Sirsi Update

From Syma:

We’ve just completed our 2^nd week on Symphony and many of our initial problems have smoothed out. 

·        Customer concerns and confusion about accessing their accounts online have declined. 

·        Some customers are still upset about the change in how the system renews items and we appreciate your efforts to explain how the new system works. 

·        We continue to work on database clean-up issues, particularly related to uncataloged paperbacks and periodicals. 

·        We successfully transmitted two small orders to Baker & Taylor and hope to have new title orders appear in the catalog and new materials start to arrive by the beginning of August.

·        The Enterprise catalog software is scheduled for an upgrade on Monday night that should solve the problem for customers trying to place holds on a particular volume of a series. 

·        We are working on removing the personal customer information that has been printing on the receipts.

·        Felicia Brisco sent out detailed instructions on how to place circulating items in “discard” or “repair” status.  Please be sure all staff are familiar with these procedures.  There is a slight difference in dealing with reference materials and Felicia will be getting that out to you next week.

·        Felicia will be sending detailed instructions for Item On the Fly procedures.  This was covered in training but we realize that written procedures will be useful to everyone. 

·        Final testing is going on for Interlibrary Loan so we hope that will be live sometime next week.

Enterprise Catalog Features:

·        We have tried to make the language in Enterprise a bit more customer friendly.  For example:

·        In Transit = Being Transferred Between Libraries

·        On Hold = On Hold for Someone

If you have suggestions to improve other terminology, let me know.  It may not always be possible but we can try.

·        When an item is checked out to “Discard” or in another lost/missing type of status, it is automatically shadowed (suppressed) in the catalog so customers do not constantly see them.

·        The new titles lists are generated automatically and actually update daily (while we are still in start up, don’t expect to see much change).  Because of this automatic updating, they are not sorted by author or title.  Once you have pulled them up, you can change the sort.

We will be posting a revised version of the hold wrapper to the Intranet.  It is an improvement from the current version but it is still not as good as what we had in Millennium.  This is on our enhancement request to Sirsi but, it is not likely to happen soon. 

Let me know what concerns and issues you are facing and continue to contact the IT Helpdesk for assistance.  Thank you for your hard work every day.

Pedro