Gary Sanford Retires

Yes, it's finally happened - Gary Sanford has retired after 33+ years at OCPL.

Sigh.

For those of you not knowing our setup here at the OCPL system, Gary has been the Head of Automation/Technical Services for over three years, and was a critical player in the upgrade of the OCPL infrastructure and the rollout of the Polaris ILS. Without his leadership, there would be no workstations on which staff and public would view the catalog, nor would there be the connectivity between those workstations and the server farm in the basement of Central (which also wouldn't have grown as it has without Gary).

We celebrated Gary's career with OCPL both with a casual party Thursday afternoon, and last night with a "Reboot" Party - although it was more of a Hollywood event, red carpet, Oscar® award and all. About 60 people attended. Gary was jovial throughout the roasting that occurred. When his turn came, he read us a short poem by Ted Kooser - wish I could remember the title - anyone?

As Gary and his wife Jen head across the county with their trailer/camper, we wish them the very best, and anxiously await the time when they return to Syracuse, in the hopes that we can lasso Gary into coming back to OCPL now and again.

Gary Sanford

Technology Hero

Thanks from all of us!

Problem with emailed overdue notifications

We know of several cases where patrons received email notifications this morning about overdue items – but the items were due in October/November, were returned, and are not appearing on the patron records.

The printed notices appear to be normal, and not contain these ghosts from the past.

Polaris is investigating the scope of this and why it happened. Please apologize to any patrons who have received these.

Deb

New Training/Learning Opportunities

Just wanted to let everyone who may still be checking this Blog know that we've just created some additional training sessions about holdings/item records. I sent out an email to all of the mailing lists we have, and listed these on the OCPL-Projects.pbwiki.com site (don't forget it has a password) as well. The procedure is the same - we're using EventBrite to allow you to "buy a ticket" to the training session. A real time saver for us!

We're also working to set a date for Reports training, to be given by a trainer from the Finger Lakes Library System, as they've had Polaris up and running for about a couple of years now. Information coming soon about that.

Cheers!
Deb

OCPL Polaris Implementation - Issues for Patrons

There are a few things affecting patrons (for which we are very sorry):

1) Holds: it turns out that many patrons maintain their to-be-read reading lists as inactive holds. Polaris doesn't have a status of inactive for holds, so these were supposed to come over to Polaris as holds with an activation date of Feb. 14, 2008. Unfortunately, this didn't happen; they came over instead as active holds, so some patrons and libraries are receiving a large number of filled holds all at once. Please apologize for us. For any not yet filled, they or you can go into their account and suspend holds they do not yet want. For holds that have shown up, you can tell the system that the patron no long wants the item, then have the patron re-initiate their hold.

Also, it turns out that email holds notification has not yet happened; we have to make another connection - this with our mail server. We're working on that as quickly as we can, but please don't remove materials from your holds shelf just yet.

2) Holds, part two: there has been an overwhelming number of requests to reinstate the holds queue position - patrons don't care that it isn't accurate. I've asked the ILS PAC committee to survey their peers and give me a yea or nay by 5:00 p.m. on Monday; if enough say, "do it" we'll flip that on.

3) Telephony: voice is apparently more threatening than the printed word, as the calls pretty much mirror the postcards and our older Dynix notices. The server is not specifying the name associated with the call, which admittedly makes the calls a little less specific.

So, the calls for overdues go something like this:

"Hello, this is Onondaga County Public Library calling."
"Our records indicate that you have - " item count (singular) " - overdue item." (OR)
"Our records indicate that you have - " item count (plural) " - overdue items."
"Please return all overdue library materials and pay fines. Items not returned will be charged to your library account."
"Accounts exceeding fifty dollars will be turned over to a collection agency."
"Please return these items as soon as possible."

For holds:

"Our records indicate that you have items being held for you."
"Our records indicate that you have - " item count (singular) " - item being held for you." (OR)
"Our records indicate that you have - " item count (plural) " - items being held for you."
"These items can be picked up at the following branch - " branch listing,
"Please pick up these items as soon as possible. Holds must be picked up within the next 7 days"

We will look at this on Monday to see if we can make this less threatening, and will probably also ask that the intro be rerecorded to say something more like, "a person with this phone number in our records"...

3. Lists - more patrons than we realized had used the Store Bibliographic List feature of Dynix (it's very difficult to see these as a whole in Dynix). You should be able to go into Dynix to call these up for a patron, or they can go to the web version of Dynix to see and print them - once we have that version of the catalog up again - it's down right now. We plan to put a link on this page http://www.onlib.org/website/catalog.htm to the Dynix version of the catalog for this purpose.

Please let us know as quickly as possible of any other anomalies or issue - some are easily corrected or changed. And it will help if everyone knows what's going on.

Cheers!
Deb

With some bobbles, we're live!

