CCS News
SEPTEMBER 26, 2008
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
Nick of time - As most of you know, Arlington Heights experienced a sustained power failure very early (3:30 am) the morning of Tuesday, September 23 for about 2 hours. Although we run on battery power for a while, the servers are configured to automatically shutdown “nicely” before the batteries run out. In this case, we had trouble getting the Workflows server restarted due to a configuration setting coupled with a minor hardware failure (bad port connection). Workflows came up just before 9:00 am Wednesday – just in the nick of time. Thanks for bearing with us!
Calendar maintenance time coming up soon – the beginning of Autumn heralds clean-up-time for our calendars. In the next few weeks we will be removing the old closed dates for each library from 2006 and 2007. Then we will be asking the circulation heads to respond to our email (sent after the cleanup) when we are ready to take your calendar of closed dates for 2009.
AUTHORITIES UPDATE:
In one week alone, the Library of Congress approved 6 new subject headings that CCS libraries proposed. The subject headings include: Boyle, Billy (Fictitious character); Scratch (Computer program language); Red-light districts; Verse drama, French; Caroline (Fictitious character : Probst); and Swift Nature Camp (Minong, Wis.). A big round of thanks goes to Des Plaines, Northbrook, and Park Ridge for proposing them.
Also, Marcive has updated 5542 authority records and added 439 new matches this month. More bibliographic records will be sent to them soon.
Virginia R. Seward
CCS Authorities Librarian
DID YOU KNOW?
Did you know that there’s a PowerPoint presentation about Director’s Station available on the CCS web page? If you’re interested in reading some background information about Director’s Station’s basic capabilities, you can get a brief overview of the product from this document. Originally presented by Jeremy Clute from Sirsi, it highlights the advantages of using Director’s Station for performing collection analysis and creating customized reports for the library. Because the data used for Director’s Station is housed on a separate server at CCS, there’s no danger of harming production records when developing reports - so users can feel free to experiment with many different combinations of data tables and formats. CCS libraries should consider having department heads (in addition to directors) take advantage of its strategic analysis capabilities and ability to quickly generate a wide variety of reports, as well as colorful charts and graphs. Each CCS library has an assigned login and password for accessing Director’s Station via a web browser and, with your director’s approval, I’ll be glad to supply the URL and login information to anyone that doesn’t already have it. I am also available to provide on-site training at library’s that are interested in having additional staff learn to use Director’s Station.
The PowerPoint presentation is called “Director’s Station PowerPoint presentation” and it can be found on the CCS web page under the Sirsi Resources link, in the General Bulletins column. Note: It’s best to view this document with MS Internet Explorer. – en Victorson
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
Wed., 10/1, 9:30, NSLS: Catalogers
Wed., 10/1, 12:30, Jameson’s: Continuing
Education Steering Committee
Thur., 10/2, 10:00, Zion-Benton: Governing Board
