Fun Facts About Location Facets in GIL-Find

I've gotten a couple of questions about whether or not we can alphabetize the location facets in GIL-Find and why they're sorted the way they're sorted. So, here's the GIL-Find Location Facet 411.

When you do a search in GIL-Find, the location facets that you see on the left are in descending order by number of holdings. This is the way that most catalog/discovery layers work, and I doubt that the server site will want to change it. Even if they did want to change it, it wouldn't be good for us, and here's why.

The first level of location faceting only shows you five locations, then you have to click "more" to see others. If we used alpha order, that prime real estate would almost always be taken up by Alpharetta and Clarkston. Great for them, bad for the rest of you.

After you click more, you're not actually seeing ALL the locations. You're only seeing a truncated list. Eyeballing it, I'd guess 25-30. We have a squillion locations. Okay, not quite a squillion, but 157. In a more general search, there are actually locations that may have a few holdings for the search terms, but you're not seeing them because that list is truncated and the other locations with the most holdings are getting priority. Switch that to alpha order and you have a scenario where a location that only has one holding is bumping a location that might have 100+ holdings and be a better limiter for patrons. That, or Newton holdings would get bumped a lot. Again, not a good outcome for everyone.

So, you say, "Well, that makes sense, Tessa, but, durn it, I still want to limit searches to my campus' holdings!" Fear not! You can do that. You just have to do it in the Advanced Search.

http://gilfind.gpc.edu/vufind/Search/Advanced

Near the bottom of the limits of that search, you will see a Location limit. Select your location and perform your search. You will see other location facets available to you in the search results, but the search results should still be only holdings in your selected location.

Now, I notice that you can only select a single location in the Advanced Search. I'm about to email our GIL-Find Guy now to suggest an enhancement for selecting multiple locations.

Give me a holler if you have any questions about this!

Library of Congress Subject Heading Change

Thought that you all might be interested in a recent LCSH change that I came across while doing authority control. Alien labor has become the far nicer-sounding Foreign workers. You could subdivide the earlier heading geographically, and that hasn't changed, so you'll see headings like, Foreign workers, Guatemalan -- Nebraska, and so on.

Just let me know if you have any questions.

New Systems LibGuide

Hi all. Just wanted to let you know that I've made a LibGuide for systems documents.

http://guides.gpc.edu/systems

You will also be able access the page through the Library Technical Services Department pages, by clicking on any of the "Systems" links. (As soon as I can get them up there.)

The page includes procedures documents and archived reports that were previously on a password-protected page. They contain no personally-identifiable data, so we thought that you all might like to have a peek at them. These reports are updated each semester, the first of the 2009s will be up there soon.

If there's anything else that you'd like to see on this page, please feel free to let me know. Hope you enjoy it!

That Which We Call NonPrint, By Any Other Name ...

As you all may know, the NonPrint department is now a part of the Clarkston library, rather than a unit of Technical Services. I’ve just edited all of the locations to reflect this. So, NonPrint Popular DVD is now Clarkston Popular DVD, and so forth. You may still see NonPrint On Order here and there, I can’t change that to Clarkston On Order since that location already exists, but, as we finish up the NonPrint backlog, those will shake out.

Now, these changes merely affect the way these locations display in the OPAC and the staff side of Voyager. The location codes cannot be edited and will remain NPPopDVD, and so forth. I’m fairly certain that the catalogers are the only people using the location codes, but, just in case, I wanted to mention that they’re staying the same.

NonPrint still needs to keep their happening location, NONPRINT CIRC DESK, and their own Callslip queue. But, outside of that, everything that once said “NonPrint” should now say “Clarkston.” If you don’t see these changes in the staff side of Voyager, just close the client and restart it.

Please let me know if I missed anything. Thanks!

Virginia Yawn Is Retiring

Great for her, but very sad for us. Virginia has announced her retirement and her last day will be July 31.

