We discovered today that Firefox 10 (coming to desktops near you over the past few days) reacts strongly to some things that it always used to accept without complaint – which can end up in a degraded or completely broken catalogue, depending on how you’ve customized it with BibTemplate.

Long story short, we’ve been able to figure out that Firefox 10 is reacting to particular CSS3 selector syntax combinations. A solid clue is if you check the JavaScript error console, you might see a warning like:

Warning: An unbalanced tree was written using document.write() causing data from the network to be reparsed.

The warning also links to Optimizing your pages for speculative parsing from the Mozilla project, which sort of helps; at least it is clear that the Firefox project is trading fault-tolerance for speed. One thing that is known to make it angry is attribute values without quotes; for example:

• query='datafield[tag=245]' /* breaks in Firefox 10 */
• query='datafield[tag="245"]' /* works in Firefox 10 */

We have also determined that CSS3 selector syntax that uses hierarchies is also broken, at least in some cases. For example:

• query='datafield[tag="245"] subfield[code="a"]' /* breaks in Firefox 10 */

The current recommended workaround is to wrap another dojo.query() function and
select the second element of the CSS2 selector syntax that way; for example:


<td type='opac/slot-data' query='datafield[tag="245"]'>
<script type='opac/slot-format'>< ![CDATA[
dojo.query('subfield[code="a"]', item).forEach(function(item) {
/* code you would have previously dumped directly in the script tag */
});
]]></script>
</td>


This isn't perfect, by any means, but it should get you on the road to getting Firefox 10 working better than it might be right now. If you want to see what we're doing at Conifer, you can follow along with our skins branch. (I'm trying not to put too much profanity in the commit messages).

Many thanks to Dan Wells for figuring out the CSS3 selector quoting; this Firefox 10 incompatibility absolutely blindsided us all and it's always nice to have a calm voice of reason sorting things out

Happy Superbowl Weekend from Indianapolis! There are some great sponsorships and exhibitor opportunities available for the 2012 Evergreen International Conference!

Gold sponsorships: 1 exhibit space, 1/4 program acknowledgement, 2 break stations during afternoon break
Silver sponsorships: 1 exhibit space, 1/4 program acknowledgement
Keynote speaker: Acknowledgement in program on conference speaker page
and introduction of keynote speaker at conference

Exhibit spaces: $650. Save $100 by registering to exhibit before March 31, 2012.

Fill out the Sponsorship and Exhibitor Application today! Please contact sborger@library.in.gov with any questions.

Exhibitor fee of $650 will be extended until March 31, 2012!!! Don’t miss your opportunity to exhibit at the Evergreen International Conference and interact with close to 200 Evergreen users from the international community! Register here!

2012 Evergreen International Conference

Today is the last day for Early Bird Registration! Register today and save $15 on attendance!

Vendors can save $100 by registering to exhibit today!

A list of programs and descriptions is available on the blog!

eReader policies for the OverDrive Committee

The eIndiana Digital OverDrive Committee has had many inquiries from eIndiana Digital Consortium members regarding local library or consortium-wide policy on loaning eReaders. Evergreen Indiana and eIndiana Digital Consortium do not have a consortium-wide eReader policy but we would like to collect samples of policies each individual library has about loaning eReaders. The committee has decided to post them at the URL below so that interested eIndiana Digital Consortium and Evergreen Indiana members may consult them for ideas before establishing their own local policies. Please send sample policies to the Evergreen Indiana Coordinator, sborger@library.in.gov.

Circulation Module

Prefix field has been added back to the option fields upon registering a patron. Thank you to those who reported this issue.

Did you know that you can gather any information you want from Patrons or Items and track it in the Evergreen ILS? Setting up a Statistical Category is an easy and effective way to gather information on patrons or items that aren’t otherwise tracked in the system. Documentation on setting up a Stat Cat below.

Staff Training Documents > Reports Module > Statistical Categories Editor

Example: Some libraries serve several townships and want to track patrons from each township. They follow the instructions for creating a Patron Stat Cat and then put in a helpdesk ticket to have a report created that they can run to get their information. Upon registering a new patron, staff members can choose their Stat Cat response at the bottom of the patron registration screen and run the report created by the helpdesk to get their responses.

Today is the last day for Early Bird Registration! Register today and save $15 on attendance!

Vendors can save $100 by registering to exhibit today!

A list of programs and descriptions is available on the blog!

Policies and Permissions in FulfILLment will be very flexible and highly configurable.  Read on to learn more.

• FulfILLment will have the ability to create policies to determine/control patron eligibility.  This is flexible down to specific libraries or specific item types.
• Authorized staff will be able to create org groupings to funnel patrons into searching pre-defined groups (county-wide, regional, state, school, etc.).
• FulfILLment will allow blocking of material types at specific libraries from filling ILL for all or specific patrons or groups.
• Circulation policy can be generated from either the owning or lending library policies.
• When an item is put in transit to a library to fill an ILL request, a brief bib record is pushed to the home ILS system (if the system permits it) to facilitate checkout.  If the home ILS does not permit it, then staff will need to create a brief record.
• The Administration module will allow local definition of what actions staff may perform and at what locations.
• The Administration module also allows fine granularity of policies and permissions to be set/configured.  Here are a few examples:
  1. The ability to configure max requests per patron.
  2. The “Need by” date for material can be configured.
  3. Org units can be configured to be valid pick-up locations.
  4. The ability to designate a library to be the “lender of last resort”.
  5. Renewals will be configurable on a material type or library-by-library basis.
  6. The ability to configure standard processing charges per library. This amount will be visible to patrons in “My Requests”.

  Remember to check back next week.  Next week’s post will cover Patrons and Staff Use in FulfILLment.

   

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Program presenters have been contacted and asked to finalize their program title and description in preparation for making it available on the blog next week. Check back next week for detailed program descriptions!

2012 EG International Conference

Program schedule is available. Evergreen Indiana Membership Meeting on Friday afternoon.

Also, Early Bird Registration ends on January 31, 2012!

Evergreen Indiana Executive Committee by-laws updated (link)

III. COUNCIL MEMBERSHIP MEETINGS

a) The Evergreen Indiana Council shall meet at least once a year in Spring with the time and location to be determined by the Executive Committee. Other membership meetings may be called by the Executive Committee. Members will be notified at least thirty (30) days in advance of the annual meeting.

Cataloging Committee updates

Cataloging Committee minutes from September 13, 2011 were approved at the Cataloging Committee meeting on December 6, 2011.

Cataloging Committee Policy and Procedures have also been updated.

Cataloging Policy changes include Beginning June 30, 2012 the permissions for Cat-2 catalogers will change. Cat-2 catalogers will no longer be able to create new MARC records, batchload new records or edit MARC records. Only Cat-1 catalogers will be able to create new MARC records, add records by batchloading and edit MARC records.

Since you may have Cat-2 catalogers on your staff that have been performing these functions, they will need training to obtain their Cat-1 certification. The Cataloging Committee wants to schedule training to accommodate these needs, so we would like to know how many people on your staff will need this training in the coming months.

Cataloging Procedure changes were distributed in draft form to the consortium in October 2011. A summary of the changes is available here.

Food for Fines Clarification

Several libraries have contacted ISL with questions regarding a local Food for Fines holiday program and the previous statement on this blog about the library contacting their city/town attorney for a legal opinion. The correct statement is that the library should contact their library legal consultant.

After consulting with the Indiana State Library Legal Consultant and the State Board of Accounts to find out the requirements if a library wants to engage in such as program, we have learned that there is no prohibition for the practice of waiving fines in the State Library Code, however the decision on whether or not to implement a Food for Fines program comes down to a legal question that needs to be addressed locally by the library board and their attorney.

NOTE: If a library wants to engage in a Food for Fines program, they must have a written local policy adopted by the Library Board along with a written opinion from their attorney. (If your library does not have access to an attorney, contact Karen Ainslie or Edythe Huffman at the Indiana State Library for more information on how to locate one). Both of these documents are required by SBoA to implement Food for Fines program without receiving an audit exception.

Once this policy is in place, you may use either the Forgive or Goods Billing option to forgive fines and fees in a patron’s account.

Remember, you may only forgive those fines and fees to which your library is owed. Overdue fines are owed to the circulating library. Lost and damaged fines are owed to the owning library.

The 2012 EG International Conference Schedule is available here! Thanks to the members of the Program Committee who made final recommendations earlier in the month.

Don’t forget, Early Bird Registration ends on January 31, 2012! Register today and save $15!

The Evergreen community participates along with hundreds of other websites in raising awareness about two pieces of U.S. legislation, SOPA and PIPA, by posting the following banner on the official website.

Annual report information

eIndiana Digital Consortium members: Because eIndiana Digital Consortium doesn’t provide MARC records in the Evergreen Indiana OPAC, members must report this service as a database, in 50a. All those libraries in other OverDrive consortia around the state that do create MARC records and provide them in the Evergreen Indiana OPAC may report the items as electronic books owned by the library, 58f in the annual report.

Everyone may count them as items circulated in 57a. If you can separate out children’s materials, you may also count them in 57b.

