "Options" menu on those notifications. It's under-the-hood stuff, not cosmetic. Just leave it at the defaults.

Just email Tessa with any questions!

Copying & Pasting Searches in GIL

Copying and pasting a title to use for a search in GIL is a great little time saver, particularly when checking for duplicates on your order slips, but there is a caveat. When copying and pasting from a webpage, you can carry over formatting that will cause your search to bomb out even if we own the title.

For example, we have McGraw-Hill’s GMAT. If you copy and paste that title into a GIL Classic exact title search, as is, you'll get a "no matches found" message, even though we own it. When you copy the title, you're getting a formatted, as opposed to plain text, apostrophe. GIL Classic is very literal, especially in the exact search. This is why it's more precise than GIL Find, but also more demanding. If you remove the apostrophe and search on McGraw-Hills GMAT (or delete the apostrophe and retype, which will be plain text), you'll get two hits.

This premise applies to any sort of potentially formatted punctuation, accent marks, etc. If you remove anything like that from a copy and paste search, it won't bomb out unless we really don't own the title.

The above applies only to GIL Classic. GIL-Find seems to just ignore punctuation. However, I'm not 100% certain of that. If you have a copy and paste search bomb out, in any catalog or search interface, and you feel like it shouldn't have, removing any punctuation and accent marks is always a good first step.

The Status of the Withdrawn Status

We’ve had some problems recently with patrons being sent to other campuses to get items that turned out to be withdrawn, so I wanted to take a second to go over that status and how it currently displays.

When items are withdrawn from the collection, they are given the item status of “Withdrawn”, which allows me to run a report and pull them out for Sonya, who removes/suppresses the records in the catalog and takes our holdings off of the WorldCat record, if necessary.

Now, unfortunately, this item status doesn’t display in GIL Classic. That’s why people withdrawing items have to add the temporary location of “WITHDRAWN,” in addition to the item status. This temporary location does display in GIL Classic. We’ve put it in all caps to make it as noticeable as possible, and it's pretty large, but that’s the best we can do given the limitations of the software.



Now, GIL-Find is a little more flexible about statuses than GIL Classic, and I’ve been working with the server site to get statuses to display in a more meaningful way. When the new code rolls out soon, we may even start seeing “Withdrawn” in GIL-Find. Here’s a screenshot from the testing code.



Whether they’re using GIL-Find or GIL Classic, please look for this temporary location and/or status in the holdings record before telling someone an item is available and remind your part-time staff to do so. Patrons have gotten understandably upset after driving to another campus for a book that wasn’t there.

Thanks everyone! Please let me know if you have any questions.

"Cookery" Gets a Makeover

Great news on the LCSH front All of the "Cookery" headings have been changed to the much less baffling, "Cooking". So exciting!

Now, this affects roughly a squillion headings in our catalog, so it's taking me a little longer than I'd anticipated to change them all. You'll see these changes kind of rolling out over the next couple of hours. I'm plugging away though and hope to be finished by mid-day. If you see any "Cookery" headings in the catalog after today, let me know. I probably missed them.

Libraryland Gets Into the Google Books Game

Open Library, a project of the Internet Archive, has been around for a couple of years now and is a really interesting project with the lofty goal of creating a webpage for every book ever published. Since it's a wiki, they're plugging along pretty well with over 20 million records.

Tuesday, they will be offering more than a million public domain and contemporary e-book titles. There are some titles in there that are still in copyright, but are no longer sold commercially, so this will be an interesting project to watch. No doubt legal challenges will unfold and Libraryland doesn't have Google's financial might to endure protracted litigation. However, libraries getting on board with testing the boundaries of copyright in a digital age certainly doesn't hinder Google's efforts in that arena. Strange bedfellows, maybe?

Open Library

Digital Lending Library (Internet Archive Announcement)

Libraries Have a Novel Idea (WSJ)