CCS News
JULY 8, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
SVA – SVA has been checked more that regularly since the problem with long failed call lists was discovered on July 1. SVA appear to be entirely stable and the failed call lists have returned to normal levels. The reason for the problem remains a mystery despite best efforts (and considerable time) spent in diagnosing the issue with Sirsidynix. We need to be watchful in case this re-occurs and then detect some common circumstances.
Memory Board – a memory board was posting faults to our log and was fixed by Sun engineers on Wednesday (July 6) morning. The repair necessitated taking the system down, but all went well and we were ready for a normal day on Wednesday by 8am.
Help Desk Incidents– we need to emphasize the need to report through the Help Desk (WonderDesk). During the recent problems with SVA, one library reported through private phone to a person who was on vacation, one library reported to a private email and one library reported to the Help Desk. To the staff on duty this looked like a single library problem and was dealt with in that manner. But the problem affected all SVA users. We detected this on Tuesday and were able to “hop to it” but it reminds us to remind you the WonderDesk Help Desk is the way to go!
SIRSIDYNIX 2011 ROADMAP AVAILABLE:
The 2011 Sirsidynix Roadmap has been published. It is confidential for current customers only, but we have it available for perusal on our new web site ccslib.org under Sirsi Documents.
JOANNE HOLMES UPDATE:
We are hoping to see Jo Anne back at work on July 18, but that’s not definite yet.
SOME JULY 1 FILE SIZES:
We’ll crunch more numbers soon to show the change during the fiscal year, but on July 1 our database included:
606,960 patrons
1,074,756 MARC bib records
5,119,800 items
704,203 authority records
CCS MEETING NEXT WEEK:
Wed., 7/13, 10:00, CCS: Executive Committee
Thursday, June 30, 2011
CCS News
JULY 1, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
Power Outage – While the CCS headquarters escaped the multi-day power outages due to micro-bursts on Tuesday, June 21, we were not so lucky on the following Tuesday, June 28. Our latest outage was caused when a motorist struck a utility pole. Our systems were shut down gracefully before battery power ran out completely and were restarted at 9:30 pm on Tuesday night by Bob and Rory when the power was restored and stable.
Equipment Testing – the slight interruptions that we announced for Thursday morning (before opening) were needed in order to test our equipment as we continue to diagnose the problem with downloading Java clients.
UPS Maintenance – Protech will be doing maintenance on our UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply/ Battery) the evening of July 6. We do this twice a year and we expect no interruption in service.
Holiday Computer Room Staffing – The Computer Room will have normal staffing Saturday and Sunday but be closed on Monday, July 4.
FOND FAREWELLS:
CCS wants to extend our good wishes to retiring staff Jessie Exum (Crystal Lake), Rosanna Moore (Wilmette) and Judy Wright (Winnetka-Northfield), all of whom distinguished their libraries and CCS. And of course we also bid a fond farewell to NSLS and a welcome to RAILS!
THE CCS STAFF WISHES EVERYONE A GOOD HOLIDAY WEEKEND!
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
None! (Remember, the Circ meeting will be July 22!!!)
JULY 1, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
Power Outage – While the CCS headquarters escaped the multi-day power outages due to micro-bursts on Tuesday, June 21, we were not so lucky on the following Tuesday, June 28. Our latest outage was caused when a motorist struck a utility pole. Our systems were shut down gracefully before battery power ran out completely and were restarted at 9:30 pm on Tuesday night by Bob and Rory when the power was restored and stable.
Equipment Testing – the slight interruptions that we announced for Thursday morning (before opening) were needed in order to test our equipment as we continue to diagnose the problem with downloading Java clients.
UPS Maintenance – Protech will be doing maintenance on our UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply/ Battery) the evening of July 6. We do this twice a year and we expect no interruption in service.
Holiday Computer Room Staffing – The Computer Room will have normal staffing Saturday and Sunday but be closed on Monday, July 4.
FOND FAREWELLS:
CCS wants to extend our good wishes to retiring staff Jessie Exum (Crystal Lake), Rosanna Moore (Wilmette) and Judy Wright (Winnetka-Northfield), all of whom distinguished their libraries and CCS. And of course we also bid a fond farewell to NSLS and a welcome to RAILS!
THE CCS STAFF WISHES EVERYONE A GOOD HOLIDAY WEEKEND!