Everyone should report any Overdrive operating expenditure in 35aa. If you use other funds, report it in 36.1e.

Cataloging Committee survey

The Cataloging Committee will soon be sending out a survey which will help them update their records. The following questions are included in the survey:

1. Name of Library
2. Name of Director
3. Email address of director
4. Email addresses of all staff who would like to be included on the cataloging listserv
5. Cataloging contact person name and email address
6. Beginning June 30, 2012 the permissions for Cat-2 catalogers will change. Cat-2 catalogers will no longer be able to create new MARC records, batchload new records or edit MARC records. Only Cat-1 catalogers will be able to create new MARC records, add records by batchloading and edit MARC records.

Since you may have Cat-2 catalogers on your staff that have been performing these functions, they will need training to obtain their Cat-1 certification. The Cataloging Committee wants to schedule training to accommodate these needs, so we would like to know how many people on your staff will need this training in the coming months.

Berklee College of Music is sponsoring development to add an auto-suggest feature to Evergreen Open Source ILS search interfaces.  The goal of this development is to create a fast service for providing suggestions for user search queries which display as the user enters a query in the catalog search input.  During the normal typing pauses that occur as the user enters a query, the catalog will retrieve the set of suggestions for the current value and display them to the user just below the search box.  The user can then click on one of the entries to perform a search for the entry or continue typing to manually refine the search.  The number of characters a patron will enter before auto-suggest is triggered will be configurable.   The initial development will target the Template Toolkit OPAC.  There will also be support for auto-suggest in the JavaScriptOPAC.  Upon completion, the development will target the next major release of Evergreen.

Evergreen and Koha are open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

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Have you been wondering how FulfILLment will handle patron management and privacy?  If so, you’ve come to the right place.  Read on for an overview of both.

Patron Management in FulfILLment:

Did you know…?

• FulfILLment can automatically create patron records on the fly when an ILL is initiated by a patron or staff member on behalf of the patron by pulling information directly from the home ILS.
• Standard patron fields will include:  names, home library, barcode, DOB, email address, 3 phone fields, unlimited physical addresses, profile, standing, barred, expiration, group, and statistical categories (stat cats).  A statistical category is a reportable field in Evergreen Open Source ILS that allows staff to organize and gather information about sets of patrons and/or copies. Examples of commonly used patron statistical categories include residency, age, school district or department. Examples of commonly used copy statistical categories include funding, genre or reading level.  (Thanks to Shae Tetterton, Project Manager, Equinox Software, Inc., for this description of stat cats!)
• FulfILLment will support searching on all patron fields.
• FulfILLment will prevent patrons from requesting material for which they already have an active ILL request.
• FulfILLment can track patron fines, charges and overdues.
• FulfILLment allows staff to create policies to determine/control patron eligibility.  This is flexible down to specific libraries or specific item types.

Patron Privacy in FulfILLment: 

Did you know…?

• FulfILLment can be set to remove patron information after ILL transactions are complete.
• FulfILLment can be set to require confirmation that a patron is sharing their data with a foreign library upon ILL initiation.
• FulfILLment can be set to retain as much or as little patron data as local policy requires.

Be sure to check back next week for another update.  The next post will cover the exciting realm of Policies and Permissions.

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Annual report data

Each library has received their annual report data for 2011 via email. The data you received included data for the following annual report questions:

Question 10-13 List of patron types and the quantity for your library.

Question 51 e Libraries must record n/a.

Question 57 a-b Holdings are listed by shelving location. Each library must identify which items to include in Question 57a and which to include in Question 57b. NOTE: Since EI libraries count the circulations of other EI library’s items, you get the shelving locations of all those libraries.

Question 57 d-i Circulation count is listed by circulation modifier.

Question 58 a-f Holdings are listed by circulation modifier.

Question 117 Each library should run the report entitled “Q117 PLAC loans (Revised 1/6/2012)” to get their answer to Question 117 on the Annual Report. Contact Wendy Knapp or Steven Schmidt if you have any questions.

Updates to Circulation Procedures

http://www.in.gov/library/files/Evergreen_Indiana_Circulation_Procedures.pdf

Transiting lost items

1. Procedures > Checkin > Lost Items. If a circulating library receives a lost item, they should check it in. They will need to override the status, making the item available to transit back to the owning library. Add an alert in the Item Attributes Screen explaining that the item was marked lost and then checked in so that it could transit back to the owning library: Lost item checked in at [name of library] on [date]. When the owning library receives the item, they can decide based on local policy what to do with the item and associated lost fees.

Updating resident patron accounts

1. Procedures > Patron Record Management > Updating Expired Patron Accounts > Staff members choosing to update a resident patron account at a different library than the patron’s home library should create an alert in the patron’s account to notify the patron’s home library with the following text: Patron account was updated at [name of staff member’s library] on [date].

BookWhere/WebClarity Information

BookWhere is offering a 25% discount, applicable to both the per seat and site license rates for BookWhere Suite. BookWhere/WebClarity is offering two informational webinars for those interested in learning about the product:

EI libraries BookWhere webinar
General public BookWhere webinar
EI libraries BookWhere webinar

Meeting announcement

Circulation Committee meeting, Tuesday, January 17, 2012.

Meeting minutes

Executive Committee minutes from October 11, 2011 were improved and approved at the Executive Committee meeting on December 13, 2011.

OverDrive Committee minutes from October 11, 2011 were approved at the OverDrive Committee meeting on December 13, 2011.

The beta release of FulfILLment is very near completion.  The projected beta release date is January 31, 2012, with a projected release of v1.0 at the end of March 2012.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be posting more updates about FulfILLment, providing additional insight into how it works and highlighting some of its features, so be sure to check back each week.

As mentioned in a previous post, the first version of FulfILLment will work with:

• SirsiDynix Symphony
• Polaris
• Aleph
• Koha
• III Millenium

Have you ever wondered how FulfILLment will work?  How it will connect to various ILSs?   LAI is the answer.  The FulfILLment LAI (Local Automation Integrator) is designed to work with multiple protocols (like NCIP, SIP, etc.) for retrieval and processing of data.  LAI is implemented as a collection of RESTful web-service interfaces that can map, via an ILS specific connector, to each of the various ILSs in use by libraries in the Next-Generation Library Resource Sharing solution.  Records can be manually or automatically loaded.  Library Administrators will appreciate that the Reporting Interface will allow for powerful and detailed reporting on any field.

Have you ever wondered what else makes FulfILLment special?  My dear Watson, it’s the Next Generation Discovery Interface (aka NGDI).  The NGDI is a union catalog for patron and staff use, with different actions available based on log in permissions.  Staff will have additional options    available to them beyond the options available to patrons.  The NGDI, a full-text indexing database, utilizes the same extensible search backend as the Evergreen ILS.  It’s templatable so libraries can customize the look and feel.  The NGDI will display results based on relevance and faceted for best matching and discovery.  To prevent patrons from seeing excessive duplicate titles, records are virtually de-duplicated during the catalog loading phase using a fingerprinting algorithm.  Holdings availability information may be configured to display on the results page or full record display.    Libraries will be able to specify what data is presented in the brief and full bib record displays.  Patrons will appreciate being able to view their outstanding ILL requests via the My Requests page.

Be sure to check back next week for another update.  The next post will cover patron management and privacy in FulfILLment.

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Happy New Year, Evergreen Indiana!

2012 EG International Conference

Early bird registration for the 2012 Evergreen International Conference has been extended to January 31, 2012!

http://2012evergreenconference.eventbrite.com/

The program for the 2012 EG International Conference will be finalized and posted on the blog early next week.

Item barcode and library card orders

The Indiana State Library will be placing an order on behalf of Evergreen Indiana libraries that have filled out the item barcodes and patron library card surveys. If you are interested in ordering more sheets of item barcodes and/or GREEN or BLUE patron library cards, please fill out the appropriate survey below. I will submit orders on Friday, January 13 so please get your orders in before then.

Item barcodes: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/itembarcodes

GREEN patron library cards: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GREENlibrarycards

BLUE patron library cards: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BLUElibrarycards

Early registration for the 2012 Evergreen International Conference has been extended to January 31, 2012!

http://2012evergreenconference.eventbrite.com/

Perry County merger

Tell City – Perry County Public Library and Cannelton Public Library will be officially merging on January 1, 2012, changing the total number of libraries in Evergreen Indiana to 95. The new library system name will be Perry County Public Library. Please note that the Member Library Abbreviations for Intra-Evergreen Indiana Library Lending on the Staff Training Documents website > Circulation Module will be updated with the following information:

TCPCPL: Perry County Public Library
TCPCPLT: Perry County Public Library – Tell City
TCPCPLB: Perry County Bookmobile
CNLPLC: Perry County Public Library – Cannelton

Pass Through Fund

In preparation for eventually expanding the cash and check payment program to all libraries in Evergreen Indiana, each member library will need to establish a Pass Through Fund (if you don’t already have one established). According to the State Board of Accounts, payment that libraries accept on behalf of one another must be receipted to the Pass Through Fund and deposited into the bank account on a daily basis. We have set up bookkeeping instructions for the six payment pilot libraries, in accordance with those instructions and you will also find a board resolution template below to establish a Pass Through Fund.

