PrairieCat Support

If anyone would still like to provide input on the planning that PrairieCat has been doing over the last few months, you are welcome to do that.  Please use the attached document with the five planning questions, and return it to judy [dot] hutchinson [at] railslibraries [dot] info (Judy Hutchinson) at RAILS no later than Friday, December 13, 2013. And, thank you to those who have already participated in one or more planning sessions - your input is appreciated!

Forwarding on behalf of Susan Weinmann-Stanfa, RAILS Resource Sharing Specialist:

Good news! RAILS has renewed its license for Public Web Browser and it is available for your library to use again at no cost to you.

Please visit the RAILS website at http://www.railslibraries.info/resource-sharing/discounts and look for “Free Public Web Browser Offer” and click on the document to the right. The document will give you information on this resource such as:

Congratulations to the East Dubuque Public Library (EDLY-13) who has gone live today as the newest fully participating member of PrairieCat!

East Dubuque PL had been a union listing member that has upgraded its level of PrairieCat membership to fully participating.

Congratulations to the community of East Dubuque and best of luck to the library staff!

For those PrairieCat members who have signed up to participate in the ERead Illinois ebook consortium, we have filled in the PrairieCat common information in the Axis 360 Setup Form below.  If you have additional questions, please contact Ron Chesko (ron [dot] chesko [at] railslibraries [dot] info or extension 4197) or Kacy Kelly (kacy [dot] kelly [at] railslibraries [dot] info or extension 4318) for more assistance.

We now have confirmation that we will be upgrading to Sierra version 1.1.3 next Wednesday, November 20.  Please inform all staff that we will once again be doing a staggered update of the Sierra client on workstations in the afternoon/early evening after the server upgrade has been completed in the morning. Stay tuned for more instructions next Wednesday, when it is your library's turn to upgrade workstations.

Any PrairieCat Fully Participating library can choose to use the ILL Module in Sierra to manage interlibrary loan requests for their patrons from outside of PrairieCat (i.e., requests on SHARE-Illinois, I-Share or OCLC).  The ILL Module allows staff to add a virtual record for the title requested, and then track the ILL through the order, receive and return process. This also means that the patron can see the status in My Account in Encore, will receive pickup notices and overdues, etc.

Congratulations to the Odell Public Library (MORG-7) [Morrison] who has gone live today as the newest fully participating member of PrairieCat!

Odell PL had been a union listing member that has upgraded its level of PrairieCat membership to fully participating.

Congratulations to the community of Morrison and best of luck to the library staff!

As you may have experienced, searching by local call numbers in our database is tricky.  The “trickiness” stems from trying to keep the different “Class Schemes” that were used in our legacy system when those are no longer necessary in Sierra. We have broached the call number searching topic with Innovative Interfaces management and our new implementation project manager and they are working on a plan.

The following values have been added to the Patron Code 4 dropdown. These will apply the next time you log into Sierra.

As a reminder- the PCode 4 is used with/assigned to Reciprocal Borrowing patrons.

#998 - CLOVER DIST LIB (WOODHULL)

#999 - NEW WINDSOR PLD

#1000 - CENTRAL CITIZENS LD (CLIFTON)

#1001 - WATSEKA PUB LIB

#1002 - KECK MEM LIB (WAPELLO, IA)

#1003 - FLEWELLIN MEM LIB (SHABBONA)

Technical Bulletin #16 - Holds Processing Cribsheet, is now available on the Support Site under Documentation-Circulation-Technical Bulletins. This Bulletin reviews the proper selections for placing “normal” holds for patrons, including:

• routine holds (Title Level  - Hold Copy Returned Soonest)
• multi-volume holds (Volume Level  - Hold Selected Volume) -- commonly used for requesting TV series, magazines, etc.