Kia ora koutou

Minisis was upgraded this morning and this seems to have broken the registration process for new Kā Kohika users (e.g. to be able to request art and archive material).  We have reported this to our Minisis vendors and hopefully will be fixed soon.

In the meantime MB staff should be able to request/retrieve items on behalf of people that can’t create accounts.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

After the cyclone guys flitted through offices updating Monitor docks for staff with laptops we noticed some staff getting repeated DB process dead/SQL errors with Horizon throughout the day when trying to CKO/CKI or save record changes.  There were also some issues with people unable to remote into their laptops from home.

We think we have tracked this down to the monitor dock’s power mode/sleep settings.  The docks were going to sleep when laptops had idled for a while and when asleep so were their LAN network connections  which upset Horizon’s connection.  Also means your computer is not findable on the network so remote desktop also failed for people.

If you have a laptop with monitor docking station (the dock will be the screen with the camera pull out at the top and speaker if you have the standard 2 new monitor + laptop set up) – check its power mode (if you haven’t had any errors from Horizon you probably don’t need to check).  There are some small buttons just in from the power button on the right bottom of the monitor – the one closest to the middle will launch the on-screen display menu as in the pic below.  You can navigate around the menu with the other buttons. I pinched this pic from the service now knowledge bask so ignore the red boxes around things and instead look at the highlighted bits to point you in the right direction for the power mode setting – it should be on Performance rather than Power Saver.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

Digital Services are looking into some problems we are having with Payment Plus timing out while looking up Canterbury Card balances for processing fine payments etc.  There have been some problems with the RAS server we use to connect to Equitrac this morning so likely to be related to that.
No E.T.A. on a fix yet.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

We identified 16 borrowers who had items out with incorrect renewal due dates from renewing in the new catalogue on 9th and 10th of February and have edited the due dates back to what they should have been.

All affected borrowers have been sent an email suggesting they check their library account to see the edited due dates – this was sent from the library@canterbury.ac.nz email address so you may see some responses in there from the borrowers – if there’s anything that needs our attention please forward on to eservices@libr.canterbury.ac.nz.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

The new catalogue is unable to process renewals for overdue items  – this is something Horizon enforces so will probably take a while to work around.   We didn’t pick up on it in initial testing as it only happens when DayEnd has run and generated an overdue item block for the items (renewals do work on items with edited back due dates).

In the meantime, we have edited the error message (for those items to the below (alas we can’t put in the actual clickable link to the old my account, plain text only in these error messages)

This item could not be renewed: Item is overdue and currently cannot be renewed here – please renew via Old Library Catalogue link in footer or contact library staff.

We will keep working on a solution as realise this is not ideal for our users.

NB: looking into this today has also delayed our plans to identify adn fix items with too long due dates from last week’s American date format renewal issue – apologies for the delay on this.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

Users have reported getting the following error message when trying to renew items on the new catalogue this morning:

“Connection to the library management system failed. Information related to your library account cannot be displayed. If the problem persists, please contact your library”

I will investigate and attempt to fix but this may require Margaret intervention and she is not working today.  In the meantime if you get queries from users – please give them the old My Account link or renew items on their behalf in Horizon https://ipac.canterbury.ac.nz/ipac20/ipac.jsp?&profile=a&menu=account
If the problem persists, I will add the old link to the error message or somewhere else in the Your Account menu .

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

From tomorrow morning we will begin replacing links to the old catalogue to the new one in places.  We’ll start with the library website links to Library Catalogue and MyLibrary Account and MultiSearch (this needs to be done by external vendors so not entirely sure when the change will kick in there).  Then incrementally approach links in other places like library notices/etxts, library web pages (e.g. instructional pages), LEARN, LibGuides, and many more.  We’ll be trying to use bulk/batch changes as much as we can to avoid individual staff having to edit every single one of their links – aiming to get as much done as we can before term starts.  This work will take a fair while and we will not be switching off the old catalogue until that is complete.

We have put out communications on Tū ki te tahi, Library News and submitted a post to Tūpono (hasn’t been accepted for publish yet at time of writing) about the upcoming change.  We are aiming to do some social media posts for students once more of them are back on campus too.

RE MyLists from the old catalogue – we looked into bulk migrating these across but it is just too complicated to do en masse.  The best thing for users to do is to recreate the lists via the new catalogue (it is much easier to do this there and also can just save the search itself as an easier alternative to individual items).  We should be able to do a workaround for people who have a lot of short lists (basically pulling out all the bib numbers from their MyLists and constructing a VuFind saved search link) so if you get queries from concerned old catalogue users you can forward them to eservices@libr.canterbury.ac.nz

Thanks for all your help and feedback testing out the new catalogue.  It is still very much a work in progress and a learning experience for our team and we’ll continue to make tweaks to it as we go on.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

If you are going to be remoting to your UC computer via go.canterbury.ac. this evening between 5pm and 9pm  – Digital Services are upgrading that system and have stated the following:

Users will be disconnected twice if using go.canterbury.ac.nz during the upgrade but will be able to log back in immediately.

Student remote access will be down for 30 minutes during this time.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

The course code search in the library catalogue (original legacy one not the new VuFind one) is a bit bung at the moment – returning results but with blank details for some items.  I am going to try restarting the catalogue at 5pm to see if that fixes things so it will be down for a few minutes.  This likely won’t fix the issue so we may have to look into reindexing all the keyword indices for the catalogue on Monday (that will mean keyword searches will be a bit unreliable for a few hours while we are doing this – will post again if we need to go down that road).

The new VuFind catalogue course code searches are working if you need to look something up. However, it is possible the indexes there are not up to date especially for newly added/removed HD items.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (one behalf of Library Systems)