Please note that only the six payment pilot libraries are accepting payment on behalf of one another at this time. We hope to allow all libraries to participate in the cash and check payment program sometime in 2012. You may be certain that an announcement will be made in the Weekly Update blog.

Board Resolution template to establish a Pass Through Fund

A few days ago I made a small donation to the Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization registered in the United States. There are many organizations to which I could have donated, and indeed Lynn and I have donated to a number of charities again this year, but I felt it was important to direct some funds to the Conservancy for a number of reasons - which I will attempt to describe and hopefully convince you as well.

First, for those who know that the Evergreen open source integrated library system is a member project of the Conservancy and the the project on which I invest much of my professional and person time, an obvious question might be: "Why didn't you just donate to Evergreen?". Donating to Evergreen does result in a small percentage of those funds being directed to the Conservancy. Currently, Evergreen directs 5% of its income to the Conservancy, but I feel that even with $20,000 passing through the project's hands for the purposes of the 2012 Evergreen conference, that $1,000 that goes to the Conservancy is far below the value our project has received in return in the form of Conservancy services.

One of those services is the provision of a trusted third-party home for project assets such as the aforementioned finances, but also including domain names, trademarks, logos, and (if desired) copyright. While distributed ownership of these assets is not a problem for projects when everything is going fine, personal disputes, a change of business strategy, or new ownership of a contributing company can lead to severe difficulties for a project. Evergreen's sister project, Koha, found itself forced to change its domain name and fight trademark battles over its very name when one company adopted an aggressive business strategy.

Another service from which Evergreen has thus far derived great benefit is access to legal counsel familiar with software freedom issues. In September the Conservancy added Tony Sebro as General Counsel to offer basic legal assistance to its member projects. The Conservancy was most recently involved in a discussion about Evergreen documentation licensing that evolved from an unfortunately adversarial position to, shortly after the Conservancy became involved, a mutually satisfactory agreement. I believe this result was due not only to Conservancy's legal expertise and familiarity with the specific licenses in question and the general mechanism of granting licenses, but also with their ability to understand the goals of the project and its participants in helping to guide all parties to their desired goals.

The Conservancy also has a wealth of experience to draw upon to offer guidance expertise on many matters that free software projects have in common, but which each project tends to rediscover on its own. For example, the Evergreen project has been able to run conferences on an annual basis for the past three years, but has historically relied on Equinox's willingess to assume the financial risks when signing venue contracts. This year, due to the positive results of the previous conferences, the Conservancy was able to provide the deposit for the Evergreen 2012 conference in Indiana. While personally I deeply appreciate the role that Equinox has played in helping to build such a core part of our community experience, it is an important step for our project that the Conservancy be able to assume this role.

In addition, the Conservancy's experience with various conference management packages and the payment fees associated with online financial services such as Google Checkout and PayPal provided some important guidance early on in the Evergreen conference 2012 planning process. That advice probably paid for itself!

I expect that the Evergreen project will continue to benefit from our membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy as we work towards a mechanism for electing members of the Evergreen Oversight Board and continue growing and evolving the project. The $1,000 or so that the Conservancy has earned as a result of the 5% of revenue that Evergreen directs its way is far below the value that we have derived from our relationship thus far, and that is why I have chosen to donate to the Conservancy again this year.

P.S. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, donations to the Conservancy are tax-deductible for American citizens. As a Canadian, this particular benefit does not apply to me - however, the rest of the benefits that the Conservancy provides to free software projects are international in scope and deserve to be supported.

The block of rooms set aside in the Hyatt Regency – Indianapolis for the 2012 EG Conference on Tuesday, April 24 is filling up fast! If you are planning on coming in on the Tuesday evening before the conference starts, and the Hyatt Regency is booked up, we encourage you to book rooms for Wednesday, April 25 through Friday, April 27 in the Hyatt Regency at the EG Conference rate of $125 per night.

The adjoining Westin Hotel has guest rooms available on Tuesday, April 24 at $139 per night. If you plan to come in on Tuesday evening, transportation to and from the Westin Hotel to the Hyatt Regency will be provided throughout the day on Wednesday. Volunteers will be on hand to assist attendees with moving from the Westin Hotel to the Hyatt Regency on Wednesday, April 25.

Reserve a room at the Westin Hotel.
Phone: (317) 262-8100

2012 EG Conference – Keynote speakers

I am delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the 2012 Evergreen International Conference!

Jono Bacon, Community Manager at Ubuntu, will kick off the conference on Thursday by sharing his passion for open source and his experience in working with open source communities worldwide! Being deeply involved and committed to the world of open source, Bacon will discuss the opportunity behind engaging the open source community. He will highlight the core areas of growing a community and will illustrate his discussion by using Ubuntu as an example and describe how Ubuntu has grown the global Ubuntu community. More about Jono

Galadriel Chilton, Electronic Resources Manager at the University of Connecticut and Indiana University graduate, will entertain and energize attendees on Friday by illustrating how important open source projects are to libraries through a fun and engaging comparison of libraries (as a habitat) and librarians/library staff (as a species) to an evolutionary biologist’s study of non-human animal survival. Through examples and stories, she will describe how survival of the fittest through competition is a misconception and that survival through cooperation leads to not only surviving, but thriving, and as some evolutionary biologists suggest, morality. Further, she will look at how integral – especially during times of economic collapse and deep budget cuts – cooperation is for libraries not just to survive but to evolve and how/why it is imperative that this cooperation move beyond sharing collections into the continued development of our tools and infrastructure such as open source systems like Evergreen. More about Galadriel

More information on each presenter is available at our blog.

Staff Training documents website update

You will notice that the Staff Training Documents website has been reorganized to be more intuitive. It is organized by module: Circulation, Cataloging, Local Admin, Reports.

Circulation committee minutes

Circulation Committee minutes from September 20, 2011 were improved and approved at the Circulation Committee meeting on November 10, 2011.

OPAC committee minutes

OPAC Committee minutes from August 25, 2011 were approved at the OPAC Committee meeting on October 27, 2011.

Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative (MassLNC) & Equinox Software, Inc. (Equinox) are excited to announce a new development project for the Evergreen Open Source ILS.  This project is the result of an RFP issued by MassLNC in August 2011.  The parties anticipate the coding will be ready for testing by the end of April, 2012.  MassLNC is sponsoring the project and Equinox developers will be spearheading the work.

Some of the highlights include:

• enhancements to the open-ils.pcrud service to enable fleshing, include fleshed objects, and to make it respond to requests faster

• the creation of a generalized API to ultimately facilitate the simplification of existing UIs and provide for new UIs based on simple, reusable components

• support for applying and saving distinct sets of columns for any individual screen using the column picker, specifically including the holds view in the patron holds screen, the title holds screen, the browse holds shelf screen, and the pull list for holds request screen

• enhancements to the patron search and holdings maintenance with the addition of support for double-click behavior

• enhanced navigation of Acquisitions providers and fund lists so that users will be viewing/retrieving funds and providers based on their permissions and will be able to filter on fields in the grid

• the ability to save distinct receipt templates for an individual screen

• list interfaces will supply a row-number column, useful for scanning a long list without losing one’s place

• the addition of a customizable toolbar per given user

• enhancements to the catalog bib record display, checkout, the Vandelay interfaces for importing records, and purchase order interfaces to support real-time display of updated data without having to manually reload

• enhancements to the interfaces using column pickers to enable sorting by multiple columns

• the addition of an easy return to search results from MARC record view

• the addition of a new tab button in the Staff Client (beyond the existing hot-key and file menu options for doing this)

• Org Units will be able to hide various fields in the copy editor based on local policy

• enhanced record matching and overlay in Acquisitions to provide an automated method for matching incoming acquisitions records to existing catalog records

• flexible scoped searches of the catalog based on pre-defined groups of copy locations both at the owning library and consortial level

• more flexibility as it pertains to library selector display and OPAC-visibility, including the option of hiding an org unit but not its descendants

• the last date of patron authentication will be stored, visible and reportable

• and finally, staff will be able to configure the holds pull list.

For this project, project managers are Kathy Lussier, MassLNC, and Suzannah Lipscomb, Equinox.

About MassLNC

The Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative is a collaborative project among three Massachusetts library consortia – C/W MARS, MVLC and NOBLE  – to implement and jointly develop an open-source Integrated Library System. The cooperative is moving forward with development of Evergreen. This project is funded with a Library Services and Technology Act grant from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners and by participating libraries.

About Evergreen

Evergreen is a robust, open-source integrated library system best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia. However, it has also proven equally successful scaled down for even the smallest libraries. Since its debut in September 2006, the software has sustained the 280-plus libraries of the Georgia PINES consortium. Evergreen has earned acclaim and praise from users worldwide, including a Technology Collaboration Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evergreen now supports over 1,000 libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen’s rapidly expanding community includes libraries across 4 countries including 31 U.S. states and 8 Canadian provinces.

