General Update - Bowker's Book Analysis System & Computer Systems

We made some progress in the Bowker's Book Analysis System. It has been at the low end of my priority list, but the system seems to be working. Thanks to their technical support staff for locating the error of my ways - I did not manually enter the .csv extension to the files that I was naming. At any rate, the Medicine Hat Campus's AV, Circulating, Reference, and Complete LC [Medicine Hat and Brooks Campuses] collections holdings have been uploaded and processed. They are ready to be sifted through by the librarians.

I am not a huge of fan of Excel 2007, but it did come in handy when creating a CSV file for Bowker's. You really have to love it when it goes from having 65,536 rows of information that can be addressed to 1,048,576 rows. This will make next year's inventory a breeze.

Most of the issues involving the Millennium LIS have been resolved. There are a few minor issues still, but they will be cleaned up in short order. We should see little impact on library operations.

Speaking of "impact" - staff will be preparing to "pull the plug" on computer systems in the library this afternoon. We will have to unplug all electronic machinery in preparation for the annual power outage that we were initially led to believe was last weekend. It would suck to return Monday morning and discover our computers fried from a power surge; it is good thing that we are so conscientious.

Relais Self-Registration & Bowker's Book Analysis System Progress

This week was a busy one for me - if you call three days a "week".

I modified the Relais ILL source code for the ILL self-registration. It employs a combination of CSS, HTML, and JSP. I am familiar with two of the three, but JSP is new to me. The college Webmaster tells me that I am on the right track, but I am not so sure. The folders were zipped and transmitted to Relais. We should know if my work was successful later this week - Relais will post the modified code to its test server. In the meantime, I will keep my fingers crossed.

My technical contact with Bowker's Book Analysis System tells me that one of the two files I uploaded was formatted correctly. Their system tells me that the files are still being processed. I suspect that something is amiss, since it has been processing a relatively small file for more than a week. I will be contacting them later today and find out if this is normal. Perhaps I did not map the categories/headings properly, but I doubt that. It is probably a case where pulling data from MARC fields was not as "clean" as either of us desired.

The Circulation Clerks finished my desired modifications to the NetLibrary holdings' URLs in the catalogue. The next step for me is to build a custom interface to search for e-books from our library pages. This is a low priority, since the OPAC can handle that chore for now.

Next week will be busy. Thankfully there will be five days to accomplish some tasks.

Bowker's Book Analysis System

I believe that I figured out how to perform the processes for Bowker's Book Analysis System for collection development. Not that they are overly hard, but some of the system and required formatting tricks were new to me.

Since getting MARC records from our system was a tricky affair, I decided to upload specific MARC fields in a CSV file. Whether or not it is formatted correctly is another matter. At any rate, two different files were uploaded and are now processing. We will know tomorrow whether or not the procedure was successful.

If the test is success, other collection areas will be uploaded. The Reference Collection was the test file, so other significant areas (AV and Circulation Collections) will follow. Then it is on to Relais ILL form customization.

One cool thing that I played with is using an FTP extension in my Firefox Web browser. FireFTP proved to be an easy and successful FTP client.