For those of you who don't know her, Virginia is a part-time librarian in Technical Services, and catalogs our sound recordings (which includes music CDs and audio books). She's been with the college for almost 30 years, and we will miss her dearly.

One OPAC Bug Unmasked

Well, as I'm sure most of you know, we've been plagued by OPAC bugs for a while, and the folks at the server site are as stumped as we are. But, we have had one small ray of light peek through. The bug that causes the Item Status to display as "No Information Available" has been isolated. It is an issue with the current version of WebVoyage, and Ex Libris has been made aware of it. Apparently, it only occurs when you have exactly 15 unsuppressed holdings records (MFHDs) attached to one bib. Click on the image below for an example. (You'll just see one MFHD in this .jpg, not all 15.)


I imagine that this doesn't happen very often, but if you see it, please drop me a line and I'll patch on bubble gum and bailing wire in the back end to make it look purty in the OPAC. And, as always, thanks for your patience.

Voyager Upgrade '08

Just wanted to let you know that I've just received confirmation of our Voyager upgrade schedule. The server will be upgraded during the evening of Sunday, Jan. 6, 2008. Which means that, when you come in on the morning of Monday, Jan 7, 2008, the Voyager clients will be down. I'll be working with OIT to remotely push out the upgrade, like I have in the past, and I'm striving for the minimum down-time possible, but just to be on the safe side, please be prepared to be down for the first few hours of the day.

Please remember to leave your PCs on over the weekend, this is crucial if you won't be in on Monday morning. You can log out of your profile (Usually, Start > Log Off > Log Off on XP machines) but the computer MUST BE POWERED ON when I start the upgrades on Monday morning. If it isn't, then I have to get the liaison to power it on, which may involve tracking down office keys, and it always makes for an aggravating morning for everyone involved.

I'd like to issue a hearty thanks to the upgrade liaisons for providing their assistance. They will be visiting you all on Monday morning, letting you know when I'm about to start your campus's upgrade, at which time you'll need to stay off of your computers. When the upgrade is over, they'll let you know and check to see that Voyager was successfully upgraded on your machine. Please report any problems with the upgrade to your liaison as soon as possible.

Clarkston: Amy Yang
Decatur: Adrienne Graham
Dunwoody: Pete Bursi
Newton: Rebecca Rose
Technical Services, Media Services, and NonPrint: Tessa Minchew

If you have any questions about this process, please just let me know.

IMPORTANT: Change to Voyager Upgrade Date

To accommodate the schedule of my gracious OIT contact, I have to upgrade the Voyager clients beginning around 2:00pm on Tuesday, August 7. Since the server is being upgraded that evening, Voyager will be inaccessible after I do our upgrade. Circulation & Media Services should be prepared to do manual check outs from 2:00pm until closing, and anyone else who has any work to do in Voyager should try to do it before 2:00pm. If you are leaving the office before 2:00pm, please leave your computer on, just log off of your profile.

When you come in on the morning of August 8, our server will have been upgraded and the clients should work just fine. Your upgrade liaisons will be giving you a heads-up before the upgrade begins.

Clarkston: Amy Yang
Decatur: Adrienne Graham
Dunwoody: Carmel Chaille
Newton: Rebecca Rose
Tech Serv, Media Serv, NonPrint: Tessa Minchew

Please let me know if you have any questions, and thanks in advance for your patience during the upgrade.

Voyager Upgrade Date Set

Hi everyone. Just wanted to let you know the date of the Voyager upgrade has been set. Our server will be upgraded on the evening of Tuesday, August 7. This means I will be upgrading Voyager clients on the morning of Wednesday, August 8. This process will work much as it has the last few times. I will be performing the upgrades remotely, and each campus will have an upgrade liaison to facilitate the process and report problems to me. Here are the folks who have graciously agreed to be your upgrade liaisons.

Clarkston: Amy Yang
Decatur: Adrienne Graham
Dunwoody: Carmel Chaille
Newton: Rebecca Rose

I'll be handling the liaison duties for Technical Services, Media Services, and NonPrint.