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
None! (Remember, the Circ meeting will be July 22!!!)
Thursday, June 23, 2011
CCS News
JUNE 24, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
BiblioCommons – with help from Glenview we and BC are looking at a test of how call number information is updated in both the brief and detailed display. So far we have determined that call number updates take 24 hours on the brief screen when updating an on-order records where the call number is changed from XX(number) to a valid call number. However, call numbers added with no preliminary call number don’t seem to get updated. Stay tuned for further results and resolutions.
Normal Business – with the upgrade behind us we are working on routine tasks as well as BookMyne and an application to provide patron status information for reciprocal borrowing purposes. Also, we are insisting that all Computer Room staff take vacations which are well deserved. For vacations of any length we post schedules on the home page of WonderDesk.
AUTHORITIES NEWS:
This week, CCS loaded 2 files that were obtained from Marcive. One file contained 3473 updated authority records and the other file contained 419 authority records that were needed, but not available until now.
Virginia R. Seward
CCS Authorities Librarian
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
None! (But we hope to see some of you at ALA...)
JUNE 24, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
BiblioCommons – with help from Glenview we and BC are looking at a test of how call number information is updated in both the brief and detailed display. So far we have determined that call number updates take 24 hours on the brief screen when updating an on-order records where the call number is changed from XX(number) to a valid call number. However, call numbers added with no preliminary call number don’t seem to get updated. Stay tuned for further results and resolutions.
Normal Business – with the upgrade behind us we are working on routine tasks as well as BookMyne and an application to provide patron status information for reciprocal borrowing purposes. Also, we are insisting that all Computer Room staff take vacations which are well deserved. For vacations of any length we post schedules on the home page of WonderDesk.
AUTHORITIES NEWS:
This week, CCS loaded 2 files that were obtained from Marcive. One file contained 3473 updated authority records and the other file contained 419 authority records that were needed, but not available until now.
Virginia R. Seward
CCS Authorities Librarian
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
None! (But we hope to see some of you at ALA...)
Thursday, June 16, 2011
CCS News
JUNE 17, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
Director’s Station – we have had reports that diacritics do not print in Director’s Station reports. This is a problem with the current release and has been brought to SirsiDynix’s attention.
BiblioCommons – BiblioCommons have been working on the mapping rules with us. LP’s are now coming up properly.
Staff absences – Bob is away June 13-20, Willie is away June 20-24, Linda is at ALA June 24 – 28 (as is Richard).
AUTHORITIES NEWS:
Last week, CCS sent a group of bibliographic records to Marcive for authorities processing – 6094 bibliographic records were sent, and Marcive returned 1826 updated ones, as well as 3375 new authority records. All of these records have been re-loaded.
Virginia R. Seward
CCS Authorities Librarian
CCS MEETING NEXT WEEK:
Tues., 6/21, 9:30, McHenry: Maintenance Coordinators
JUNE 17, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
Director’s Station – we have had reports that diacritics do not print in Director’s Station reports. This is a problem with the current release and has been brought to SirsiDynix’s attention.
BiblioCommons – BiblioCommons have been working on the mapping rules with us. LP’s are now coming up properly.
Staff absences – Bob is away June 13-20, Willie is away June 20-24, Linda is at ALA June 24 – 28 (as is Richard).
AUTHORITIES NEWS:
Last week, CCS sent a group of bibliographic records to Marcive for authorities processing – 6094 bibliographic records were sent, and Marcive returned 1826 updated ones, as well as 3375 new authority records. All of these records have been re-loaded.
Virginia R. Seward
CCS Authorities Librarian
CCS MEETING NEXT WEEK:
Tues., 6/21, 9:30, McHenry: Maintenance Coordinators
Thursday, June 9, 2011
CCS News
JUNE 10, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
UPGRADE COMPLETE – Our three step upgrade to 3.3.1 is complete. (1) The upgrade itself went well on May 23, but we noted lengthy client downloads. (2) The indexes were rebuilt on Memorial Day. (3)The refactor names report was run last Tuesday. We are grateful to Bob who watched these processes through to completion at all sorts of odd hours. Thanks for your patience with this upgrade. With SirsiDynix we are exploring ways to make the download process less time-consuming.
RUSSIAN HEADINGS – after our index rebuild we noticed some anomalies with authority headings containing a character that appears in Russian. These records have been re-indexed and all appears well now.
