Thursday, February 13, 2014

CCS News February 14, 2014

CCS News
 
FEBRUARY 14, 2014

BOOKMARK TEMPLATE ONLINE:
We have posted the CCS bookmark as a .pdf on the (not passworded) Home Page of www.ccslib.org under the About Us tab, in case anyone wants to print their own.  We are also printing more; please contact Bonnie Owens to request some.

LIBRARY CLOSING:

The Wilmette Public Library will be closed all day on Friday, February 21st for a Staff Institute Day. Regular hours will resume on Saturday, February 22nd.

WELCOME TO JOEL HAHN
:
Joel will start on Monday, February 17.  We’re proud to have him as part of the CCS staff, and again thank Niles for their graciousness in not forbidding him to leave their premises.  Roger Anderson will do some training; we all look forward to a smooth transition and continued benefits from Joel’s expertise.

CCS MEETING NEXT WEEK:

Wed., 2/19, 9:30, CCS: SCRAP

Thursday, February 6, 2014

CCS News February 7, 2014

CCS News
 
FEBRUARY 7, 2014


FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:

ICN T1 Cutover Complete:
The cutover of our ICN T1 lines at 10 AM on Tuesday, February 4, about which we have communicated previously, went without a hitch or even a noticeable hiccup.  ICN has confirmed that the work
was done.  This is not our switch to fiber; that is months away but in progress.

Next CCS Web Site Password Change:
Before the end of the month we will have information on our next change of the CCS Members Only section of our web site.  We will announce an ongoing schedule for these changes, so you will know in advance when this will happen, and no, January 1 won’t be one of the days...

NOVELIST LIBRARYAWARE TRAINING:

EBSCO is setting up each library’s account for LibraryAware, now part of our NoveList subscription.  When that is in place we will re-schedule the training which we postponed from February 18 (sorry).  They’re shooting for early March, so we’ll re-schedule for either before or after PLA depending on their rate of progress.

ENTERPRISE ROLLOUT:
Sirsi is setting up a basic starting point for each library and about half our libraries now have something in place to serve as a point of departure.  When that’s done we’ll send out the URLs.  In the coming week or so we’ll also send out information about Enterprise eCommerce (eventually followed by a webinar), configuration documents, the Task Force rosters and registration as we have it for the March 25 configuration workshops.

CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK
:

Wed., 2/12, 10:00, CCS
: Executive Committee

Thur., 12/13, 9:30, Round Lake: ILL

(Note to Catalogers: The February meeting is canceled!)

Friday, January 31, 2014

CCS News January 31, 2014

CCS News
 
JANUARY 31, 2014


FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:


Just in: 
 We were made aware of this from ICN today, and doing our best to let libraries know.

 ICN is working on CT3 consolidation and in the process the T1 circuit for COOPERATIVE COMPUTER SERVICES will be moved to another CT3 on Tuesday 02/04 at 10am. It should only be a few seconds outage to move the circuit and if we run into any problems, the move will be rolled back. We will keep everyone posted on any changes and when we know the work will be complete.


Self-Check and Those Who Manage It:
An email to the Maintenance Coordinators group was sent out this morning discussing the self-check offline mode. For those in that group please be sure to read the email.   For more information, please contact Bob Barth at CCS.

AUTHORITIES NEWS:
Last week, CCS sent a file of 9050 bibliographic records to Marcive for authorities processing. 6820 records were updated and returned to CCS, as well as 3988 new authority records. All of these records were loaded into our system.

Over the next week or two, two more files from Marcive will be loaded into our system. One contains 2917 updated authority records and the other contains 325 new authority records  that were needed in our database, but were not available before this time.

Virginia Seward
CCS Authorities Librarian


ANYONE ELSE GLAD THIS MONTH IS ENDING??

CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:

Thur., 2/6, 9:30, Niles: Webmasters

Thursday, January 23, 2014

CCS News January 24, 2014

CCS News
 
JANUARY 24, 2014


FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:

The Postini antivirus/spam filtering product that we currently use for email will be discontinued in the near future, as it has been bought by Google and they have no plans for continuing it. We are in the process of evaluating other solutions such as McAfee and Symantec and will begin testing them shortly. We expect that the eventual transition to the new product to be invisible to anyone using the listservs.
   
ENTERPRISE:
We will be moving  forward with the CCS rollout by September 15 of Sirsi/Dynix's Enterprise product as the primary user interface, along with eResource Central and Portfolio for electronic resources and digital archives respectively.  Even though we are almost eight months prior to going live, we will need to take advantage of this time to review configuration, work with third parties including BiblioCommons, Boopsie and the people who manage ePay, do testing, etc.  Of course this will not be possible without the participation and collaboration of all the libraries in CCS.