Remember, when the server is upgraded, the Voyager clients will not work until they are also upgraded to the new version. So, Circulation, especially, should be braced for a little downtime, but I will do my best to turn the upgrades over as quickly as possible, and, on that note, there are a couple of things that you can all do to help me achieve that goal.

1.) This week, your liaison will be checking the IP address of every computer requiring a Voyager client, and reporting that information to me. If you need the client, make sure you make it on this list.

2.) Please remember to leave your PCs on on Tuesday evening, this is especially important if you won't be in on Wednesday morning. You can log out of your profile (Start > Log Off > Log Off on XP machines) but the PC must be POWERED ON when I start the upgrades on Wednesday morning. If it isn't, then I have to get your liaison to power it on, which may involve getting office keys, and always fouls up my workflow.

If anyone has any questions about the upgrade, please just let me know. And thanks in advance for your patience!

Another Voyager Upgrade On Its Way

Hi everyone. I just learned that we will be upgrading from Voyager 6.2.1 to Voyager 6.5.1, somewhere between Friday, August 3 through Friday, August 10. I won't know the specific date until I hear from our Service Site Coordinator, but I wanted to give you all a heads up.

Most everyone knows the drill by now. The server will be upgraded, usually in the evening, and after this you will be unable to access Voyager from your PCs until I have upgraded the clients. This has to happen on each and every PC that runs Voyager. The last couple of times, OIT has been gracious enough to help me push out a script to each computer, which dramatically reduces our downtime. Otherwise, I would have to drive to each campus, and upgrade each PC by hand, which can take quite a while.

I've also found it helpful to have an "upgrade liaison" on each campus, to check that the script has run correctly on everyone's PC, relay questions, etc. I'm going to be contacting folks about doing that and I'll let you know when we have our victims, *ahem*, I mean lucky volunteers.

For a little more info about 6.5.1, allow me to quote the esteemed Phil Williams. "One of the primary features of this upgrade will be the implementation of the "UB Local Block Policies". The Service Site Staffs will set the appropriate UB Local Block Policy Definitions in accordance with established GIL Express standards. We are anticipating that GIL Express transactions will continue through the upgrade period, however if difficulties do arise a notice will be sent to the listserv and a message will be put on the GIL Universal Catalog web site."

I would advise that everyone read the release notes for this version.

http://download.gil.usg.edu/gold/0605/relnotes.pdf

If, after that, you're feeling especially curious, please feel free to peruse the rest of the 6.5.1 documentation.

http://download.gil.usg.edu/gold/0605.html

Both of these links will ask you for our GIL Knowledge Base username and password (which is the same as the Endeavor Knowledge Base username and password). Give me a call if you've forgotten it.

If anyone has any questions, please drop me a line. And thanks in advance for your patience during the upgrade!

Rockdale/Newton Becomes Newton

Just wanted to let everyone know that, with their move, the Rockdale campus will now be known as Newton. To that end, I've changed all the instances of "Rockdale" to "Newton" in the Voyager back-end, the OPAC, and on the webpages I have control of. The other webmasters will be changing their pages shortly, if they haven't already.

For those who use the Cataloging module, you will notice that drop-down menus are reading something like "Newton Book," but the location code will still be "ROBook." I'm afraid that Voyager doesn't allow for changing permanent location codes, just the way they display, so we're stuck with this. Those using Acquisitions and Circulation probably won't notice this. I think all you ever see is the display name, which will be "Newton Book," "Newton Reference," etc.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Update: In the OPAC, the Location field of the Narrow My Search limits and in the Quick Limits under the Exact Search still say "Rockdale." Bob Trotter will have to change that and I emailed him on 4/1.

