Library Software

It's been a software week at work.

Back in August, we were looking for a date that we could update our primary library software when student use of the software would be low. We picked Tuesday, September 26--Faith & Reason Lecture day. The students spend all day at required activities--a lecture in the morning, small group discussions in the early afternoon, and a round-table discussion in the late afternoon.

About three weeks ago, I was reminded that a piece of software we use for cataloging was requiring an update by October 1. So when I e-mailed I.T., I suggested they could do the client update for our primary library software and this cataloging software at the same time.

Late Tuesday morning, they came down and did the updates on all the library staff computers.

Not long after that was done AC tried to do a daily upload-download with our ILL software--it failed. A call to the ILL software support confirmed my fears--one of the other updates had made a change that affected the ILL software. The fix: update to the latest version of the ILL software.

So I.T. was down in the library again on Wednesday morning performing the update for the ILL software.

An unavoidable side-affect of two of the updates is the loss of customizations for our web catalog and all of the ILL notices and forms we generate. The rest of the week I then spent most of my time working on getting all of those customizations re-set.

For the ILL notices and forms, I'd done a partial documentation of the needed changes with previous updates--that helped immensely. And I took the time to make that documentation a bit more complete to try to ease the next transition even more.

For the catalog, I had a folder of 150+ files used in customization from the previous version. I didn't want to just do an unconditional overwrite of the newer files, so I took the time to go through the 10-20 major files a little more closely. No major problems or changes, but it did take a bit. Hopefully I've finished that and the catalog will once again work as we want it to and as students expect it to.