For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

About Equinox Software, Inc.

Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who provide services for Evergreen and Koha. These services include software development, consulting, training, legacy data migration, 24×7 technical support, and system hosting. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding open source community.

For more information on Equinox Software, please visit http://www.esilibrary.com.

Evergreen and Koha are open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

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Upgrade to 2.1

Evergreen Indiana libraries were upgraded to version 2.1.1 on the weekend of December 9-11, 2011. Preceding the upgrade, all servers had their Debian operating systems upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze. Likewise, all PostgreSQL database servers (production, reports) were upgraded to version 9.1. These upgrades were put in place to take advantage of the latest functional improvements and security features of their respective software platforms. The installation of the Evergreen 2.1.1 software completed early Sunday morning and was tested by Adams Library System and Morgan County Public Library with the remainder of the consortium coming live Monday morning, December 12.

So far, the upgrade looks to have gone as well as expected. The Evergreen Indiana IT team are finding minor bugs as they are reported. Further, returns of searches and reports are likely to be a little slower than normal through Wednesday as the replication of data from the production server to the reports server completes.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation and please continue to report issues through the helpdesk via either the staff client or your browser:

http://help.evergreen.lib.in.us/helpspot/index.php

2012 Evergreen International Conference

We are accepting program proposals for the Evergreen International Conference until December 16! Some areas that the program committee felt should be better represented in the program include inventory, cataloging, and holds. If you are interested in submitting a proposal, please fill out an application and turn it into the Evergreen Indiana Coordinator by December 16! What better opportunity to share our knowledge with the international community!

2012 EG International Conference Program Proposal

Advanced Cataloging training

There are two Advanced Cataloging classes scheduled for the first quarter of 2012! Libraries without a Cat1 on staff and libraries new to the consortium should consider attending.

January 18, 2012 Online Webinar

February 16, 2012 at Harford City Public Library

Blue cards

Orders for blue cards have been finalized. Libraries may not receive them before January 1, 2012 but should receive them soon after. Libraries should plan on implementing them whenever they receive the blue cards.

Executive Committee meeting

The Executive Committee minutes from the October 11, 2011 were improved and approved at the Executive Committee meeting on December 13, 2011.

Beginning on Friday, December 9 until Sunday, December 11, Evergreen Indiana libraries should run in offline mode while the upgrade to 2.1 is complete.

Don’t forget that there are tutorials available for functioning in offline mode:

Standalone mode tutorial

Uploading offline transactions

If you have questions about functioning in offline mode, please contact the Evergreen Indiana Coordinator sborger@library.in.gov or your regional coordinator.

If you have questions about functioning in offline mode that are technical in nature (i.e. Issues creating a backup file each night), please put in a helpdesk ticket.

Downloading the 2.1 Staff Client

In advance of the Evergreen 2.1 upgrade, which will begin Friday, December 9th, 2011 at 8 AM, we’ve made available Evergreen Staff Client installers for various operating systems. Please choose the link below that applies to your operating system.

The new staff client can be installed alongside the current 2.0.4 client. Downloading the 2.1 staff client will create a new directory (Evergreen Staff Client 2.1) and a new icon with the “Evergreen Staff Client 2.1” label. Please continue to use Evergreen 2.0.4 offline through close of business Sunday, or until after the upgrade is finished.

FYI, until the Evergreen 2.1 upgrade has been completed on Monday, December 12th, 2011, opening the Staff Client 2.1 will result in a message that says “This server does not support your version of the staff client…”. Go ahead and click “Cancel” and then exit Evergreen 2.1 and run your current version.
As a refresher, we’ve provided documentation on installing the staff client.

Additionally, you are welcome to contact the helpdesk with any questions regarding the staff client installation.

Windows XP/Vista/7

Macintosh (unsupported)

Linux Source Code (unsupported)

Food for Fines

Several libraries have contacted me with questions regarding their local Food for Fines holiday program. As such, I have consulted with the Indiana State Library Legal Consultant and the State Board of Accounts to find out their requirements if a library should choose to engage in such as program locally. Because there is no prohibition of the practice of waiving fines in the State Library Code, the decision on whether or not to implement a Food for Fines program comes down to a legal question that needs to be addressed locally by the library board and the city/town attorney.

NOTE: If libraries will be engaging in a Food for Fines program, they must have a written local policy adopted by the Library Board along with a written opinion from the city/town attorney. Both of these documents are required by SBoA to implement Food for Fines program without receiving an audit exception.
You may use either the Forgive or Goods Billing option to forgive fines and fees in a patron’s account.

Remember, you may only forgive those fines and fees to which your library is owed. Overdue fines are owed to the circulating library. Lost and damaged fines are owed to the owning library.

Tips for Using Offline Mode

We have recommend that libraries only check-out during offline mode and do not check-in, register patrons, or check-out holds to patrons. Staff members shouldn’t check-in items using offline mode or check-out holds to patrons because it is best when using offline mode to only check-out items with a status of “Available.” Because transits won’t be checked in from December 9-11, those items will still have a status of “In-transit” and checking items out with a status of “In-transit” causes issues when uploading the offline transactions. If the transaction can’t be uploaded, staff need to go in and manually re-create the transaction so you will want to avoid needing to do that since it is difficult to track down and manually re-create a transaction for an item that may be circulating outside the library.

If you receive transits on Thursday and are able to check them in before going onto offline mode on Friday, you may check those items out to patrons. However, if you have transits that you aren’t able to check-in before going to offline mode, staff members shouldn’t check those items out to a patron.

Ballot to change by-laws

Ballots to change the by-laws were sent to all Evergreen Indiana libraries. Just a reminder that you must turn them in by the next Executive Committee meeting on December 13, 2011. If you have misplaced the original and need another copy, the Ballot to Change the By-Laws is available here. Please fill it out and return it to the Evergreen Indiana Coordinator at the Indiana State Library.

A big thank you to those companies who are supporting the Evergreen conference by sponsoring and exhibiting! There are still many exciting opportunities left! Please fill out a sponsorship application today!

Platinum sponsorship

Equinox Software, Inc.

Unique Management Services

Gold sponsorship

Lyrasis

Bibliotheca – ITG

Conference tote bags

Envisionware

Conference programs

Equinox Software, Inc.

Exhibitors

Baker and Taylor

Evergreen 2.1 Staff Client download and instructions

In advance of the Evergreen 2.1 upgrade, which will begin Friday, December 9th, 2011 at 8AM, we’ve made available Evergreen Staff Client installers for various operating systems. Please choose the link below that applies to your operating system.

The new staff client can be installed alongside the current 2.0.4 client. Downloading the 2.1 staff client will create a new directory (Evergreen Staff Client 2.1) and a new icon with the “Evergreen Staff Client 2.1” label. Please continue to use Evergreen 2.0.4 offline through close of business Sunday, or until after the upgrade is finished.

FYI, until the Evergreen 2.1 upgrade has been completed on Monday, December 12th, 2011, opening the Staff Client 2.1 will result in a message that says “This server does not support your version of the staff client…”. Go ahead and click “Cancel” and then exit Evergreen 2.1 and run your current version.

As a refresher, we’ve provided documentation on installing the staff client. This is available from: Installing the staff client.

Additionally, you are welcome to contact the helpdesk with any questions regarding the staff client installation.

Windows XP/Vista/7

Macintosh (unsupported)

Linux Source Code (unsupported)

Newton County Public Library transits

Transit slips for Newton County Public Library (NWCPL) may display any of the following shortnames:

Main Library – Lake Village Memorial Township: LVMTL
Branch Library – Roselawn Library: RLL
Branch Library – Morocco Community Library: MCL

InfoExpress transits should be directed to the main branch and will be sent to different branches from there.

Blue card proofs and orders

Proofs for blue library cards were emailed to each library. Not receiving a blue library card proof indicates that your library reported no reciprocal borrowers, students, or computer users on your 2010 annual report and you have not contacted me to update the number. If you do not receive a proof, you will not receive an order of blue cards in this order. However, you can always place an order for blue cards in the future.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PROOFS: Please print out the proofs, open up Microsoft Word or Notepad and scan the barcodes. Please also pay close attention to the information on the library card proofs. If the proofs scan okay and the information is acceptable, do not email the proofs back to the number listed on the proofs. Instead, let me know by Friday, December 2 and I will finalize your order. We need to get orders finalized ASAP in order to get library cards delivered and ready to use by January 1.

Future orders for blue cards will be handled exactly like orders for green library cards. I will send out an email with links to three different surveys: a survey for blue library cards, a survey for green library cards and a survey for item barcodes. You will complete the survey for whichever item you need to order and receive proofs that you will need to approve.

OPAC enhancements to the software in 2.1

• Spell-checking suggestions are now case-insensitive, to avoid generating terms which would yield the same result set. Since we have disabled the search suggestions (Did you mean ?) in the current OPAC, we will test this functionality on the test server and the OPAC committee will decide whether the suggestions are improved enough with this added functionality to re-instate them.
• Patrons are guided to select a specific part if they are placing a hold on a bibliographic record that has parts assigned to its copies.
• Added search functionality for e-Resources (856 subfield 9).
• Search results will automatically update if there are changes to a bibliographic record while a patron is browsing their results.

