Re: [IUG] Housekeeping in Create Lists : Enhancements

[Elizabeth Thomsen <et at noblenet dot org>]

We love Create Lists and we do a lot of training, support and 
encouragement to the staff of our 28 libraries in the use of this 
program.  We have 160 review files of varying sizes, the largest of 
which is 300,000.  We have lots of files that hold 1,000 records, since 
for many of the types of projects we do, that's more than adequate.  We 
use a script to empty unowned files every night, encourage people to 
empty their files as soon as possible, send out reminders, and empty by 
hand files that are more than 60 days old.  We encourage people to use 
the new option to filter the list of files to LIMITED rather than EMPTY. 
 This will show them files they already have, so they can reuse one of 
those rather than choose and empty file.

Here are my enhancement requests that relate to housekeeping in Create 
Lists:

Emptying Files:  Review file maintenance is really similar to 
circulation.  We want to be able to, in effect, "check out" a review 
file to a user for a certain length of time, and then have the system 
send them one or two reminders, and then empty the file.  For example, I 
think I would want all my users to get a friendly e-mail message at one 
week, a warning at three weeks, and have their file be emptied or 
"renewed" at one month.  To do this, we would need to have e-mail 
addresses as a separate "field" associated with a set of initials.

Number of Files: We've talked about buying more files or reconfiguring 
our files, breaking up some of the larger ones and ending up with more 
small files, and more files in total. However, I don't want to do that 
unless or until III makes it easier to choose review files from a list. 
 In several places where you have to do this (for example, to use one 
review file as the range for another), you have to choose from a list 
that doesn't show the file number, which is really annoying when you 
have 100 or more files in use and you have to look for your own.  (A 
handy trick for this is to click on the list to open it, and then hit 
the first letter of your file name.  This will jump you down to the 
first file that starts with that letter, and repeatedly hitting that 
letter will bounce you from file to file that starts with the letter b 
or whatever.)

Subset of Records: The other thing we wish III would do to reduce the 
number of files in use is to add the ability to list or export a subset 
of records.  In the character version of the program, the ability to 
list a subset makes it possible to create a list of your new items, or 
whatever, and then list different categories separately from the same 
files.  In Millennium, this kind of thing usually requires the user to 
make separate files.

--
Elizabeth Thomsen, Member Services Manager
NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange
Danvers MA 01923
et at noblenet dot org