"What Goes Around"

This Chronicle article is well worth a read. It was written by Susanna Ashton, an associate professor of English at Clemson University in South Carolina. Apparently, when she was a Fulbright scholar to the Republic of Ireland, she was surprised with a whopping ILL bill that opened her eyes to how fortunate we all are to have an ILL system in the U.S. that is very low cost, if not free to the user.

The line that promises to leave no dry eye in the house, "The greatest resource sharing our libraries practice is sharing their faith in us."

Oh! I'm verklimpt. Talk amongst yourselves.

Upgrade to Voyager 6.2

Just wanted to let everyone know that the server site has informed us that we must undergo another Voyager upgrade next week. Apparently v.6.2 has some needed fixes (see attachment). It has been road tested by the folks at UGA, and passed their approval, so everything should be fine. (I have some hopes that it will help with our OPAC-issues, but there are absolutely no guarantees on that, so keep sending in those problem reports until you hear from me otherwise.)

As of now, the schedule I've been given for the upgrading GPC's server is the evening of Monday, February 26th. This means that when you come in on the morning of the 27th, Voyager will be down on everyone's PC. I am working with OIT to prepare another packet delivery system and we have high hopes that it will work as smoothly as it did last time. If it does, down time will be minimal. If not, I may have to drive to your campuses to upgrade PCs manually. Let's all keep our fingers crossed that it doesn't come to that. I don't want you to experience any more down time than is absolutely necessary.

As I understand it, GIL Express transactions are expected to function normally between 6.1 and 6.2 libraries, so no GIL Express downtime is expected. Please report any problems you might experience.

Thanks in advance for your patience! Hopefully this will be our last upgrade in 2007.

Hello, and wildcard searching

First of all, hello! I am Amy Eklund, one of the new catalogers in Tech Services. I am really glad to be here at GPC and I am really enjoying working here (I started Dec. 1). I look forward to meeting those of you I haven't had the chance to meet yet.

Secondly, I wanted to mention something I noticed while doing a recent database maintenance project. I have been using truncation and wildcard searching in the Voyager cataloging module (which I didn't know was possible until I began working here) and that got me wondering about those capabilities in GIL, as well. So, after some playing around in GIL and reading all the "Help" documentation (particularly the sections on "Searching" and the "Technical Documentation"), I discovered that both right-truncation (using ?) and wildcard searching (using % anywhere in the word) are possible in keyword search and command search in GIL. Truncation is mentioned in the "Help" documentation, but wildcard searching is not. I can see how wildcard searching might be very useful if you haven't been aware of it before, for instance if a patron comes in asking for a book about Powerpoint by "Munson" but they are not sure whether it is spelled "Mansen", "Munson", "Monsen", or "Munsen" (so you could do a fielded keyword search for "M%ns%n" with a keyword search for Powerpoint).

Hope this is useful for you if you didn't already know about it, and happy searching!
Amy

Problems with the OPAC? Part Deux

I'm still working with Bob Trotter on our various and sundry OPAC problems, and he's asked me to give him the full URLs of the oddities.

So, from here on out, report any OPAC weirdness to me as follows.

1.) Copy and paste the URL of the problem page into the body of a plain text email.

2.) Include as full a description of the problem as possible [what problem is occurring (we have three right now), time, date, what kind of search you were doing, did you go in through the Quick Search originally, what you clicked on right before the bug occurred, etc.] There is no such thing as too much detail here. Give me everything you can think of.

3.) Email this to me at tminchew@gpc.edu.

You no longer have to send me printouts, just follow the above instructions.

To recap, these are the three different instances of "weird" OPAC behavior we are working on now:

1.) Sometimes the Item Status in a record display will read "No Information Available" even though there are clearly item records attached, as the number of items will be set. Then the Item Status will revert "Not Checked Out". I'm not clear on whether or not this happens automatically, or if the user has to hit Refresh. On the one instance report I have of it, the item status read one way on one computer, and a different way on the other during the same one minute period.

2.) When leaving search results idle for a little while, then coming back and clicking on the Quick Search link at the bottom of the screen, people are being thrown into a plain white screen containing only the text "lost+found".