BIBLIOCOMMONS – BiblioCommons has added a link for our email registration page. The link is located as the last link in the bottom navigation bar. We are also seeing some progress with call number updating.
VACATIONS – Bob Barth will be on vacation the week of June 13. Willie will be on vacation the week of June 20. Linda will be at ALA June 24-27.
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
Wed., 6/15, 9:30, CCS: SCRAP
Thur., 6/16, 9:30, CCS: Acquisitions
(And don’t forget the NSLS Farewell in the NSLS Auditorium Fri., 6/17, 11-1)
JUNE 10, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
UPGRADE COMPLETE – Our three step upgrade to 3.3.1 is complete. (1) The upgrade itself went well on May 23, but we noted lengthy client downloads. (2) The indexes were rebuilt on Memorial Day. (3)The refactor names report was run last Tuesday. We are grateful to Bob who watched these processes through to completion at all sorts of odd hours. Thanks for your patience with this upgrade. With SirsiDynix we are exploring ways to make the download process less time-consuming.
RUSSIAN HEADINGS – after our index rebuild we noticed some anomalies with authority headings containing a character that appears in Russian. These records have been re-indexed and all appears well now.
BIBLIOCOMMONS – BiblioCommons has added a link for our email registration page. The link is located as the last link in the bottom navigation bar. We are also seeing some progress with call number updating.
VACATIONS – Bob Barth will be on vacation the week of June 13. Willie will be on vacation the week of June 20. Linda will be at ALA June 24-27.
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
Wed., 6/15, 9:30, CCS: SCRAP
Thur., 6/16, 9:30, CCS: Acquisitions
(And don’t forget the NSLS Farewell in the NSLS Auditorium Fri., 6/17, 11-1)
Thursday, June 2, 2011
CCS News
JUNE 3, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
INDEXES – The indexes were rebuilt on May 30 and the process went well.
PATRON NAMES – The patron names will be “refactored” on Tuesday June 7 before the libraries open. The process breaks the names up into separate fields. Please be sure all workstations are on the new client to work properly with the new patron name fields.
UPGRADE POST MORTEM:
We have been looking at what we can do to improve the client upgrade process the next time we do a Symphony software upgrade. We are talking with Sirsi about ways to provide all or part of the client in advance, but so far that dialogue has been less fruitful than hoped; we will continue to pursue it. We are also looking at our network appliances to see if they contributed to the bottleneck. We do know that it wasn’t a server capacity issue and that since libraries with dedicated connections were also impacted, it wasn’t just a problem with our ICN bandwidth. We are hoping we can alleviate the situation before our planned January 2012 upgrade to the prevailing version of Release 3.4 or 3.4.1.
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
Wed., 6/8, 10:00, CCS: Executive Committee
Thur., 6/9, 9:30, Cary: ILL
JUNE 3, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
INDEXES – The indexes were rebuilt on May 30 and the process went well.
PATRON NAMES – The patron names will be “refactored” on Tuesday June 7 before the libraries open. The process breaks the names up into separate fields. Please be sure all workstations are on the new client to work properly with the new patron name fields.
UPGRADE POST MORTEM:
We have been looking at what we can do to improve the client upgrade process the next time we do a Symphony software upgrade. We are talking with Sirsi about ways to provide all or part of the client in advance, but so far that dialogue has been less fruitful than hoped; we will continue to pursue it. We are also looking at our network appliances to see if they contributed to the bottleneck. We do know that it wasn’t a server capacity issue and that since libraries with dedicated connections were also impacted, it wasn’t just a problem with our ICN bandwidth. We are hoping we can alleviate the situation before our planned January 2012 upgrade to the prevailing version of Release 3.4 or 3.4.1.
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
Wed., 6/8, 10:00, CCS: Executive Committee
Thur., 6/9, 9:30, Cary: ILL
Thursday, May 26, 2011
CCS News
MAY 27, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
UPGRADE TO 3.3.1 – The upgrade itself in the night went well (Thank you Bob and Rory!). Then the excruciating business of client upgrades commenced and we were in agony along with those reporting 1-2 hour download times. We are exploring what caused the bottleneck with download times. On the good side, many libraries have been upgraded completely and NO problems with the release have been reported at all!!!!
INDEX REBUILD (UPGRADE TO 3.3.1 Part 2) - In order to rebuild the indexes, SVA will be turned off on Sunday May 29 at 9:15 pm until Tuesday May 31 at 8am. BiblioCommons functions may be limited between May 30 1:00 am until May 31 8:00 am.