We will begin intensive work with our membership on this in March, after the CCS budget is completed and the office renovations are further along.  We do have a head start via the version of Enterprise that was set up as part of our comparison with BiblioCommons, and Jonathan Padilla deployed Enterprise at the consortium where he worked in Oregon before joining CCS. We anticipate having at least the basic configuration for everyone finalized by the beginning of August.  We can probably fast track some libraries, with two caveats: we can’t promise an earlier extraction of user-generated content from BiblioCommons, or the latest and greatest version of Enterprise, if it’s going to be much sooner.

We will soon be scheduling a workshop in March on the configuration options for a library.  The Enterprise configuration guide will be posted well in advance.  We will allow for two people per library, with AM and PM sessions to provide a little scheduling flexibility.  Each library has been asked to designate a primary contact for this project.  We will also create two Task Forces: one for general implementation guidance, the other for PR and marketing purposes. We will communicate much more broadly with the CCS community as we go.

CCS MEETING NEXT WEEK:


Fri., 1/31, 10:00 A.M., CCS: Equitable Access Task Force

Thursday, January 16, 2014

CCS News January 17, 2014

CCS News
 
JANUARY 17, 2014

FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:

BiblioCommons DNS Hiccup:
Late Tuesday, January 14, BiblioCommons had a brief issue with their DNS management.  It was resolved fairly quickly, but if you encountered access issues then, it’s the likely suspect.

SYMPHONY SERVICE PACK 3.4.1 SP4:
Sirsi has announced the release of Service Pack 4 for our current Symphony Release 3.4.1.  We were planning to go to SP3 when our office renovations are complete.  Everything in SP3 is also in SP4, so our new strategy is to watch the chatter about SP4 for the next month while our renovations continue, then load SP4 onto the Test Server and bang on it for a few weeks before we put it into Production.  We have posted the SP4 Release Notes on our web site on the (passworded) Members Only page.  They are also accessible at this link:

http://ccslib.org/attachments/File/LibraryStaff/Sym_341_SP4_RelNotes.pdf

LIRBRARY CLOSING:
Lake Villa District Library will be closed for Staff Development Day on Friday, January 24th

CCS MEETING NEXT WEEK:

 Wed., 1/22, 10:00, Algonquin: Annual and regular Governing Board meetings (catered breakfast included)

Thursday, January 9, 2014

CCS News January 10, 2014

CCS News
 
JANUARY 10, 2014

 
FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:

Air Conditioner Repair:

On Monday after we closed early due to the weather, our air conditioner in the server room went down. Staff (Bob Barth) did come in to start the spare air conditioner unit, and that kept us up and running until the repairman arrived on Tuesday morning. We did have to shut down the Test Server to reduce heat in the server room, as is always the case when we have temperature issues. We were told the cause was the outside air temperature; the failure occurs when the temp drops below -15.  This was a case of “what you didn’t know didn’t hurt you.”  It is nice having a backup unit, especially one that works.

SIP Help Desk Tickets:


When your library requests a SIP port, please open a WonderDesk incident so we can track the ordering and configuration process, which can often be a few weeks.  Thanks!

AUTHORITIES NEWS:

Two files from Marcive were loaded into our system this week. One contained 2791 updated authority records and the other contained 302 new authority records  that were needed in our database, but were not available before this time.

Virginia Seward
CCS Authorities Librarian


CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK:

Wed., 1/15, 9:30, CCS: SCRAP

Thur., 1/16, 9:30, Niles: PAS

Thursday, January 2, 2014

CCS News January 3, 2014

CCS News
 
JANUARY 3, 2014


FROM THE COMPUTER ROOM:

Our mandatory firewall firmware upgrade on Sunday AM, December 29 went quickly and well once we were able to get to it.  We had to wait first for a special cable which was shipped to us with inexplicable sloth.  As soon as we received it on the 27th, we put out the word.  We regret any inconvenience caused by the short notice and holiday absences; we faced a year-end deadline and limited times when we could do this without disrupting service.  Onward...

NEW CCS DATABASE MANAGER:
We are thrilled to welcome Joel Hahn as CCS Database Manager as of February 17.  Joel’s name will be familiar within the CCS community since he has worked for almost twenty years at Niles (which was very gracious about losing him to us, although we still don’t see why he has to wear that ankle monitor bracelet) and undertaken many projects for the benefit of CCS and our database.  He is also revered and venerated (if anything, those words are understatements) within the SirsiDynix customer base, where his has become the definitive Last Word on the discussion boards thanks to his exhaustive knowledge of Symphony and how to get the most from it.  Roger Anderson will assist us with the transition.  We now have one more reason to add to many why we can be proud of CCS.  

       
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL FROM THE CCS STAFF!

CCS MEETINGS NEXT WEEK
:

Wed., 1/8, 10:00, CCS: Executive Committee

Fri., 1/10, 9:30, Round Lake: Circulation

Fri., 1/10, 2-5 PM, CCS: Roger Anderson’s reception