Training Training Training!
Well we are getting ready tomorrow Nov 18th to do training with our librarians. This is the BASIC training – there is only so much we can show them in 1 1/2 hours if that!
First – how to login to the new system
How to circulate a book
How to modify/add a borrower
Basic reports
Then maybe some searching.
This sounds simple, but we anticipate TONS of questions since the librarians have not seen anything up to this point other than demo things. They maybe tinkered with it, but didn’t actually try and figure day to day activities and how it would/wouldn’t work.
We’ve made great headway with borrower loads and dealing with Homeroom codes from Pinnacle, now I just have to figure out a way to use CRON to load that data on a weekly basis… hmmm Another learning adventure!
This has been a great experience for me, forces me to look outside the box and ask the impossible and see what happens!(even with our own staff!)
It came to us last week that we need to develop some 15 minute web type trainings that people can start attending or watching on their own. That will help people become more familiar with the system and how to’s. The help is totally web based as well and customizable, have to watch that in upgrades, but we can put links directly into the help screens etc… Still working on that!
Update on progress!
Well we are in the process of getting our second set of data loaded. I’m taking better notes this time so that when we do it in December it will be easier and I will get the right data!
Well things are going well. LibLime does well with my data and they are very helpful. We found the accession numbers from 15 years ago in our item records, so I guess it is about time we let those go! Amazing what you find when you didn’t even know it was there.
Couple of items that need to be addressed – which I believe will be eventually…
13 digit/10 digit ISBN conversion and matching. I have a quote on this, just not sure what the immediate need is going to be so don’t want to say go ahead when I may need something more desperately!
They are giving me a quote for changing the Overdue process – Koha want to email overdues which would be great, but… How do you get them! You can export a file and do a mail merge which is also nice, but there are fields for Schools that we are going to have to sponsor some minor changes to the process to get it to work as we need it.
Individual spine labels – I’m waiting for a quote on this one, but I suspect it may be out of my price range to do. Koha is currently setup to BATCH print spine labels. We can cut and paste into a Dymo document to print them, just not as handy as it was in the last automation system.(work in progress!)
Batch adding items – working on that… They gave me a quote, but I havn’t figured out where the money might come for that one.
Batch Editing of items – working on that one again need to find the money to sponsor this type of development.
That’s where a shared group of individuals coming together to discuss the future of Koha would be helpful. We could sit in a room and prioritize and hopefully share some of the development dollars we all have precious little of.
The thing with Open Source is you can PAY to have development done – so if you are thinking of doing this don’t look at it as a completely money saving tool… I’m thinking of keeping $20,000 – $30,000 in our budget if possible for further development. That’s a fraction though of what we paid in maintenance in the past.