Symphony will be taken down completely on Monday (Memorial Day) in the small hours of the morning for index rebuilding through the day.
Indexes should be complete by 11pm on Monday night and we will put the system back up as soon as indexes are actually finished. We will of course plan to build through early Tuesday morning if the necessity arises.
BiblioCommons will be available for searching but no holds, or status information will be available while Symphony is down.
This schedule allows for nearly minimal impact on reports, notices and other offline processes, except SVA would not be calling out on Memorial Day.
Libraries may wish to update their message in BiblioCommons to indicate reduced functions during the index rebuild. All systems will return to normal by Tuesday 8am.
NAME REFACTOR REPORT (Upgrade to 3.3.1 Part 3)– At this time we now plan to run the name refactor process in the wee early hours of TUESDAY June 7. If you recall, this separates names into fields first, last, middle. The process will be complete by 8am on that morning. Once we run this report you MUST be using the new client, so please be sure to have all the workstations upgraded to the 3.3.1 client in advance of that date.
BIBLIOCOMMONS AVAILABILITY– BiblioCommons has reported that they have fixed the issue with availability. For Symphony systems an additional correction process has been added to catch availability synchronization errors that were not caught by the normal process. Availability should be updated hourly, but anything that is missed should be corrected overnight. So, you may find the availability in search out of sync with the real-time availability for a few hours, but it should never be out of date for more than a day.
AUTHORITIES NEWS:
Last week, CCS loaded 2 files that were obtained from Marcive. One file contained 1835 updated authority records and the other file contained 476 authority records that were needed, but not available until now.
Virginia R. Seward
CCS Authorities Librarian
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
Wed., 6/1, 9:30, Cary: Catalogers
Thur., 6/2, noon, Jameson’s: Technical Group Chairs lunch
MAY 27, 2011
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:
UPGRADE TO 3.3.1 – The upgrade itself in the night went well (Thank you Bob and Rory!). Then the excruciating business of client upgrades commenced and we were in agony along with those reporting 1-2 hour download times. We are exploring what caused the bottleneck with download times. On the good side, many libraries have been upgraded completely and NO problems with the release have been reported at all!!!!
INDEX REBUILD (UPGRADE TO 3.3.1 Part 2) - In order to rebuild the indexes, SVA will be turned off on Sunday May 29 at 9:15 pm until Tuesday May 31 at 8am. BiblioCommons functions may be limited between May 30 1:00 am until May 31 8:00 am.
Symphony will be taken down completely on Monday (Memorial Day) in the small hours of the morning for index rebuilding through the day.
Indexes should be complete by 11pm on Monday night and we will put the system back up as soon as indexes are actually finished. We will of course plan to build through early Tuesday morning if the necessity arises.
BiblioCommons will be available for searching but no holds, or status information will be available while Symphony is down.
This schedule allows for nearly minimal impact on reports, notices and other offline processes, except SVA would not be calling out on Memorial Day.
Libraries may wish to update their message in BiblioCommons to indicate reduced functions during the index rebuild. All systems will return to normal by Tuesday 8am.
NAME REFACTOR REPORT (Upgrade to 3.3.1 Part 3)– At this time we now plan to run the name refactor process in the wee early hours of TUESDAY June 7. If you recall, this separates names into fields first, last, middle. The process will be complete by 8am on that morning. Once we run this report you MUST be using the new client, so please be sure to have all the workstations upgraded to the 3.3.1 client in advance of that date.
BIBLIOCOMMONS AVAILABILITY– BiblioCommons has reported that they have fixed the issue with availability. For Symphony systems an additional correction process has been added to catch availability synchronization errors that were not caught by the normal process. Availability should be updated hourly, but anything that is missed should be corrected overnight. So, you may find the availability in search out of sync with the real-time availability for a few hours, but it should never be out of date for more than a day.
AUTHORITIES NEWS:
Last week, CCS loaded 2 files that were obtained from Marcive. One file contained 1835 updated authority records and the other file contained 476 authority records that were needed, but not available until now.
Virginia R. Seward
CCS Authorities Librarian
CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:
Wed., 6/1, 9:30, Cary: Catalogers
Thur., 6/2, noon, Jameson’s: Technical Group Chairs lunch
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