Many thanks to all staff and patrons for being patient with the new system. We think we're now at the point of tweaking it, but have experienced uninterrupted service now as far as I know for the past 2 1/2 days, and expect this to continue. We're going to make one more change to the system early Monday morning to do some load balancing on our terminal servers.

So, the saga so far:

Monday night, the 22nd: the system was live ; we finished up loading all offline transactions by midnight.

Tuesday, the 23rd: People were working on the system, although we had many calls asking about passwords and logging on. However, by the time we had the system loaded up with users around 11:00, we started having problems (this even after our network stress test on the 11th - but that was probably too short). Polaris staff came down to Central and diagnosed a probable bad network card in the production server, as it kept losing track of itself (the wonders of technology!). Staff struggled with the online system the rest of the day, although it got better when the load diminished around 5:00. Then after libraries closed at 9:00 on the 23rd, Polaris staff replaced our network card and reorg'd our data files. Everything looked peachy (but of course, there was no load on the system).

Wednesday, the 24th: came up, then came down again when we hit significant load. Polaris staff rebuilt/restaged the production server, hampered by long download times for the Microsoft updates that needed to be reapplied. We came back up in the late afternoon, and as some of TS staff were calling libraries asking them to get on the system, others were uploading the offline files.

[I have to say that this just struck me as one of the huge benefits of the new ILS - no more manual recording of barcode info to be typed in later - we had the files uploaded by the time staff were getting onto the live system.]

We had over 90 staff on at peak after we came back online, and had over 8,800 transactions (checkins and checkouts mostly) between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. with no system problems.

Thursday, the 25th: same time, different issue: we had problems with an overloaded terminal server. We had thought that we had enough horsepower and memory in the terminal servers to support all users on one so we we could dedicate the other to continued access to the training server, but it turned out that this was not the case. The terminal server being used was resorting to virtual memory on the hard disk to support the load, which for staff made it look like the system was freezing. After figuring this out, we added the production client on the 2nd terminal server, removed the icon for the training server and asked the staff of the larger libraries in the system to point directly to that terminal server. They did (thanks, all!), and this manual load balancing allowed everyone to work without freezing.

Polaris staff and OCPL staff agreed that although we'll be load balancing between the two terminal servers from this point out, we also need more memory in both terminal servers to allow us to fall back on a single one if the other dies for some reason. So hopefully, Monday morning (the 29th), at 7:30 a.m., Polaris staff working with our consultant from Visory group will both put automatic load balancing in place, and will double the memory in both of these servers.

Whew!

Because we know staff are still interested in playing around on the training server, we also on Friday added an icon leading to the training server. It's as obnoxious and as different from the Polaris icon as we could make it:

to be sure that staff know that this isn't Production Polaris - remember, what happens in the training server stays in the training server!

Polaris staff, including Bill Schickling, the President and CEO, were onsite much of the time from Tuesday morning through Thursday midday, freezing in our server room (now a server-friendly 66 deg. F) - which we really appreciated.

And all through this time, we kept receiving messages of support from staff in the libraries, hearing also that patrons were being patient as well. Thank you all for that support - it means a lot to us!

There are some issues on the patron side that I'll discuss in the next posting, and many of those we can and will fix quickly.

Cheers!

Deb

Our new postcard notices

We have a 3-4 month supply of these (actually, hopefully more!), so we can see how effective they are, and change them if necessary.

The other side will be the address of the patron, the address of the pickup branch, and an indication of the type of notice.

We're going to start the holds notices process working tomorrow - setting everyone with an email address to email notices, telephony for those without, and these postcards for the remainder.

Note that only patrons with email notices will get advanced notice of upcoming due dates and only those with email or phone notification will receive notice of expired/cancelled holds.

Carrots to get more patrons to use email notices!

Transactions Uploaded!

Just a brief note to let everyone know that after a few bobbles, we've uploaded all of the transaction files for the last 4 days. (Pictures of the upload crew tomorrow - but thanks to Heather, Maija, Michele, Brian, Gary S., and Ann L.) Polaris is now current, and we're ready to go live on Polaris Tuesday morning.

Thanks to everyone for logging on and off to keep the files small!

There were some errors in the files that we'll be looking at over the next few days, but no showstoppers.

Polaris is live - go for it!

The catalog is also now available at http://catalog.onlib.org (or http://catalog.onlib.org/polaris). We'll change our links on the OCPL website sometime before 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, and OverDrive will be repointed by then to Polaris. AquaBrowser should also be up with the Polaris data during that timeframe. RPA (Remote Patron Access) to the databases may take a day or two longer, but we'll leave it pointed at Dynix so the majority of users will be able to use the databases remotely. Please let us know if you have a desperate need for a new patron to get to the catalog and we'll add them to Dynix.

Reports - we're working on getting you information on reports - the equivalents to what you get on a daily basis, but essentially, you'll be accessing the reports via our reports website, so can access via any staff workstation connected to a printer. Therefore, no need to print the holds lists on receipt printers. Whew!

The adventure continues...thanks, everyone.
Cheers!
Deb