Work is being done in the Central Library Level 2 Women’s toilets to install 2 new hand driers. The toilets will be closed today, Friday. Please direct students to the women’s toilets on all the other floors.
Helen

A request made on a 3 day or one day item offers no choice other than pick up from it’s home location. By this we mean a specific branch library. However, as we all know, each branch runs Horizon ‘a’ location on one of it’s CKI PCs. This means there is always a possibility that a daily loan belonging to a specific branch can be checked in any branch PC running ‘a’ location and declare itself ‘home’.

This is why we all label our 3 day and 1 day loans with a distinctive spine label. Education is lime green, PSL green, Law yellow, EL an orange strip and CL an orange square.

Horizon does not provide any real clues to say which Hold shelf a daily loan is on and reports don’t help either. So, here’s a reminder to keep an eye on the labels festooning the items on your hold shelves to catch the wandering stock from other branches.

Thank you to the alert staff who helped us find our wandering stock this week!

Helen

From time to time an item from the Hold shelf ends up in the hands of the requester without being checked out. The title eventually shows up in the Expired Holds report but cannot be found on the Hold shelf. A discreet phone call to the requestor usually reveals that they do in fact have the item.

From observation in training new staff, I have found one possible scenario which, if the staff member is not paying attention, can lead to an item on Hold being handed over. When you open the borrower’s record, the Current Blocks screen appears.

This is NOT a screen in which the barcode should be entered and normally if you do scan a barcode it will appear in the ‘Selection box’ and trigger the error message ‘Improper selection’ to let you know of your mistake.

However, sometimes the cursor is not active in the Selection box and instead of the error message, there is a ‘beep’ as if the item has been checked out. What has actually happened is that the scanning of the barcode has simply closed the Current Block screen and the item has not been checked out.

The screen that is now open gives you no clues, unless you click on ‘All items out’ and they you can see that your Held item is not there.
This is a plea to pay extra attention to the Current Block screen when dealing with an item on Hold – it will save so much work later.

Helen D

The problems with the use of Casual cards and Eftpos to Canterbury card machines is confined to Central and Law Libraries as they both have the upgraded machines.
Marilyn McLaren advises that anyone with a Casual card who wants to load money should be sent to Sciences, Engineering or Education Libraries as they still have the older machines. She is requiring ICTS to fix this problem before these 3 libraries receive the upgrade.
Helen

Now is the time of year to look closely at the DATE on each student Canterbury card when it is presented at your lending desk. For undergraduates look for ’02/2010′. Research students may have a wider variety of expiry dates, but all should be future dates. If they have re-enrolled, their Horizon record will be updated, but it is a University requirement that they present a current card.

Any slow coaches who have not got round to getting their new card should be requested to go to the Card Co-ordinator. Please place an Alert Block on their record along the lines of ‘New 02/2010 card to be sighted before next CKO’.

Helen

ICTS advise the following:
“Due to a CSGold webservice bug there was around a week (10-18 March) of transactions that did not complete successfully. The import files for these transactions have been corrected and the transactions were left to run over night. Based on the progress the server made yesterday (some 23000 transactions) and the fact it started at 4pm I’m estimating 2300 transactions an hour so there will be around 5 hours of processing left to do.”
What does this mean? Students are loading money onto their Canterbury cards but it is taking hours to be processed.
How can we help?
1) Where a student has a blocking fine and has just loaded money onto their card but cannot access the money, override the fine for today and issue to them.
2) If the student does not have a positive balance they are not able to access the internet, webmail or anything that requires authentication. IT HelpDesk in Central Library may be able to assist in some cases where the student has proof that they have loaded money e.g. receipt. Send these students to the Help desk.
Helen

When a 3 day loan belonging to another branch is returned at your library, please do the following:
CKI the item at your HOME location .
This puts the item ‘in transit’ and allows staff at the item’s home location to know that they don’t have it.
Phone the branch and advise that you have this item. If it is in high demand they may wish to come and get it.
If they are in no hurry, place the item in the hamper for the correct branch to be sent the next day.

If you CKI the item at the restricted loans location ‘a’ then the item is at home but leaving no clues as to which of the 6 physical buildings it might be in. Staff can waste a lot of time searching for it…

Helen

The updated model of the EFTPOS to Canterbury card machine was put in today beside the Central Library Lending desk. Unfortunately a minor programming glitch has caused a transaction backlog (only a few thousand) which has delayed the availability of money loaded onto Canterbury cards. The technician was unable to predict how long the backlog would persist but on the chance that it will continue this evening – please read this message.

Helen