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Support and Training Services Report: January 2010

Aleph

Acq/Serials

  • A two-day Serial Module training is planned for March 11 and 12, 2010. This will be held at Century College in White Bear Lake. Details and registration information will be sent out soon.
  • The Acquisitions/Serials Workday combined with the Cataloging Workday will be held April 8 and 9, 2010. This will be held at Metro State. If you have any particular topics you would like covered, contact the Acquisitions/Serials convener, Rachel Wexelbaum - rswexelbaum@stcloudstate.edu. More details will follow.

Cataloging

  • Bemidji State University has received training for the Automatic Creation of Holding and Item records.
  • The Cataloging Workday combined with the Acquisition/Serial Workday will be held April 8 and 9, 2010. This will be held at Metro State. If you have any particular topics you would like covered, contact Adam Marsnik, Normandale Community College, at his e-mail address adam.marsnik@normandale.edu. More details will follow.

Circulation

  • As of Jan 1st, Rasmussen College is no longer part of the MnPALS Consortium. Eventually, we will delete all their patron and item records from the database. Meanwhile, we have expired all their patrons. Please do not override and check out any materials to Rasmussen students, as they are no longer valid MnPALS patrons. We are working on a service that will produce a report for any MnPALS libraries who have outstanding transactions with Rasmussen patrons, whether they are loans, ILLs, fines, etc. That will allow libraries to take the appropriate actions to clear the outstanding transactions.

ILL

  • Provided a response to ExLibris development specifications for the transfer of an ILL request from ALEPH ILL to OCLC ILL via OCLC direct request protocol.

OPAC

Systems

  • Held a one-day Systems Librarian training at the PALS office for BSU on Dec. 30, 2009. It was condensed and fast paced.
  • Reports enhancement - Created an 'If' process in the loan-receipt.xsl to allow a script to appear on the receipt based on the sublibrary status. This allowed UCR to add a signature form to loans of electronic equipment, but this form will not appear on regular loans.

Not Aleph

EZproxy

  • For more information on this product, check out the MnPALS Forum: http://forums.mnpals.org/index.php?board=47.0
  • Assisted MSB with EZproxy. They were adding the proxy url to the electronic resources in the catalog. We advised them to proxy the MnPALS catalog. This will result in saving employee time/costs in future catalog maintenance.

MnPALS Plus

  • For more information on this product, check out the MnPALS Forum: http://forums.mnpals.org/index.php?board=35.0
  • Al recently figured out a problem with the display of Unicode characters in MnPALS Plus. If you have records that have displays like the following:
\9EC3\571F\5730 Yellow earth

which should really be:

黃土地 Yellow earth

The display has been fixed. In order for a record to be fixed in MnPALS Plus it needs to be reloaded into the Solr database. This is done during the multiple daily updates of the database. Just force a re-indexing of the record in Aleph and the record will get updated in MnPALS Plus correctly during the next update. Sometime in the future we will probably rebuild the MnPALS Plus database. At that time all of the bad records should get fixed. Until then, this is an alternative way to correct those records.
  • A number of new enhancements and fixes for MnPALS Plus are being put into production:
    • Wording change for ILL form - 'date needed by' change
    • Wording change for unsuccessful searches - 'search other libraries' change
    • Boolean Search fix
      • When doing a Boolean advanced search you would get different results than a Boolean search on the Basic search page
      • The two searches are still not completely identical, but the results are much closer than previously.
    • Search box for Course Reserves
    • New functionality to be able to limit by a range of years
    • URLs - links are now created by the sub-fields 3, z, and y if they exist
    • Fix for author searches
    • Description is now appended to the call number instead of replacing the barcode
      • the description is usually the volume of the particular item
    • Indexing the note fields in the 856 fields
    • Fix some bugs in the schema for the SOLR database
    • Login box is now centered on the page if you have scrolled down
    • Printing enhancements

PALSconnect Linker

  • OpenURL Linker project from PALS currently in beta testing.
  • Perry has created a set of pages on the MnPALS wiki for PALSconnect Linker http://wiki.mnpals.org/index.php/PALSconnect_Linker
  • The two beta testing libraries are Minnesota School of Business and Crown College.

OCLC's Worldcat Link Manager

Task Forces

Authorities

Indexing

MnPALS Plus Working Group

Reports Task Force
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