Weekly Update – February 14, 2012
Update on Payment pilot
As many of you already know, Jackson County, Jennings County, Brownstown, Hussey Mayfield Memorial, Lebanon and Thorntown Public Libraries are participating in a payment pilot which will benefit all libraries in the consortium. Our pilot libraries are accepting cash and check for any fine or fee that a patron owes to any library in Evergreen Indiana. ISL staff have provided Daily Reconciliation Reports which are downloaded from a website daily and provide bookkeepers with an itemized list of payments taken in on behalf of other libraries which bookkeepers will reconcile in the Evergreen Indiana Fund, previously referred to as the Pass Through Fund. The payment pilot documentation has been approved by the State Board of Accounts.
Since the payment pilot began in July 2011, we have made great progress, having added three more libraries to the payment pilot in November 2011. ISL staff have collaborated with State Board of Accounts to create documentation for the program and Evergreen Indiana Helpdesk staff have written scripts to allow libraries to efficiently view the Daily Reconciliation reports needed for bookkeeping. We will need several more months of payment pilot cycles before we open up the program to other libraries in the consortium but the goal is to allow all libraries to participate in 2012.
Technical Bulletin
As you’re all aware, we recently upgraded our Evergreen system to the latest version of the Evergreen software, 2.1. With your cooperation, we’ve been able to add a number of great new features to the software, which has benefited staff and patrons alike. Unfortunately, one of the downsides to software upgrades is the occasional introduction of new bugs.
As many of you are aware, Evergreen Indiana has experienced sporadic issues with the cataloging module since our upgrade in early-December. Thanks to your detailed helpdesk submissions and patience, the top developers in the Evergreen Community have discovered that these sporadic network errors are caused by large-sized bucket/batch operations, such as deletions or updates.
Today, the Evergreen developers released a patch which is expected to alleviate these network errors. You may still see time-out’s in the staff client with very large buckets (think thousands of items) but the deletion/update process will continue in the background in these cases.
In order to apply these patches, the Evergreen Indiana system will go offline this evening around 10PM for up to 2 hours. This will be done during the after-hours maintenance time provided for by the Evergreen Indiana Executive Committee.
The Evergreen Indiana team, again, would like to express our appreciation for the detailed reports we received, along with your patience. They both lead to the discovery of the bug, and the solution.