Library on my mind

Well school was called off today due to Ice, but since I’m on a long contract guess who is at work! Since the phone is quiet and email is light I am doing some professional reading. I’m reading up after ALA and all the discussions that happened while I was hard at working keeping everything up and running here at home.

One discussion that happened evidently was some OCLC policy discussion and the introduction of Biblios.net – as a free service to the library community from LibLime. So I started reading Blogs and articles about Biblios.net. Mind you I am using Koha, and was introduced to Biblios.net almost a year ago so to see where the cataloging editor has started and ended up is a wonderful thing! I did some beta testing on the software to see how it worked, and there is some great potential here… With a district so security concerned, open Z39.50 searching from within the network is not allowed. But with Biblios – the searching is actually happening outside the district – so Z39.50 in the community does make it possible. Currently in my opinion Biblios.net is too Academic oriented/University – there are few records from schools or public libraries. Search Green Eggs Ham and you get 2 records one of them in French I believe…

Here are a couple of blog articles you might be interested in reading:

http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/the-state-of-the-future-of-cataloging/

http://blogs.liblime.com/open-sesame/archives/332

Here is a followup on items from our go live…

Turns out that the 500 item limitation has to do with Koha indexing and not the MARC record..  We had several records that when we loaded them they were unsearchable or circ’able – due to the fact that there were more than 500 items attached.  It created some strange search results at times as well.

Basically when you scanned that barcode you would get a Koha error …  So LibLime helped me to identify records that were still too big and split them so that the items are now searchable and circ’able!  Bummer…  Just something to think about as you move forward.

Another item we discovered is having 100 items checked out to a teacher and 400 items attached to a bib, when you checkout one of those items to that teacher it may take 20 seconds for all the updating to happen.

With that said we are looking at creating magazine records specific to each campus to keep circulation moving and not slow down the checkout lines for kids with magazines.  Teachers can wait – kids can’t.

We’ve had some slow issues, but that could be general in district traffic – which we are investigating.  I did talk with a district using a different web based software and they indicated acceptable checkout/in times are between 2-3 seconds.  The page has to refresh so it is a little bit slower than the client or terminal software in that instance.

All in all the librarians have been pleased and we continue to tweak things.  I will post hopefully more tomorrow on our Pac for student access and things we are learning!  We did stretch the setup some on that, but we think in the long run it will be great!(default searching for a specific location initially)