Signs for the upgrade

In order to prepare staff and patrons for the upgrade December 9-11, we have created flyers informing patrons and staff members about the limitations of library service during the upgrade. They are available on the Member Resources website in PDF and publisher versions if you want to make edits.

Upgrade to 2.1 – Patron
Upgrade to 2.1 – Staff

eReader Policies

The eIndiana Digital OverDrive Committee has had many inquiries from eIndiana Digital Consortium members regarding local library or consortium-wide policy on loaning eReaders. Evergreen Indiana and eIndiana Digital Consortium do not have a consortium-wide eReader policy but we would like to collect samples of policies each individual library has about loaning eReaders. The committee has decided to post them at the URL below so that interested eIndiana Digital Consortium and Evergreen Indiana members may consult them for ideas before establishing their own local policies. Please send sample policies to the Evergreen Indiana Coordinator, sborger@library.in.gov.

Member Resources

Welcome Newton County Public Library!

Newton County Public Library successfully migrated to Evergreen Indiana on Tuesday, November 22, 2011. Please join me in welcoming them!

Serving a population of 9,243, Newton County Public Library has three branches: Lake Village Memorial Township Library (Main branch, Lake Village, IN), Morocco Community Library (Morocco, IN), Roselawn Library (Roselawn, IN).

Evergreen Indiana now serves a population of 862,333 and includes 96 libraries (93 public libraries, 2 school libraries and 1 special library).

Circulation enhancements to the software in 2.1

• Transfer selected holds to a different title: It is now possible to select multiple holds on a given title and transfer them to a different title. Example: Your library acquires another copy of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, but as it is a new edition it must be cataloged as a new bibliographic record; however, you would like to spread out some of the holds queue from your current edition to the new edition.

• Mark patron as exempt from billing collections.

• Hold-driven recalls: It is now possible to define a loan period threshold (such as 60 days) so that if a hold is placed on an item with a loan period beyond that threshold, the system will automatically shorten the loan period to a specified value; change the fine rules; and send email notification to the person who currently has the item checked-out saying “A hold has been placed on this item, get it back before <new_due_date>“.

• Grace periods are now stored in the database and set via circulation rules, rather than passed into the fine generation code, and can thus differ between different rules. They are also no longer based on a number of fine intervals, but are instead defined by their own specific interval. This can eliminate problems with closed date interpretation during grace periods.

The development team has announced an End of Life for the 1.6 release series of Evergreen. The series is no longer maintained and will not receive any updates effective 2011-11-04.

It is advised that installations running a 1.6 version of Evergreen upgrade to the 2.0 or 2.1 series. To get the latest release and view upgrade instructions please visit http://evergreen-ils.org/downloads.php

Evergreen 2.1.1 and 2.2-alpha1 were released on November 17, 2011.

Evergreen 2.1.1 represents the first major bug fix release of the 2.1 series.  You can view the full changelog here.

Evergreen 2.2-alpha1 is the first cut of the next 2.2 series.  Come be among the first to help test new features and functionality.  This release includes many new features, including the Template Toolkit OPAC (or Tpac, for short).  As always, please report any new bugs to Launchpad.

Enhancements to the software in 2.1

Cataloging module

• Unified copy / call number editor: The default holdings maintenance interface now enables catalogers to edit copies and call numbers on a single screen.

• Call number prefixes and suffixes: While previous releases of Evergreen supported the automatic prepending or appending of prefixes and suffixes to call numbers based on their shelving location, the functionality was limited primarily to printing spine labels. As of 2.1, you also have the option to assign prefixes or suffixes for individual call numbers; these will be displayed in the public catalog and other interfaces, but prefixes in particular do not affect shelf browsing, which is based entirely on the label.

• Bibliographic parts: This feature adds the ability to designate specific “part” roles for the items attached to a given bibliographic record, such that a user can place holds on a specific kind of item without limiting it to an individual item. For example, libraries may assign parts to each DVD in a season of a popular TV show; or to individual volumes of an encyclopedia. This feature also introduces “part holds”.

• Conjoined items: This feature adds the ability to associate a single barcode with multiple bibliographic records, so that the availability of those records is updated based on that copy. For example, libraries may make an electronic reader available for loan that is preloaded with 1000 electronic books; they can add 1000 bibliographic records to the library system and associate them all with a single barcode, so that when the electronic reader is signed out, the availability for all 1000 records changes to “Checked out”.

Further discussion about enhancements will be forthcoming in future Weekly Updates!

See you at ILF!

Registration is now available for the 2012 Evergreen International Conference! The early registration discount is available until January 1.

NOTE: Google Checkout is the preferred method of payment because they allow for a larger non-profit discount.

http://2012evergreenconference.eventbrite.com/

Register for the 2012 Evergreen International Conference!

Registration is now open for the 2012 Evergreen International Conference! By registering early, you receive a $20 discount. Early registration discount is available until January 1. NOTE: Google Checkout is the preferred method of payment because they allow for a larger non-profit discount.

It is expected that the Evergreen Indiana Annual Membership Meeting will be held in conjunction with this conference to maximize the time and expenses for Evergreen Indiana members. More information will follow in the coming weeks.

http://2012evergreenconference.eventbrite.com/

Enhancements to the software in 2.1

Staff Client enhancements

• After downloading this new staff client, it will update automatically in future upgrades! When it connects to the Evergreen server after upgrading to 2.1.0, staff clients will automatically check for updates. If there are updates, the software will automatically download the files that have been updated and replace those files in the existing staff client.

Further discussion about enhancements will be forthcoming in future Weekly Updates!

Ballot to change by-laws

Ballots to change the by-laws were sent to all Evergreen Indiana libraries. Just a reminder that you must turn them in by the next Executive Committee meeting on December 13, 2011. If you have misplaced the original and need another copy, the Ballot to Change the By-Laws is available here. Please fill it out and return it to the Evergreen Indiana Coordinator at the Indiana State Library.

Blue Cards

Orders for blue Evergreen Indiana patron cards have been placed. Libraries will receive proofs soon and will be given 48 hours to contact the Evergreen Indiana Coordinator to approve their proofs. Also, below you will find a flyer you can use to begin notifying your patrons and staff members of the change on January 1, 2012 when the consortium will begin using blue cards for reciprocal borrowers, students and computer users.

Blue Cards

Modified Catalog Freeze

Newton County Public Library will be migrating to Evergreen Indiana on November 22! There will be a Modified Catalog Freeze from Friday at 8am, November 18 to Tuesday at 8am, November 22. There can be no original cataloging in the system. Items can be added to existing bibliographic records but creation of new bibliographic records is prohibited.

Upgrading to 2.1

Upgrading software is a best practice which takes into account the latest and most effective security settings, increased functionality, and the most current version of the system. As such, we will be upgrading to Evergreen 2.1 beginning at 8am on Friday, December 9 until Sunday, December 11 at 8pm.

1) During the upgrade window, please run in standalone mode or checkout on paper until you are notified that the upgrade is complete via all four evergreen listservs. Remember: Do not check-in or register new patrons in the standalone mode.

2) Staff are encouraged to conduct a test-run of standalone mode during the weeks of November 7-11 or November 14-18 and ask questions of your Regional Coordinator and Evergreen Indiana Coordinator ahead of the software upgrade so that everyone is prepared to function effectively during the upgrade. Keep in mind that ISL will be closed November 8 and November 11. Review the following standalone mode tutorials with your staff:

Standalone Mode Tutorial (PDF)
Uploading Offline Transactions (Flash Version)

3) The 2.1.0 staff client will need to be downloaded sometime before the upgrade begins. So plan on downloading the new staff client before Thursday, December 8. The link to the current staff client will be provided on the listservs Monday, December 5. After a notice is posted to the listserv that the upgrade is complete, localadmins may begin registering workstations.

4) Please note that while the servers are down for the upgrade and libraries are operating in offline, the SIP connections (for OverDrive, PC Reservation, etc.) will also be down. We apologize for this inconvenience.

The upgrade will include enhancements to the staff client, circulation module, cataloging module and OPAC. I will discuss these enhancements in further detail in future Weekly Update entries!

Delete Patrons Functionality

The ability to delete patrons individually has been added to the staff client functionality as of today, courtesy of the Evergreen Indiana helpdesk. Please use the documents below to educate your staff on using the functionality. Remember that this is a localadmin ability and the localadmin can grant permissions to appropriate staff members.

Deleting Patrons Documentation (PDF)
Deleting Patrons Tutorial (Flash Video)

Blue cards

I will be finalizing blue Evergreen Indiana library card orders and submitting them on the morning of Friday, November 4. Libraries from which I still need patron library cards samples have been contacted. Please get those samples to me before Friday, November 4 or I may not be able to place an order on behalf of your library.

