Online Training Opportunities – Do not forget to sign up for the excellent online courses we are offering over the next few months. You can learn all about it at http://www.nlls.ab.ca/Online-Training.  

 

To signup visit http://nlls.webex.com, search the calendar for the course of your choice and click on the register link next to it. Fill in the required information (for company enter your library name). Once the instructor approves your registration the system will email you instructions on how to join the session. Registrations will be taken up to the hour before a session begins. 

 

Patron Logon in the PAC- Your patrons can now create usernames in the PAC for their library cards.  This means they don’t need to memorize that 14 digit barcode number anymore.

 

Patrons can create a username by:

1.       Logging in with their barcode and pin

2.       Navigating to Patron Account > My Record

3.       Clicking on the “Change Logon” button at the bottom left of the screen

4.       Clicking on Change Username

 

You may want to recommend to your patrons that using their email address as a username will make it easy to remember and ensure that no one else will already have the name.

 

Password Reminder for Patrons: If a patron forgets their password but knows their barcode or username their password can be emailed to them.  The option to email the password is at the login screen in the PAC.  This is one more reason to make sure to get a patron’s email address when registering them – the reminder is sent to all the email addresses on their patron record.

 

OTF records for ILL – Please do not use the Material Type of Interlibrary Loan for anything other than ILL’s.  Using this material type incorrectly will damage statistics and cause a host of problems for everyone.  We are now deleting all items with a material type of Interlibrary Loan and a status of In on a regular basis - Polaris does not delete these records automatically upon checkin (like Dynix did with fast-adds).  In addition, please do not alter the call number prefix that is automatically applied when you create the record – the prefix (OTF) helps everyone determine what the item is when searching in the client.

 

TracPac Homepage – Based on feedback from you, several changes have been made to the homepage of  the PAC (www.tracpac.ab.ca).    The intent is to make this a dynamic page that is updated often with relevant material that would interest patrons.  We are tracking patron usage of this page using heat maps and statistics, but we want to hear directly from you and your patrons as well.  Please take a moment to fill out the survey found at the bottom of the page to tell us your thoughts.  Please also let your patrons know that their feedback is most welcome.

Fines – At YRL’s LMC meeting on Friday, April 3, 2009, a motion was passed unanimously to adopt the new fine procedure that makes fines follow the transacting library. This was the last region who needed to pass this. You may recall we unanimously passed this motion at our LMC back in November 2008.  This new fine procedure will not be put into place, however, until the TRAC Advisory Council passes the same motion on May 8th.   This motion amounts to very little change for you.  Here are a few examples to help clarify:

1.       If you don’t charge fines currently, you will no longer need to waive fines because Polaris won’t charge a fine for any material lent from your location.

2.       If you do charge fines currently, all the material you lend (including the material you lend that belongs to other libraries in TRAC) will have the fine policy applied to it that your library enforces.  Your library will keep the proceeds of fines charged for books that do not belong to you.  Your patrons will appreciate the consistency they will see in fine rates that they are charged.

3.       Patron from library A walks into library B and borrows a book – this patron will be charged the fines according to the policy at library B for that book.

 

ILL Libraries – TRAC has created a new patron code solely for library patron records (libraries that we loan to that are not in TRAC, otherwise known as Interlibrary Loan).  This new patron code is ILL Library.  This code is not available to any library in TRAC to use – only the regional HQ’s can create new records with this code.  The purpose of this restriction is to ensure that we all use the correct library patron when we loan to libraries outside of TRAC – do not lend to a library that does not have the ILL Library patron code!  If you do, your statistics for that particular ILL transaction will be lost.  If the patron library does not exist in Polaris, call NLLS to have it added.

 

Polaris Maintenance Day on May 4 – On the next maintenance day (May 4) there WILL be a brief Polaris outage.  The production server requires more RAM and we will be installing it as early as possible.  The outage will likely be between 8:30 and 9am, but may take longer depending on the circumstances.

 

CAP – The role out of wireless services at your library should begin soon. There have been a few hiccups (as usual) which have caused delays. It is coming though. Thos libraries who already had wireless are making arrangements for their CAP expenditures with Brigitte and me.