Now that it's a new year/new semester, I'm back to playing catch-up with the world. Namely, back to cataloging. 112 new volumes that are destined to sit upon the noble shelves of the Reserve section (required text for the most part) and the Education resource Room. This will take days but at least it's not difficult work.
What is more difficult (or at least aggravating) is navigating the guts of SirsiDynix Unicorn Workflows Java Client v. 3.21.2.1. I've got the ILS installed on all but one of the staff workstations in the library and for the most part it's working nicely. One thing that is really giving me the business is the configuration modules's use of override passwords. The passwords are easy to set up--in fact we migrated all the previous password to the current setup. It remembered everything that came over from the earlier install, so that's not the problem. The problem (I know this is a roundabout explanation, but bear with me, we're almost there) is that every detail of the five main configuration flowcharts must absolutely agree with each other, or the ILS blocks the user's access to the module function. In other words all the details must agree to get access to the stuff I and the staff had full access to before we migrated.
The confusing part about this is that when creating or modifying a new User Access profile, it gives you the option of choosing or omitting any one of the wide array of tools and permissions that are part of the access tree. For example, I've got student workers able to perform only basic actions (create/modify user, check in/discharge, etc.) but now even those require password overrides. Even the super user account I created for myself some time ago is subject to the overrides.
Long story short (as if you haven't sat through enough already), I have to create a block of time to sit down, print out every configuration rule chart this application has, and figure out how to make everything agree. It'll be ugly but the guys at Sirsi Clientcare insist that's how one goes about fixing it. Yowza.
In the mean time, there are other things to plan for. The catalog need a deep reaming and that's the sort of thing that goes above and beyond mere semiannual weeding. The RFID tags (using our single tagging station) have been integrated into our Reserve collection and that part of the grand scheme is working as expected. But now we need to follow through. We'll need to budget for additional circulation stations to start tagging the rest of the collection and a definite time-frame for this to happen. 45,000 books can be tagged at a rate of 10,000 per year in 4.5 years, so it's doable but we need to keep up with it. That means talking to Bibliotecha, the company we bought the system from. A lot of talking.
Another major project, which I'll need to report on to my boss by mid-March is the possibility of integrating our Full Text journals into the catalog. I can think of a number of ways to do this (something like Serials Solutions' Article Linker comes to mind since I worked successfully with it in the past). The mechanics need to be figured out of course, but the benefits to the students and faculty are pretty clear ("More stuff on tap! Yea!"). Then there's the actual labor involved, but since Serials Solutions would be doing the heavy lifting on it, that's less of a problem than it might sound. Finally, there are the training issues for staff, students and faculty.
There's more to think of: preparing better and more frequent stat reports for the staff and admin folks, improving and implementing new quality control procedures, and improving our collective levels of customer service, to name three, but that's for later.
For now, back to cataloging.
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