Evergreen Indiana Staff Training Documents

The Evergreen Indiana Staff Training Documents website has a new look! It has been reorganized to reflect staff workflow beginning with Installing Evergreen ILS to Day-to-Day Operations and Reporting. Introduce your staff members to this website because many questions about circulation can be answered in one of the tutorials!

Introduction to Acquisitions webinar

The Introduction to Acquisitions webinar is available at the URL below. If you would like to receive LEUs for watching it, please wait until a test is added to it.

Two Evergreen classes available in WebJunction

There are now two exciting and interactive classes on Evergreen functions in WebJunction!

Evergreen Administration: This course covers the administrative functions of Evergreen including Commonly Used Reports, Library Configuration Tools, Offline Transaction Management and Receipt Template Editor.

Evergreen Reports: This approximately one-hour course covers the Evergreen reports module including, how to run reports from an existing template, how to modify an existing template, and review of the output options.

Indiana Courses > Operating and Automation Systems > Evergreen Administration and Evergreen Reports

Boone County Payment Pilot

Lebanon, Thorntown, and Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Libraries will begin a cash and check payment pilot on November 1. As soon as the credit card payment functionality has been tested and bookkeeping documentation has been established, we will add the credit card payment functionality to the Boone County pilot. The cooperation of both of the Boone County libraries and Jackson County, Jennings County and Brownstown is very much appreciated as we work through these additional consortium features in order to bring the benefits to the entire consortium!

The 2012 Evergreen International Conference – Program Committee is soliciting program proposals for the 2012 Conference. The committee has decided to offer four tracks this year and has decided to name them in honor of the host city, Indianapolis, home of the Indy 500 car race:

Spectator (General)
Team owner (Administrative)
Driver (End-User)
Pit crew (Technical)

TIPS FOR PROSPECTIVE PRESENTERS: Based on the results of the 2012 Prospective Attendee Survey sent out to the community in August, the committee has compiled suggestions for requested programs in each user track. See the list below. The suggestions are intended to give prospective presenters some inspiration in crafting their proposal.

Prospective presenters are encouraged to contact possible co-presenters and submit a proposal together. Presenters are also encouraged to submit proposals if they are interested in presenting a 5-minute lightening talk.

INSTRUCTIONS: If you are interested in presenting, please return this form to Shauna Borger, Evergreen Indiana Coordinator, with a session proposal of a maximum of 200 words. There is some flexibility with program duration but in general, presenters should plan on having a 45-minute presentation.

Application (PDF)
Application (Word document)

The deadline to submit a proposal is November 30, 2011.

Please contact Shauna Borger with any questions.

Shauna Borger
Indiana State Library
140 North Senate Avenue
Indianapolis, IN 46204
317-234-6536
sborger@library.in.gov

User Track: Spectator

Suggested Programs

• General information from larger consortia (MassLNC, KCLS, SITKA, Evergreen Indiana)
• Introduction to Evergreen Interest Groups How to get involved with Evergreen Q&A – Little known facts about Evergreen

User Track: Team owner

Suggested Programs

• Policy best practices
• Consortium planning – benefits, costs, staff workflow, multi-type consortia, joint projects
• Promotion of Evergreen within the state
• Documentation-Circulation training manual
• Documentation-General Policy roundtables
• Evergreen International Governance Board-Understanding EG open source community and players/roles/responsibilities
• Teaching IT staff to do Tier 1 support Budgeting for development

User Track: Driver

Suggested Programs

• Cataloging – batch loading
• Cataloging – cataloging and acquisitions
• Cataloging – shortcuts
• Cataloging – RDA
• Cataloging – Creating templates
• Cataloging – Sharing cataloging resources
• Training – best practices
• Training – manuals, materials, online training
• Best practices – searching
• Best practices – training
• Best practices – circulation
• Best practices – transiting materials, ILL
• Holds – weighting, consortial settings, multiple branches
• OPAC – searching the catalog
• Circulation round table
• Circulation customizing receipts
• Reports – annual/monthly stats
• Course reserves
• Authority records
• Inventory

User Track: Pit crew

Suggested Programs

• Acquisitions
• Current and future development
• Influencing development
• Best practices – local admin/system admin
• Setting up permissions
• Best practices – maintenance/upgrades
• Database administration/library settings
• Reports – Creating Reports – SQL tips Reports – Circulation/Collection usage
• Apps and mobile browsers
• Development for specific functions – debit/credit card use
• Development for specific functions – patron billing Development for specific functions – DojoSFR development
• De-duplication
• Skin designs
• Action triggers and how to use them
• Customizing TT-OPAC
• OPAC – Configuring/Making it more user-friendly
• Discovering layers
• Screen displays
• APIs for third party tools
• Data migration
• Upgrading
• Self-checkout

Circulation Policy and Procedures

In order to remain flexible and provide clear instructions to all members of the consortium, the Circulation Committee suggested some circulation policy and procedure additions. The IT Committee also made recommendations regarding software functionality. The changes were presented to the Executive Committee and approved on October 11, 2011. Please be sure to examine both the policy and corresponding procedure as the procedure is a more in-depth explanation of the policy and will answer more questions. A summary of the changes is below:

CIRCULATION POLICY SUMMARY

Updated Circulation Policy

1) Table of contents added
2) List of definitions added
3) New policies:

o Page 2: [Beginning January 1, 2012,] reciprocal borrowers, students and computer users should be given a blue Evergreen Indiana card which indicates that their borrowing privileges are limited to the issuing library.

o Page 5: Lost Items When registering a patron, those staff members with the highest level of permissions at the local level have the ability to decide whether the patron can be considered for a third party collection service during the patron registration process.

4) Updated policies:

o Page 4: Purging of Inactive Patron Records Inactive patron accounts that do not reflect fines or fees, items checked out or claims returned activity will be marked inactive or deleted one (1) year from the date of being last used.

o Page 5: Recovering Lost Items and Refunding Payment No refund will be given to a patron for a “Lost” item for which a patron has paid. In addition, no fines/fees and third party collection fees will be refunded.

-The consortium-wide setting for voiding lost fines upon checking in a lost item has been set to false in order to bring the system in-line with the circulation policy. If a lost item is checked in, the lost fines associated with the item will NOT be deleted from the patron account. There have been several issues with patrons receiving a negative balance because staff have accepted payment for a lost item and then checked it in at a later date. The Circulation Policy and Procedures do not allow a refund on payments made to a lost item billing and the system was set up to override this policy. It was necessary to bring the system-side in line with the policy to prevent further confusion and system-created negative balances.

-If a lost item is checked in at the owning library, a dialog box will inform the staff member that the item status is lost. If the staff member continues checking in the lost item, the item status will change from lost to In Transit/Re-shelving/Available. Whereas all lost fines and fees would have previously been voided from the patron account responsible for the lost item, now the lost fees stay on the patron’s account. It is the owning library’s decision whether to uphold the fee on the patron’s account, forgive the fees associated with the lost item, and/or allow the patron to purchase another item to replace the lost item. This is a decision based on local policy.

-If a lost item is checked in at a circulating (non-owning) library, staff members will see a dialog box stating the item is lost. At this point, the staff at the circulating library should contact the owning library to find out what they should do.

CIRCULATION PROCEDURES SUMMARY

Updated Circulation Procedures

1) Table of contents added
2) List of definitions added
3) New procedures:

o Pages 4-5: Determining and Assigning the Patron Profile The following statement has been added to Reciprocal borrower, Student and Computer User patron definitions – Patrons assigned this profile should be given a blue Evergreen Indiana card to indicate that the blue Evergreen Indiana library card is valid only at the library issuing the library card.

-NOTE: Blue card usage will begin January 1, 2012.

o Page 6: Updating Expired Patron Accounts Staff members at all Evergreen Indiana libraries can renew expired Resident patron accounts if the patron’s ID matches the Evergreen Indiana account information and the patron account is in good standing. All other patron accounts (non-resident, reciprocal borrower, student) can only be renewed at the patron’s home library.

4) Updated procedures:

o Page 7: Purging of Inactive Patron Records Inactive patron accounts that do not reflect fines or fees, items checked out or claims returned activity will be purged one (1) year from the date of being last used. Member libraries are required to review patron records and mark records “inactive” or delete the patron’s account if expired or unused by the patron during the previous twelve (12) months. Those staff members with the highest level of permissions in the local library system have the ability to delete patrons when the home library of the patron matches the local library of the staff member.

-NOTE: The delete patron functionality will be available on November 1, 2011.

o Page 11: Lost Items When registering a patron, those staff members with the highest level of permissions at the local level have the ability to decide whether the patron can be considered for a third party collection service during the patron registration process. These staff members also have the ability to grant the permission to others in their library system.

-NOTE: The functionality will be available with the system upgrade to Evergreen 2.1. Date: TBD

o Page 11: Claims Returned The circulating library must contact the owning library of the item to inform them that a patron claimed to return the item. The circulating library cannot mark an item they do not own as claims returned.

Blue Evergreen Indiana library cards

As you will note above, the Evergreen Indiana Executive Committee voted to require blue cards for reciprocal borrowers, students and computer users since all three users have limited access to materials and may not use the card to borrow materials from other Evergreen Indiana libraries. As such I have updated the total number of blue cards that will be ordered for each library. Please take a look and let me know if your total has changed at all.

