CCS News
JUNE 19, 2015
CHRIS’S CORNER:
Do you know your mobile phone accounts per population ratio? I just sat in on a presentation by a Hong Kong PR firm who talked about 175% of Hong Kong residents having mobile phone accounts, i.e. almost 2 accounts (not devices, accounts) per resident. This could mean separate accounts for work and personal phones or even separate accounts for tablets.
While I expected it to be a high number, seeing the actual stats getting close to 200% for a city of 7 million really jumped out at me. This among other related stats are useful to help us prioritize where to focus our own technologies and also to help us make a strong point to vendors where their development time and priorities should be spent.
(Editor’s Note: Chris sent this from Beijing!)
A COUPLE OF ENTERPRISE TIPS FROM JOEL HAHN:
Printing from the Enterprise hit list
We are in the process of rolling out a long-awaited customization for Enterprise's "printer-friendly" page that includes some call number & copy information for each title when printing from a hit list or My List, and also automatically triggers the browser's Print dialog window in order to save patrons a step. Up to three copies will display for each selected title, so as to not use up a ream of paper each time someone selects a record that has dozens or hundreds of copies.
Lexile Range Searching in Enterprise
We now have a way for patrons to enter their own Lexile range and search for books in that range.
The Lexile search page exists as a common "room" that is shared by all profiles, so if you want to roll this out for your Enterprise profile, you just need to create an HTML link for it and paste that link somewhere in your Enterprise home room or your library's web site whenever you are ready to roll it out. If you do not want to make this available to your patrons, simply do not create an HTML link to the page.
Instructions for creating an URL to access the room have been posted to the SHELP-L list.
There are two buttons at the bottom of the search form: "Search Your Library" and "Search ALL Libraries". The former uses a mapping table of the Enterprise profile ID to figure out which Search Limit to apply; for libraries with branches, it uses the limit that searches all of your branches at once.
Behind the scenes, it analyzes the end points the searcher entered and figures out all of the Lexile facet values that it needs to select to achieve that range--it is not actually doing a true numeric range search. As a result, if you enter a range that is extremely large (for example, 0 to 2000), there are so many facet values that the URL becomes too long for the web server to handle and you will get a "Bad Request" error message. The usual ranges that kids & parents search for are small enough that they are fine.
Thanks to the kind people at the SELCO consortium in Minnesota for figuring out and scripting this workaround and letting us use their scripts.
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
None!