3.) After taking some action in the OPAC, people are thrown into a screen entitled "Builder Search". The style sheet changes from our usual blues to reds, and the search itself doesn't always work. The majority of the time folks seem to have been doing an exact search, then left the connection idle for a while, then clicked on New Search, and were thrown into the red screen. However, this is not always the case.

Thanks everyone! Keep these reports coming. Hopefully Bob will be able to figure something out. And please let me know if you have any questions or encounter any new problems.

Problems with the OPAC?

I've gotten a couple of reports about problems with the OPAC since the upgrade. The scenario is always the same, after taking some action in the catalog, people are thrown into a screen entitled "Builder Search". The style sheet changes from our usual blues to reds, and the search itself doesn't actually work. The only option to get the OPAC working again is to completely exit and start over.

I've had this happen to me a couple of times over the years, but not often enough to worry about. After the upgrade, I've had it reported by two librarians on two different campuses, and each says that it's happening several times a week or more. Bob Trotter and I can't seem to replicate it, so there isn't much that we can do right now, and I was just wondering if this is happening to anyone else. If so, please drop me a line and give me as many details as you can (time, date, what you were trying to do in the catalog when it happened, etc.). Thanks!

Voyager Upgrade Looming

[I sent a message about this to everyone's director, to forward along, but I thought that I'd post it here too, just in case anyone missed it.]

The slot GPC has been allotted for the Voyager upgrade is Wednesday, December 20th, beginning that evening and hopefully ending by the following morning or afternoon.

I'm exploring the possibility of a remote upgrade with OIT, which is very gracious of them. However, if we can't get that working, I'll be manually upgrading every PC running Voyager, just like John did last year, starting December 21st. I will make it my only priority, but even devoting all of my time to it, it may take a while for me to get to every campus, so your patience will be greatly appreciated.

Circulation (for GPC materials) will be down until the machine you run it on is upgraded. GIL Express will be down for the duration of the entire upgrade. This means that all USG institutions must be successfully upgraded before GIL Express service can resume anywhere. The estimate is that GE will be down from December 13, 2006 through January 5, 2007. This service suspension has been discussed at length on the UC/UB listerv, and I imagine that GPC circulation staff are familiar this discussion.

That's about all that I know right now, but if you have any questions, please just drop me a line. I'll keep you posted as more details become available.

Welcome Amy Eklund!

The last of our new catalogers has arrived! Amy Eklund is a recent graduate of UNT and was involved in some mighty impressive work there. We are quite happy to have her with us, so please pop by and make her feel welcome. Her phone number is #3666, and her office is CL-1204.

USG Upgrade to Voyager 6.1

No specific dates for GPC yet, but they're predicting sometime this December and I expect that I'll start working on our individual machines shortly after that. (I have to touch each PC that has the Voyager client.) The Voyager 6.1 documentation has been placed on the GIL Download web site. Remember that access to the GIL Download web site requires our SupportWeb user id and password. If you've forgotten it, drop me an email and I'll send it to you.

The GIL Download site has user guides for each module in Voyager 6.1, but they're extremely long (828 pages for circulation alone). I would, however, recommend taking the time to read the release notes, which are a much more manageable length (9 pages). Some of the highlights are search enhancements in WebVoyage and the Voyager staff interface, improvements to the display and sorting of results lists in the staff interface and the display of results lists in WebVoyage, and ISBN-13 support.

This is the gist of what I know right now, but please feel free to send me your questions and I'll do what I can to get them answered.

Ross Singer Does It Again

[This guy is the bomb. We're lucky to have him in Georgia.]

"Ross Singer has won the Second OCLC Research Software Contest with Umlaut, an OpenURL Link Resolver intended to improve access to library collections by contextualizing citations and available holdings more accurately for a given user. Currently running with Georgia Tech's catalog, Umlaut utilizes a host of web services and can take several paths depending on what it finds at various stages."