RBs, Students and Computer Users for blue cards

Also, in order to place the order for blue cards, I will need a sample library card from every Evergreen Indiana library. Those libraries from which I need a sample have already been notified. If you haven’t been contacted that means I already have a sample library card from your library and you do not need to submit a sample to me at this time.

Ballots

Soon each library will be receiving a ballot in the mail to change a statement in the by-laws. The by-laws currently state that the annual membership meeting will occur in May. We would like to change this to Spring in order to be more flexible about the month in which Evergreen Indiana plans the annual membership meeting. Also, many of our members are already aware that Evergreen Indiana is hosting the 2012 Evergreen International Conference from April 25-28, 2012. As such, it will be most cost effective for our members to attend this conference instead of both the international conference and the annual membership meeting.

Instructions: We will be mailing ballots to each library within the next two weeks. It is the responsibility of the director of the member library or his/her designee to cast the vote. The by-laws require a 2/3 majority vote in order to make the change.

By-laws

Some important dates for 2012

We are drawing near to the end of 2011 and I would like to remind the consortium about some important upcoming dates concerning many different programs and policies that will be implemented in 2012.

Blue library cards

Distributing blue Evergreen Indiana library cards to patrons will begin January 1, 2012. Soon, I will be finalizing orders on blue library cards and distributing proofs for each library to approve.

Payment program

Based on how the Boone County credit card pilot in November goes, the payment program will be extended to the consortium tentatively in January 2012. We will share the documentation that has been approved by the State Board of Accounts with each library before the consortium-wide implementation of the payment program.

Acquisitions module

As many of you know, the acquisitions pilot is an ongoing pilot that we may be able to extend to the consortium in the near future. There are no dates set for consortium-wide implementation but we continue to set up vendors, create documentation, and work with our pilot libraries to implement the acquisitions module.

New members

New members to Evergreen Indiana usually join quarterly. Our first group of libraries will go live in April 2012.

2012 Evergreen International Conference

The 2012 Evergreen International Conference will be held April 25-28, 2012. The international conference is planned to take the place of our annual meeting in order for our EI community to make the most efficient use of their limited time and resources.

UPDATE: 2011-10-06

Unfortunately, we discovered a problem with the brute force fix that could lead to incorrect authentication failures. The problem was most evident in multi-brick environments, but could occur in any environment with more than one open-ils.auth child processing authentication requests. Consequently, we have released updated versions of the security fix releases, along with an updated version of the 2.1.0 release; the only difference in these tarballs is an updated version of oils_auth.c. The names of the releases are as follows and can be downloaded from the Evergreen downloads page as usual:

• 2.1.0a
• 2.0.10a
• 1.6.1.9a

Sites that have not yet upgraded to the announced security release are advised to upgrade to the “a” version of the release. Sites that have upgraded to the announced security release are advised to simply replace the oils_auth.so shared library, as described in the comment to this post by Dan Scott, using the “a” version of the release. The staff clients provided for the security release will continue to work with the fixed “a” version of the release.

Original security release announcement

Today, the Evergreen development team released Evergreen 2.0.10 and 1.6.1.9 – available from the downloads page -to address several security vulnerabilities and a handful of bug fixes. This post discusses the security vulnerabilities. If you are running Evergreen in production today, we encourage you to upgrade your Evergreen system to 1.6.1.9 or 2.0.10 as soon as possible.

Summary of issues fixed in 2.0.10 and 1.6.1.9

These releases include some protection against brute force guessing of weak passwords, such as four digit pins.

A running count of incorrect login attempts for a given user is maintained. After ten incorrect attempts, all attempts to login as that user will fail until the counter resets. By default, the counter resets after 90 seconds. Both the counter and the number of incorrect passwords are configurable. This change requires no client-side changes.

This release also includes a change which prevents the re-use of an authentication seed to obtain more than one authentication token. This change required a single client-side change where the staff client was inadvertently re-using a seed legitimately.

Additional issues fixed in 2.0.10

On the patron visible front there is a change to the OPAC to require that the user’s current password be provided before changes to username or email address can be made. This prevents someone who gains access to another user’s account, say due to a public or otherwise shared computer, from changing the email address and requesting a password reset. The username change requiring the user’s password helps keep someone from being “locked out” of their account because someone changed their username without the user knowing.

To continue on the password related fixes there is the removal of the password from the login screen after it is no longer needed. This prevents malicious code injected into the staff client from obtaining the password by pulling it out of the password entry box in plain text. As this code is contained 100% within the local staff client a client update is required.

Technical details: fixes in 2.0.10 and 1.6.1.9

The most significant vulnerability that has been addressed was the ability to brute force passwords. The authentication functions, available to the world via HTTP/HTTPS, have been given protection against repeated attempts to guess passwords. After a configurable number of failed login attempts each within a configurable time span from the previous failed attempt the system will treat all attempts as failures, even if they are otherwise valid and correct. The default is 10 attempts with 90 seconds between attempts. The system will unlock after the time between attempts has expired. This can be installed server-side without any client side changes.

Related to brute forcing of passwords is password replay attempts. If you can grab the auth.complete call within the auth seed’s validity period you can re-send the auth.complete data and get a new authtoken, without needing to know the seed or password. To protect against this the auth seeds are rendered invalid after a single use (successful or not). This requires a single client side change to cover the case where the client thinks it has a registered workstation and the server disagrees. In that case the client was, in effect, performing a replay attack as part of normal operations.

Instructions on searching the catalog before importing a new record

The goal in running the de-duping script was to streamline the catalog. We can also accomplish this by making sure that all staff members are thoroughly searching the catalog before importing a new record. This will allow us to avoid adding more duplicate bibliographic records that will need to be merged later.

Before importing a new record into the database, make sure you’ve searched the catalog for the record to which you are attaching holdings. Some tips from the cataloging manual chapter 2 on searching the database are below:

1. Advanced Search > Quick Search (left-hand column) > Search Library (middle column below search input) > Choose to search Everywhere

o Quick Search will allow you to search the catalog by ISBN, ISSN, Call Number, LCCN, TCN, or Item Barcode.
o Selecting the Search Library allows you to broaden or narrow your search results.

TIP: If you are searching for a specific bibliographic record on which to attach holdings it is a good idea to choose to search Everywhere. This way, your search results will include bibliographic records at every library.

2. Search Input > Select one of the following: Keyword, Title, Author, Subject, Series

o If you get zero results from the Advanced Search, conduct a Title and/or Author search for the bibliographic record.

http://www.in.gov/library/files/Cataloging_Training_Manual_Chapter2.pdf

Lost, damaged and claims returned items

According to Circulation Procedures, lost, damaged and claims returned items should be marked as such by the Owning library. If an item transits to your library and is checked out by one of your patrons, you are the Circulating library. At that point, if an item is lost, claimed returned or damaged, it is your responsibility to contact the Owning Library and notify them of the issue. The Owning Library should be the library to mark an item lost, damaged, or claimed returns and collect the resulting fines.

http://www.in.gov/library/files/Evergreen_Indiana_Circulation_Procedures_20110426.pdf

Barcode orders

The Indiana State Library will be placing an order on behalf of Evergreen Indiana libraries that have filled out the item and patron barcode surveys. If you are interested in ordering more sheets of item barcodes and patron library cards, please fill out the appropriate survey below. I will finalize orders on Friday, October 14 so please get your orders in before then.

Item barcodes

Patron library cards

2012 Evergreen International Conference websites

Follow planning for the 2012 Evergreen International Conference on our Twitter and Facebook pages!

Twitter

@eg12conf
#eg12conf

Facebook

Equinox is hitting the road this fall!  If you’re attending a conference that we’re going to, come to our booth to chat.  We’ll be there to talk with you about open source systems for libraries or anything else you want to talk about.  (Library cats?  Open source systems for library cats?  The possibilities are endless!)

If you’re in the New England area between October 2nd and 4th, come see us at the New England Library Association and Vermont Library Association 2011 Joint Conference, in booth 504:

If you find yourself in Hickory, North Carolina between October 4th and 7th, stop by our booth at the end of row 2 (booths 2 and 29 — on the left as you walk in) at the North Carolina Library Association 59th Biennial Conference.

Right here at home, we’ll be at the Georgia COMO XXIII Conference, booth 316, from October 5th through the 7th.

October is a busy month for us, as we’ll be in booth 8 at the South Carolina Library Association Annual Conference 2011 from October 19th to the 21st.

Wrapping up the year, Equinox will be in booth 722 beginning the 19th and ending the 21st of November at the 2011 California Library Association and California School Library Association Annual Conference & Exposition.

We have a busy conference schedule ahead and look forward to the opportunity to meet you out and about!

Add to:

Welcome Dublin Public Library!

Dublin Public Library in Wayne County, Indiana successfully migrated to Evergreen Indiana on Tuesday, September 27, 2011. Please join me in welcoming them!

