FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
Computer Room Staffing – We are pleased to announce that there will be two changes in the computer room in the coming weeks. Willie Balitaan will be joining us on our full time staff beginning April 1. Willie has been working for us for several years as a night operator. Willie’s previous experience has been as a systems support professional for DiscoverCards and other financial applications. Sung Je will be taking over Willie’s position as night operator on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Sung began training with us on March 15. Sung’s previous experience is as a Unix applications programmer with Transamerica (now GTE) and Walgreen’s headquarters in Deerfield. Please help us in welcoming Willie and Sung to these new positions. We are thrilled to have them onboard!
-Linda

DATABASE RE-INDEXING: The entire database was re-indexed on Easter Sunday (our customary time), and I thought you’d like to know some of the changes that went into effect.
1) Reindexing from scratch assures us that any oddities and indexing that may have been awry are now all fixed.
2) The various MARC tags used for series are now all indexed as Titles as well as Series.
3) Main titles are now browse-indexed twice: once as the full title (as they were before), and once as just the title proper; for example:
Flight: 100 years of aviation
Flight: a novel
are indexed under the title “Flight” as well as “Flight: subtitle . . .”
This should make Exact and Browse search results more predictable in some common casessuch as when a book has the subtitle “a novel”, but the audiobook version does notwithout losing the searching specificity and quick differentiation between titles indexing the full title allows.
4) Many Subject Headings that had been tagged as form headings have now had their tags changed so that they are now indexed not only as subjects, but as Form/Genre. Some examples are: Fairy tales, Mystery fiction, Werewolf films, Stories without words, and Board books. This allows you to search for Form/Genre if you want to search specifically for material that IS a form or genre (for example: Form/Genre: Pop-up books), and also search specifically for material that is ABOUT a form or genre (for example: Subject: Pop-up books NOT Form/Genre: Pop-up books). Last week Joel Hahn and I changed thousands of tags on thousands of records, but I must regretfully report that we could not be one hundred per cent thorough without taking years to first individually examine each record, so a few records may have been overlooked or may have been changed in error. There are now almost 500 forms & genres that can be used for searching our catalog.
- Roger

AUTHORITIES UPDATE: CCS sent approx. 4089 bibliographic records to Marcive on Wednesday, March 26th for Overnight Authorities Processing. The records have been processed and were reloaded into our system, so full cataloging may resume. Of the 4089 bibliographic records, Marcive returned 1190 updated bibliographic records. Marcive also sent us 2752 new authority records. CCS will be sending groups of records for processing each month, so that our database will be kept up to date as much as possible.
- Virginia R. Seward
CCS Authorities Librarian

DID YOU KNOW? Did you know that the Holds button available with Item Search and Display results in the C client is also available in Java? In both the Java and C client, after opening the Item Search & Display wizard and entering a search, you’re usually presented with a batch of results. When you highlight an item on the results list (in both Java and C) and click the Detail Display button you get a window with a choice of tabs. In the C client you select the All Volumes tab; in Java you pick the Call Number/Item tab. The All Volumes window in the C client has a “holds” button associated with each copy of the item (even if there are no holds for a particular copy). But in the Java client you must first click on a Helper Button at the top of the screen (looks like a red book) in order to access similar information. You may not realize this hold information is available because there’s a large block of bibliographic information at the top of the window and you have scroll past it to see the Holds buttons.

There are other differences between the holds displays in the two clients, so I’ve created a document called “Item Search & Display Holds Info” and posted it on the CCS web page. It provides illustrated directions for finding and interpreting the holds data available in Java IS&D. The “Item Search & Display Holds Info” document can be found on the Sirsi Resources link of the CCS web page (under the Documented Procedures heading).

Also the Java ILL training that was scheduled for the morning of April 15 at Northbrook has been rescheduled. It will now take place at the Des Plaines Library’s computer lab on the afternoon of April 15 from 1:30 to 4:30 PM. If you or anyone in your department would like to attend the rescheduled class, please contact me and provide the name and email address of the person to be registered. There are no limits on the number of people from each library that may attend (other than the capacity of the training space), so feel free to have more than one staff member register for the session.
- Ken Victorson

CCS MEETING NEXT WEEK:

Wed., 4/2, 9:30, NSLS: Catalogers

Wed., 4/2, 10:00 Niles: Governing Board