Category Archives: Uncategorized

ILL OFFICE SECRET SANTA

It is that time of year again!   Let me know by Monday if you would like to participate in the ILL office Secret Santa.  We can pull names on Tuesday, November 9.  I was thinking that maybe we should raise the gift price to $7.50, with gifts to be delivered on December 12th.

If you would like to participate, let me know, Kim

Due to the wildfires in the San Diego several libraries have announced that they will be closing. If your library, or one that you know of has been affected, OCLC Western can set symbols to non-supplier and respond to all pending requests as future date. If you would like to take advantage of this service, please contact the OCLC Western Service Center at either western@oclc.org or 1-800-854-5753.

Thank you

Christa Stack Weiker

Product Manager, WCRS

CCAR Survey time!

Starting TODAY please count the number of items RECEIVED on Ccar.

I will take care of entering all the data at the end of the week.  Kim

For the October install the following changes have been made to WorldCat Resource Sharing:

• There is a new reason for no, within the drop down menu. “Not licensed to fill” should be used when the lending library does own the item but due to contractual obligations are unable to fill (e.g. electronic resources). 
• When a lender replies to a request with “Not found as cited” as the reason for no, the request will be returned as Unfilled for the borrower to remedy the citation. It no longer  will be routed to any additional lenders.
• Users are able to print labels when individual requests are processed as well as through batch functionality (Aug. 2007).
•  The ability to view 20, 50, 75, or 99 request in a given category is persistent when users go from category to category
• Users are able to search the archive with the closed date as the search guide.
• Some users experienced not being able to update their records when the Shipped Via field an electronic delivery method was present as well as in the Electronic Delivery fields in the request form. This was due to an error in coding, and has been corrected.   

We are now able to pull the full text PDF’s from the Hartford Courant and the Historical Hartford Courant from the databases and send them through whatever mechinism, Ariel, fax, US Mail, instead of having to scan from the microfilm! This will greatly speed things up since the citations that we get are usually a bit lean on information. The Historical Courant runs from 1764 to 1982 and the regular Hartford Courant runs from 1992 to the present. Alas, there is a ten year gap where we will need to use the microfilm, but this is so much better than having to deal with all three hundred years on film.

For those libraries that want us to lend the film, if we can get them to tell us what they specifically need copied, we may actually fill more requests. Finding things is very simple. These databases are a wonderful tool for the people doing geneological research who need obituaries, especially if they don’t know the exact date that the obituary appeared.

These two databases can be accessed at: http://library.ccsu.edu/find/articles/articles.php?opt=alphadb&idx=H&type=db

From Sharon at the State Library:  The Connecticut State Library would like to conduct a brief survey during the week of October 22nd to determine the volume of items being shipped on Connecticar.  For planning purposes we would like to periodically get a sampling of the volume on Ccar.   This information will help us improve our service.  Later in the year we will be following up with a more detailed survey to investigate delivery time.

During the week of October 22nd we will be asking you to count all incoming shipments on Ccar and enter the number on the Survey Monkey website. 

Don’t forget that we can code embargoed titles as “CCL”.  Technically, we have purchased the journal title, but because of the way we purchased it, we do not have access to the most recent year.  It is the same idea as if we had a paper journal subscription and we had claimed a missing issue, we are only replacing what we did not receive from the publisher.

Make sense?

I have noticed several requests that have previously been updated to “Shipped” or “Yes Loan” in Clio that have the status of “In Process.”  These requests will have a due date.  If you trip across any of them, please double check Mill Circ and then update them back to “Yes Loan”.

In some cases, the record may not be in OCLC, we may have lost it.  I have not determined how this is happen or when it started, but Judd K. and I are working on that.  I will keep you posted.  Kim

1) New Search parameters for searching Closed Requests

The new parameters include all of the following:  Author (au:), Borrowing Library (bl:), Call Number (cn:), Illiad transaction ID number (tn:), Lending Library (ll:), Patron Department (pd:), Request closed date (rc:), Request identifier (an:), RLG reference id (rg:), Title (ti:).

2) Ability to view more than 20 requests in Request Manager categories:

Users can now view more than 20 requests in a category on the same screen in Request Manager.  A drop down box at the top of the list of requests allows users to choose from 20 (default), 50, 75, 99 records per page.  Once the selection is chosen it remains persistent thought the session.   This is available for all categories of requests.

From Bill Sullivan at iConn:  Auto-Graphics has identified the cause of the slowness problem – a condition that causes CPU utilization to max out at 100%.  The problem is related to Version 3.0 (which explains why we never experienced this particular problem before) and will be fixed with an overnight upgrade early next week.  Until then, Auto-Graphics will monitor system performance and manually free the system up if the problem re-occurs.  As of right now, system performance should be normal.  We are sorry for this inconvenience.