Patron accounts from a new Evergreen Indiana library

Just a reminder that all the patron accounts from new libraries joining the consortium need to be re-assessed so that they have the correct level of borrowing permissions, especially by those libraries physically close to the newly migrated Evergreen Indiana library as they may have patrons in common.

Circulation tip You can limit a patron search in the Limit results to patron in in the Patron Search field. Get in the habit of setting this limiter to Everywhere so that you can be sure to open the correct account and will recognize any patron duplicate accounts.

What should all Evergreen Indiana libraries do to ensure accurate patron accounts and borrowing privileges? Be aware of your library’s reciprocal borrower contract/agreements and whether you have one with a newly migrated Evergreen Indiana library. The new EI library may be bringing duplicate patron records with different borrowing privileges into the EI patron database. Your responsibility as a member library is to recognize that a new library has migrated to Evergreen Indiana and be informed about your library’s relationship with the new library. Circulation staff at your library will ask for the patron’s Evergreen Indiana card, pull up their account, assess whether the patron is a reciprocal borrower at your library with residence in the new library’s district, and if they are notify them that they will need to go to the new EI library in order to receive their Evergreen Indiana resident card.

What should the new Evergreen Indiana library do to ensure accurate patron accounts and borrowing privileges? If a patron had an account with the new library before migration, the new library will look up their account, ask for ID and proof of residency (if ID isn’t current), update patron account (if necessary), and assess what level of borrowing privileges the patron will receive. If a patron had an Evergreen Indiana reciprocal borrower card with a Evergreen Indiana library but they are a resident in the newly migrated Evergreen Indiana library’s district, staff at the new library will pull up their account, ask for an ID and proof of residency (if ID isn’t current), update the patron account, and assign appropriate borrowing privileges. NOTE: In the case described in the previous sentence, the patron would receive a resident card with the new Evergreen Indiana library.

Merging patrons If you do find that there are patron duplicates in the patron database that need to be merged, compile those duplicates in the Merging Patrons excel spreadsheet and follow the instructions in the Merging Patrons instructions.

Catalog freeze

There was a catalog freeze to accommodate the new library joining the consortium this past weekend. However, it was discovered that there were new bibliographic records added during that time. Just a reminder that editing or adding new bibliographic records during a catalog freeze is not recommended because changes to bibliographic records are not guaranteed to be saved during that time. Items can be added to existing bibliographic records but creation of new bibliographic records is prohibited. Announcements are made far enough in advance to the consortium so that Evergreen Indiana cataloging staff can plan for the catalog freeze and will not need to revisit their work.

New member joining!

Dublin Public Library in Wayne County, Indiana will be migrating to Evergreen Indiana on Tuesday, September 27, 2011. Dublin Public Library serves a population of 697 which will bring the total Evergreen Indiana libraries in the consortium to 95 libraries serving a total population of 821,103.

Catalog freeze

There will be a Modified Catalog Freeze from Friday at 8am, September 23 to Tuesday at 8am, September 27. There can be no original cataloging in the system. Items can be added to existing bibliographic records but creation of new bibliographic records is prohibited.

In the beginning there was sh. Richard Stallman looked upon it, and after a bout of dyspepsia with it all decided it sucked (it didn’t, really, but that has never stopped ingenuity before…). And then there was Brian Fox, who took the features of sh, csh, and ksh, slammed them all together and came upon bash. Richard looked upon it, and saw that it was good.

That’s how the whole Bourne Again Shell started.

In the event that you have never worked with a shell before, which is highly doubtful, but I have to cover it anyway, a shell is the piece of software that provides an interface for users of a particular operating system to interact with the kernel. In a very loose association, DOS could have been considered a shell in its time. Obviously, a shell needs configuration files to help point it in the direction in which it should go, to tell the system who you are, how you would like to deal with certain applications you may use, and in a login sense, tell the system what you are allowed to do and not to do. I understand many of the purists may be choking right now, but that is it in a nutshell.

This has to do with the configuration file for bash, found in your home directory as .bashrc. In an Evergreen instance, you will most likely not deal with bash as an independent user, but rather as the opensrf  user. That is okay. There are things you can do to make your life easier there as well. The .bashrc  makes things pretty well extensible, and if you are a systems administrator, this is a very useful thing.

Colours

One thing that doesn’t seem like much but in the end helps quite a bit is the colouring scheme for your prompt and how you view files with ls. A gentleman named David Crouse makes pretty good use of his .bashrc here. To show a good example of what I am referring to, I’d like to show you the opening screen of my own Evergreen instance pre-modification and without colour:

As you can see here, most of this is in white. I have a slight stock modification in my own config file that marks tar files red, and directories as blue. You may or may not have this. In other words, your default mileage may vary.

My prompt, as you can see, only shows the user I am (opensrf) and the machine I am on (jjones, for this instance). But I don’t like it, the white all blurs together and thoroughly messes with my ADHD. Remember that the OS and distro I am using is Debian Squeeze in this particular instance. You can find this by typing the following:

Now, I want to take a moment and point one thing out. If you examine the /etc directory, you will very likely find another set of bash configuration files. These are not the ones you want to play with unless you are intending to change the configuration files for the entire system. They are the system-wide default files that will be automatically extended to all users you ever add to the system you are working on. Now that you know that, let’s make certain that we are in our home directory (in my case, /home/opensrf), because for today’s purposes, we only want to play with our own stuff.

First thing we want to look at is the prompt. I’m going to show you quickly how to see this variable. In your bash configuration, you will see the prompt listed as PS1. There is quite a bit you can do with this prompt to gather information at a second’s notice and have a good bearing on your surroundings. Not to entirely recreate the wheel, an excellent tutorial on this is located at Nix Craft here. So let’s look at what is contained in our prompt:

So what do we know from this?  The \e  is an escape character, then the 0; to set this prompt without colour. The \u  is the username, @ gives us the ampersand in the prompt, and \h  tells us the hostname. That’s all good, but I’d like to know what time zone is local. Why is this important? In my line of work, I deal with servers that are in different time zones. It helps to know what time it is on the server I am working with, especially since some libraries are still open when everything is closed here in the Eastern Time Zone. It is also very, very useful to know what user I am in the system as. As a basic rule of thumb, if you are on an Evergreen server you want to ideally be in as opensrf. I also want to know what server I am on and the place in the directory structure I currently am.

First, I will set up this information without colour. You can test this out with the export command you will see in the screenshot. to make it permanent, write it into the .bashrc.

We will go into the actual colourisation of this in the next instalment. Until then, your homework, should you choose to accept it, it to look over Terminal Colour Highlights at Pixelbeat, and Color Bash Prompt at ArchWiki. Feel free to play with your own prompt, and find the set of information you feel is best for your and/or your users. If you want a heavy dose of crack, check this prompt.

Evergreen Indiana Phone Notification System Maintenance

On Monday, September 19th, 2011 at 9:30PM the Evergreen Indiana phone system will be temporarily taken offline for routine maintenance and to allow for its relocation for our new telephone company. We anticipate having the system back online by 9AM Tuesday, September 20th, 2011, therefore no calls should be missed. We’ll provide updates should our telephone company run into any complications which would set the online time back.

Catalog freeze

There will be a Modified Catalog Freeze from Friday at 8am, September 23 to Tuesday at 8am, September 27. There can be no original cataloging in the system. Items can be added to existing bibliographic records but creation of new bibliographic records is prohibited.

New administration training available in WebJunction

The Indiana State Library has created a self-paced tutorial for mastering the Evergreen Indiana Administration functions. If you need a refresher or want to make sure you’ve got a handle on all of the many and various administration functions, sign-up for this class. As new libraries join the consortium, we will continue to ask that they come to the Indiana State Library to learn face-to-face with an instructor in the Admin/Reports class, this online self-paced tutorial will be available and recommended soon after migration day.

Register here

Minimum and recommended system requirements

As suggested by the OPAC committee at their recent meeting on August 25, the minimum and recommended system requirements for running Evergreen Indiana appear below. If your library workstations do not meet the minimum or recommended requirements, you can experience symptoms such as slow performance on your staff clients or delayed search response time.

System hardware for each workstation running Evergreen staff client

Windows

Recommended Hardware
Windows XP or later
2GB RAM or greater
Dual Core CPU or greater
Broadband internet connection

Minimum Hardware
Windows XP or later
1GB RAM (at least 300MB RAM must be available to staff client under normal system load)
Pentium 4 or newer processor
200MB of hard drive space

Mac

Operating System Version
Mac OS X 10 or later

Minimum Hardware
Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 processor or greater 512 MB of RAM
200 MB hard drive space

Internet connection

Work with your provider to prioritize Evergreen traffic. ENA will prioritize Evergreen traffic for e-Rate members. If you are not an e-Rate participant you will need to contact your provider and work with them.

Blue reciprocal borrower cards

Many people verified their updated total reciprocal borrower number last week. Libraries will have until September 30 to give the Evergreen Indiana Coordinator an updated total reciprocal borrowers or the number on the attached PDF below will be ordered for them. Please see Weekly Update – September 7, 2011 for more information about blue reciprocal borrower cards.

EI reciprocal borrowers in annual report 2010