CCS News
MARCH 21, 2008
Happy spring and holiday weekend!
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
iBistro – positive changes have now been made through the combined efforts of PRK, Akibia, and CCS. For those wondering, we discovered that the number of requests for images from the public-only workstations at Park Ridge was unbelievably high – causing a heavy load on the iBistro server. Preliminary numbers after the change gathered Tuesday and Wednesday now show an exponential reduction in requests against the server coming from Park Ridge. In a nutshell, PRK has now changed the setting which checked for newer versions of cached pages from “automatically” to “every time I open IE” for all of their public-only stations. We will continue to monitor the numbers through the coming weeks and let you know the final results.
Easter Weekend – the computer room will be staffed the usual hours on Friday and Saturday. We will be closed on Sunday. The indexes will be rebuilt on Sunday, requiring that iBistro and Workflows will be down until about 6pm on Easter Day. (See also next item.)
MORE ABOUT THE DATABASE RE-INDEXING
On Sunday, March 23, we will once again devote a good part of the day to a complete re-indexing of the database. This is a task that should be done periodically, and we have usually done it annually. Next Sunday morning catalog users will see a message telling them that the catalog is temporarily unavailable due to database maintenance. In past years we have found that Easter Sunday poses the least inconvenience. We will keep you apprised of any further developments.
DID YOU KNOW?
Did you know that the Blanket Holds wizard is not available on the Circulation Toolbar as delivered from Sirsi and has to be specifically added to any workstations where it will be used? You can customize your toolbar to add Blanket Holds using the Preferences/Local Toolbar Management process (as you would with other toolbar customizations), but the process is not exactly the same. The main difference is the Place Blanket Hold wizard resides in the Utilities Module (last tab on the right of the Modules Toolbar), not in Circulation as you would expect.
To add the Blanket Holds, open WorkFlows and select the Utilities tab from the far right end of Modules Toolbar. Follow the path from the Preferences menu to Local Toolbar Management. If the Circulation toolbar is not already listed under Local Toolbar Files, right-click on it under Delivery Toolbar Files and select Copy to Local. (See the document called “Customizing Java Toolbars” on the CCS webpage for detailed instructions about this part of the process.)
Once Circulation has been copied to the Local Toolbar work space, expand it (by clicking the [+] box); put the curser over the Holds label, and right-click. Select Add Wizard from the dropdown list that pops up. When the Local Toolbar Management: Create window displays, use the scroll arrow in the Wizard field to find the “Place Blanket Holds” entry and highlight it. This will automatically populate the other fields. Click OK to save the changes. The Place Blanket Hold wizard will now display at the bottom of the Holds toolbar. You can drag and drop it (in Local Toolbar Files) if you want to put it somewhere else on the toolbar.
I’ve created a document called “Adding Blanket Holds to Java Toolbars” and posted it on the CCS web page. It provides step-by-step instructions (with illustrations) for adding the blanket holds to your tool bar. The “Adding Blanket Holds to Java Toolbars” document can be found on the Sirsi Resources link of the CCS web page, under the Documented Procedures heading.
Also: I have a scheduling conflict with the previously announced Java ILL training session to be held at Northbrook on April 15, from 9:30 to noon. This session will be rescheduled to a later date. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. -- Ken Victorson
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
None, but we’ll probably see some of each other at PLA!
