Symphony Update July 17

Basic circulation (check-out and check-in) seems to be functioning well.  We are aware of issues related to your passwords and authorizations and we are working on solutions.  This will require some testing and trials so we appreciate your patience.

There have been some initial problems in notifying some of our customers about holds awaiting for pick up so we have extended items on the holdshelf for another week.  Starting next week, we will return to the new standard of holding items for 7 days (one week) on the holdshelf.  We are also working with IT on a simpler way to make your paging lists and clean hold shelf reports easier to get.  We hope to have an update on that for you by the end of the week.

Reminder regarding fines:  The Symphony system displays an alert when fines are accruing on overdue items, even if the fine has not yet posted to the account.  For example, if the customer has three items that were due on 06/17 that have not yet been returned, the system displays the estimated fines owed and shows that amount under Amount Owed in the Summary of the account information.  The fines won’t post to the account until the items are returned, the items bill to the account, or some other action is taken to change their being overdue on the account.  When any of those things happen, the fines will post to the bills tab, and you will be able to collect the money. 

We are continuing to work on improving the Enterprise online catalog. 

·     Good news:  When you go into the detail display on a title, it now shows how many holds currently exist on that title.

·      Library now appears on the “widget” that gives the call number information on the initial results screen. 

·    Issues with logging in to accounts seem to have abated, especially since we changed the link for online registration to say “Need Card?” instead of “Register”.

·   When you logged in to your account and looked at your holds, the titles were hyperlinks back to the catalog.  This was not working correctly and we had to remove the linking capability.  This is a software bug that SirsiDynix is working on.

Database access issues, both in library and remotely, are mostly resolved and we anticipate the remaining ones will be taken care of by tomorrow.

Ongoing issues:

·  Holds wrappers

·   Some customer accounts did not migrate due to barcode issues.  We are working on correcting that. If you have a customer whose card does not appear in the system, please create a new card and email the information about the old card and the new card to the IT Helpdesk.  Reassure the customer that the information from the old card, including any holds, will be moved into the new system.

·   Strange due dates tied to library card expiration dates.  These due dates were the result of the system not knowing what loan rule to assign to a particular item so it made it due whenever the customer’s library card expired.  This is a database clean-up issue to identify those items and give them the correct itype.  In the meantime, we have changed the default to 4 weeks so we’ll know there is a problem but it won’t look quite as strange to you or the customer

Thank you again for all of your hard work and good customer service.  For urgent problems, please call the IT Helpdesk (x31570).  For issues that don’t need an immediate response, please send an email to the IT Helpdesk. 

Thanks,

Syma

Syma Zerkow

Chief of Library Materials Services