RE: Offline Circ Procedures

["William Gray" <wgray@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I ought to have mentioned in my own reply that we avoided most errors by not checking any items in (we had planned on 8 hours of downtime, but it ended up being closer to 4). Of course, this may not be a possibility for everyone...

One thing that makes uploading mutiple files at ince kind of tricky is that the file names that the system generates don't give any indication of where the files came from (no name, location, etc), so tracking down errors becomes more cumbersome.

-----Original Message-----
From: Todd Humble [mailto:THUMBLE@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 9:25 AM
To: IUG INNOPAC List
Subject: RE: Offline Circ Procedures


We were down for about six hours a couple of weeks ago and found the
following (2002 phase 3, offline141):

If you upload machines one by one the clocks of the cpu's can cause
errors ... We intentionally scanned things in and out practicing and
found that even though the PC's were synchronized to the network clock
that differences happened stating things checked in that were not
checked out... thus leaving items on patron records that they no longer
had...

On one of the Innovative pages they recommend everything be loaded at
one time so it can be chronologically sorted before processed.
(Differences in system clocks can still allow this to fail if staff are
checking in items).

To make things easier we had three terminals going, two for two week
loan items and one for our three day loan items (videos).  Since we knew
we would be back up in a couple hours we treated checkins like a weekend
pileup.

The hold rules when violated were reported as errors, but the hold queue
was not disrupted only a lucky patron got something before they should
have.

Dropping into DOS and setting the time on all PC's being used if clocks
are off is going to be our procedure if it were to be a long down time.
If doing checkins be sure to allow enough time to avoid errors.... If
you are down for an extended period you can really cause a catastrophe
if you are also checking in and load the workstations individually.
Things returned that were not checked out and thus errors that are not
errors because the system didn't know they were out (until you load that
station, which will report no errors).

We did not do hand written or offline checkouts for new card patrons as
we do not have the situation you described, but we do prosecute patrons
owing over $100.00 in fines and do not want the situation to be abused
by someone already in collections.


-----Original Message-----
From: Helwig, Ruth M. [mailto:helwi1rm@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 02, 2004 10:00 AM
To: IUG INNOPAC List
Subject: Offline Circ Procedures

Our system was down at the end of last week and we used Offline Circ for
the first time.  We would appreciate it if those of you who have used
Offline Circ could share your procedures or experiences on the following
issues.  Feel free to respond off list.

 

1)      If you have multiple circ points, do you coordinate uploading
the Offline Circ transactions so that each area can get a unique
error/informational report?

2)      The University distributes ID cards with barcodes from a
centralized location.  The library downloads a file of new students
twice a week from the Registrar's Office, but these records do not
contain a barcode.  The library does not know which barcode was issued
to an individual until they come to the library for the first time and
library staff updates the patron record.  Since Offline Circ only
accepts the barcode number there is no way of knowing whether or not a
patron barcode is active in the system.  On the Offline Circ error
report we found a few transactions that errored because the patron
barcode was not in the system.  If you have a similar situation, how do
you handle this?  If you automatically create a patron record for each
checkout, what happens if there was already a valid patron record in the
system?

 

 

 

Ruth Helwig <mailto:helwi1rm@xxxxxxxxxx> 

Library Systems

Central Michigan University

Park 305

300 E Preston St

Mount Pleasant MI 48859

Phone: (989) 774-2404

Fax: (989) 774-2179

 



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