Ngā mihi o te tau hou

As we are doing some maintenance on Minisis this week (4-6 Jan) Minisis clients and Kā kohika will be inaccessible for a time – shouldn’t be more than half a day today but may take longer if we encounter problems.

There was a message about the maintenance on Kā kohika warning users so hopefully the impact will be minimal.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of library systems)

Kia ora koutou

We’ll be carrying out the last step (hopefully) with Horizon annual maintenance tomorrow (Thursday 22nd December) after the library closes at 4pm.

This step requires us to take everything connected to Horizon offline so there will be no Horizon, Library Catalogue (a message has been added to the current/original catalogue to let people know) or RFID/self-loan station/smart bin etc. connections from around 4:15pm until we complete the maintenance.

Libcat (VuFind) should still work for searching for titles/bibs but My account, requesting, holdings info etc. will not be functional.

This is new to Donna and I (kudos to Peter for doing this in his own Christmas break time for so many years) – so not too sure how long it will all take but should have the catalogue back up running in an hour or so.  Hopefully everyone is in holiday mode and won’t even notice.

ELS team – please don’t set DayEnd to run tomorrow – we’ll do it after we’re done with the maintenance.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

Sage/Atypon have put in a fix for the problems we were having with access via OpenAthens.  Should be working ok again now.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

If Horizon is open on your current computer please close and re-open it to pick up the changes to requesting.

See – Changes (very very slight changes) coming for requesting in Horizon for reference and what the change entails.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

As part of the work we are doing for VuFind (new library catalogue) we need to make a change to how Horizon handles placing requests for borrowers.  Currently it actually uses the catalogue (HIP) for part of the process and that makes us vulnerable if we need to suddenly shut down HIP (it is so old it is a potential security risk).

We are going to decouple Horizon requesting from HIP on Thursday (24th November) morning.  After we’ve made the change, you’ll need to close and re-open Horizon on your computers if you are running it (will put another post out after the change is complete).

What will change?

Users placing requests via the catalogue shouldn’t notice anything different.
The only noticeable change for staff using Horizon is a slightly different looking place hold form when placing requests on behalf of borrowers.
If you use the backup database (e.g. to test things before doing them live) you won’t get the middle-tier error warning message anymore.

The new “Place Hold Request” form

Things to note:

• the pickup location now has two editable lines/fields – please just us the first line’s dropdown menu (highlighted) to select a pick-up location.  Horizon won’t change the code in the second pick-up location field to match what is selected there but don’t worry about that, we’ve tested and it will set the pick-up location according to what you select in the dropdown menu.
• Notice section – leave this set to Mail (default) – the other options are ignored come hold notification time.  In practice most people will receive an email hold notice (or etxt for HD items) – but it is our notice program that controls all that.

If you want to have an advance look at this – test756 database has the change already applied (and see test hip http://hiptest.canterbury.ac.nz/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=a#focus for the user experience.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

We are having some problems with Horizon acquisitions module today.  To try and resolve them we will be doing some database clean up work which may cause some deadlocks for people using Horizon and making changes (e.g. circulation CKO/CKI/requesting, editing bib/item records).  If you experience a lock (spinning chevron) trying to save wait for a few minutes and try again.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

We are getting “Bad Request” error messages with our AIP  resources e.g. Applied Physics Letters.

We’ve reported the issue to our Open Athens support.

Users on the campus network (using a PC on a wired network connection or docked laptop) will be able to access articles if they go directly to the AIP/ journal site e.g. via Google – https://aip.scitation.org/ or via DOI links.  There is currently no off-campus access until the Open Athens problem is resolved.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

Digital Services have just increased the memory on our Minisis server to help with some recent Kā kohika problems we’ve had.  There shouldn’t be any outages/problems but do let us know (email eservices@libr.canterbury.ac.nz ) if you have any issues.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

Typically – after putting up a Library news post and kicking off an escalation process with Digital Services….AskLIVE seems to be back in business on campus.
We still don’t know the exact cause of the issue and haven’t received any new communication from Digital Services or LibraryH3lp, so I am going to err on the side of caution and leave the library news post up in case the issue reoccurs this evening

Thanks to John and Brian for staffing AskLIVE  on their lonesome today 🙂

Will check it is still up when I get in tomorrow and take down the Library news post then.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)

Kia ora koutou

AskLIVE is down at the moment.  We are following up with the vendor.  They had problems with their servers last week so this may be a repeat of that.

We will keep you posted with any developments.

Ngā mihi,

Romy (on behalf of Library Systems)