Information Sharing Strategies for staff after STP (Switch to Production)

Mary A. Moynihan

Manager, Integrated Library System

Brandeis University Libraries

moynihan@brandeis.edu

Overview

Our ALEPH implementation Benefits of a mailing list for information sharing Question logistics What we learned For the future Questions and answers

Our ALEPH implementation

Signed with Ex Libris in December 1999 System analysis Data conversion System table configuration Staff training STP with ALEPH 500 on July 5, 2000

Benefits of a mailing list for information sharing

Mailing list service on campus (Lyris) Staff familiar with mailing list for staff announcements Access to all questions and answers about our new

system for all staff Eliminate duplicate questions Begin to build a in-house knowledge base with the

mailing list archive feature to supplement the ALEPH documentation

Reduce the number of walk in and phone questions from within departments and for the systems staff throughout the day

Question logistics

What We had broad definition of question Not just how to but also why

When One post per day per department after 4p.m. Post answered by 12 noon the next day

How Subject line -- name of the module and date Subject: CIRC MODULE 7/7/00

Who Department head Designee of department head

What we learned

Have staff give specific examples whenever possible Hands on experience with all staff ALEPH modules

when troubleshooting How our ALEPH configuration tables worked How our staff and student ALEPH account privileges

worked What items we missed on data conversion

For the Future

We found information sharing did improve as staff had access to questions/answers

We hope to use this same model when moving from ALEPH12.4 to 14.2

Question and Answer - 1

Q. Is there any way to print out the "Loan" information found in a patron's records? Patrons often ask for a list of the books they have out and we often need it for our own records.

A1 I can not see any way to print this information from the circulation module. One way to get this information is to have the staff member or patron go into the web OPAC my account function this will provide a list of loans and this list can be printed from Netscape

A2 A list of loans can be printed or emailed for a patron from the Circulation Module by going into the patron's record > Global Information Tab > Letter Button > Select List >Print Button. Sorry for completely missing this yesterday.

Question and Answer - 2

Q. Items marked "Missing" in DRA appear to have lost that status. This affects all books for which we are actively looking as well as all books that Trent has submitted bills to the Bursar. For example: see item 39097002108695 and #3909700131940.

A. This has been reported to me -- and is my mistake -- I missed the missing items on conversion. The total items this represents is 2736. I am working on a program to update these items and hope to run it in the next week or two. In the meantime, if you see an item that is missing, please feel free to manually change the

item processing status to missing - MS.

Question and Answer - 3

Q. Status #07 (Interlibrary Loan) needs to have its tables tweaked: the loan period should be 60 days, not 28 the maximum fine threshold should be $300.00, not $10,000 (!!!) under privileges the "late return ignored" button should read "yes" because they should not get fines for late books, only notices

A. OK, this has been done.

Question and Answer - 4

Q. When placing a Hold Request on item for patron, Trent Stephenson, patron was charged $1.00. There should be no charge for placing a Hold Request.

A. This charge is set in a table -- tab18.eng -- it has been re-set to $0.00.

Question and Answer - 5

Q. I am going through all the manual circulation sheets to update Ex Libris. The record linked to Hugh Pendleton, a Physics Professor, says he has 88 delinquencies, or some such number. I have tried to override the system without success. How can we clear his record?

A. This is a conversion issue -- as one of the many final checks on all text based fields (names, notes, vendors, addresses) before giving the files to Ex Libris I needed to remove commas -- the patron name field slipped by without that check and the following 7 patrons (see list below) had a comma in their name field -- this caused the conversion program to shift data into incorrect fields for these patron records. I will restore the correct information for those patrons today.