Keep on moving!
Well things just keep moving along. We are loading items like mad so that the ISBN matching will work correctly… We have sponsored the development for 13/10 digit ISBN searching/matching. That won’t be available though until possibly February…
I have figured out a way to print spine labels one at a time with the Dymo printer – koha currently has the ability to print spine labels in batch – for 8 1/2 x 11 pages of labels so this was a twist they had difficulty wrapping their head around.
Authority searching currently only searches the 1XX fields in authority records… hmmm future development? At least these people know what an authority record is…
Yes still happy with our choice to move this way… Our biggest hurdle is holds – system wide at this point.
One Month away!
Go live is about a month away, but… We only work until Dec 19th so we have 7 days of cataloging work days from today and 12 days on the current system left!
Librarians have been trained – assistants too all 140 people! I’m still working on some documentation and how the OPAC or student workstations will look. LibLime has been able to assist in figuring out a way in which we can have a link that will open up and limit to the local location so people won’t have to login first.
Our biggest discussion has been on holds – it is all or nothing right now and how we would manage those resources. We do local only on our current system, but Koha is designed around SHARING resources so imagine that… Our current hold list has about 1200 items people are waiting for and if we do district wide about 600 of them can be filled on the first day… Poor in district mail people! But from there it should slow down.
We have discovered that our work around for extracting records with more than 500 items has not worked so I am back to “duping” records to get them under 500 per bib. This is huge and again if you are planning to migrate anytime in the near future – look at your catalog and get your items under 500 per record no matter what you do!
We have sponsored a couple of development items – a filter on attributes for overdues – so we can get a list of overdue by homeroom or period or grade -
Attributes are items in which you can add to the borrower record locally – so we have discovered a way in which we can load the student schedule so secondary can run Overdues on whatever period/class they prefer – and it all is updated automatically from our student records system.(I’m going to have to manually load them as I haven’t worked with CRON jobs yet to figure that aspect out.) There is an opportunity for sponsorship!
Had to do minor sponsorship to get the book jackets/reviews etc from B&T Content Cafe’ working correctly.
We have figured out how to load all 53000 student pictures – boy was that interesting. Figuring out who has pictures(Food an nutritional services, Grade book program), who needs them(same folks and now us), and how can we share them(I have this what do you have… How can I get that without sending you the CD what if it breaks!)! The picture companies will do whatever you need, but they have to know up front. Sounds easy, but you need to give them specs for picture size and file formats – ie thumbnails – jpg format file name is ID number, need a text file with file name and student number ie – 123456, 123456.jpg – for each school.
Waiting on a few other sponsorship items to see if we have funding. Before you sign your contract ask for a copy of items that have been quoted for sponsorship to help you determine how much needs to be budgeted and what you may want to co-sponsor. When I heard minor sponsorship or some sponsorship I was thinking hundreds, well it can be thousands depending on how much work is involved. REMEMBER! Your maintenance has dropped SIGNIFICANTLY so you may be able to lower your Operating budget, but keep some money for sponsorship requests you may have. I’m working with KUDOS – and setting up a “workshop/conference” for Koha in April – 16/17 – this would be a great time for people to come and talk about development and what they need/would like to see in Koha and are willing to help sponsor.
