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.

General Update - Relais and Millennium LIS

We did get some good news with regards to our system today. The public side of things seems to be functioning properly now. The catalogue, ILL, and home authentication seem to be working properly as of this writing.

The bad news is that some staff functions are still not fully operational. We are limping along and awaiting a system back-up. It sounds as though everything is being rebuilt from scratch at the UofL. Thanks to a very regimented backup process our core information has been preserved. It now appears to be a matter of tweaking systems until the new parameters are inline with the previous parameters.

We did get a chance to see the latest version of our Relais ILL self-registration pages and they are coming along nicely. I made a few more changes and resubmitted it to Relais. It looks like we will be able to go live in the next couple of weeks with the service. We are about 3 months overdue and everyone is eager to tear into the service.

OPAC Upgrades Near Completion

The light at the end of the tunnel is quickly nearing for the WebPAC Pro upgrade. The principle features are installed and activated. I will be refining some of the Spell Check features before posting it in the live interface.

If you are on either of the campuses, navigate your Web browser of choice to: http://eureka.uleth.ca:2082/search~S2/X, type: testr [yes, it is an intentional misspelling], and see what happens. Though it is not quite Google, it is a nifty new feature with lots of promise.

A formal announcement of the WebPAC Pro launch should be made by the end of the week.

Old with the Old, In with the New (OPAC)

Well, the bulk of the refreshed OPAC has been completed and pushed to the live web server. There will be a few anomalies - such as blue buttons at the record level, but the UofL will be fixing that when they post their revisions later this week.

With any luck we will make a smooth transition to III's WebPAC Pro later this week. In the following week, the Syndetic Solutions enhancements should also come online.

Some screens captures of the before and after versions of the OPAC are shown below.

Old OPAC homepage:









New OPAC homepage:









Old OPAC Record Entry:









New OPAC Record Entry:

OPAC Update

The online public access catalogue (OPAC) is set for upgrading near the end of this month. Our partners at the University of Lethbridge (UofL) have submitted a work request to Innovative Interfaces (III) to have the OPAC upgraded to the WebPAC Pro version that will be pushed to the live server soon.

What can we expect to see in this new version: a greater implementation of cascading style sheets (CSS), a spell checker, an improved search algorithm, enhanced results lists, and preferred/saved search functionality. This upgrade will also set the stage for greater functionality of the OPAC server for future web standards.

My biggest join was deleting the image files associated with the previous OPAC on the staging server. I was able to delete more than 70 graphic files associated with the previous OPAC. Once the new OPAC is functional, I will be down to managing 3 graphic files - one for each of our two libraries' banners and a third for the Vera Bracken Library collections layout.

WebPAC Pro, with its new functionality and structure, promises to be a tremendous upgrade from the previous OPAC.