[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Open-ils-general Digest, Vol 73, Issue 24
Elfstrand, Stephen F
stephen.elfstrand at mnsu.edu
Thu Jul 19 10:41:05 EDT 2012
Thanks for the information on your experience with Acq. I followed the link where the 2.3 feature development it described, but I did not see performance enhancement ( i.e. Speed) mentioned. I am interested to know why slowness is an issue and what the development community is doing or thinking of doing to improve that aspect of Evergreen Acq.
PALS has also been working on Acq documentation and has sent in some revisions, but I'm not sure if they have been incorporated into the official docs yet. I hope Sitka will also contribute their improvements to Acq documentation and that those too can be included in the official docs.
Jed: has KCLS begun using Acq and if so have you seen the slowness?
Stephen Elfstrand
PALS
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Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 1:05 PM
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Subject: Open-ils-general Digest, Vol 73, Issue 24
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: acquisitions redux (Tara Robertson)
2. Feature request: library settings to diferentiate views of
Patron Registration and Patron Edit screens (Jim Frey)
3. ***SPAM*** RE: acquisitions redux (Mary Llewellyn)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 09:41:45 -0700
From: Tara Robertson <information.detective at gmail.com<mailto:information.detective at gmail.com>>
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] acquisitions redux
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
<open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org<mailto:open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org>>
Message-ID:
<CALPJNUnR_DYLdrSv43oi_oNX=GHNKGd3w1Hr0p8j1CJhH=CfZA at mail.gmail.com<mailto:CALPJNUnR_DYLdrSv43oi_oNX=GHNKGd3w1Hr0p8j1CJhH=CfZA at mail.gmail.com>>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
Hi,
This is my perspective in using ACQ since January, mainly through managing tech services in small academic library. I would not recommend using ACQ at this point.
For me performance is the main issue. ACQ is dreadfully slow. We are in a urban centre, with a good ISP, nearby the data centre for our consortium and things were still brutally slow. The Sitka support folks have a workaround accessing some of ACQ through a web browser, which improves things quite a bit. Instead of being very, very, very slow, they are just slow. This was not a deal breaker for us, as we have a very small acquisitions budget (~$40k/year). However most of my staff using ACQ were quite frustrated and cranky. If I had known how poor the performance was I would've waited until the next fiscal year to use start acquisitions. I wouldn't recommend using ACQ at this point. I see the potential for ACQ to be awesome in the future (it's very flexible and will support so many types of workflows), but right now it isn't.
I've been wary to share my frustrations with ACQ on this list because I know that there are people who are considering migrating to Evergreen and that there are likely proprietary ILS vendor reps on this list who are looking for more fodder to scare their customers away from using Evergreen.
As the software and our community mature we need to foster a culture where we can communicate frankly and help build the software and community that we want. In that vein, I'm extremely grateful to the folks who've been working behind the scenes to flesh out development priorities, functional requirements, get some cash together to pay for development and to the developers who seem to be listening:
http://blog.esilibrary.com/2012/07/11/high-speed-2-3-acq-development/
Sitka has excellent documentation for ACQ, but I'm not sure if they are sharing it beyond their consortium. Perhaps someone from Sitka could share the link?
Hope this is useful,
Tara
On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 7:23 AM, J. Sara Paulk <jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com<mailto:jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com>>wrote:
> Appreciate responses and realize that there is some basic
> documentation out there. Let me take a different approach. Those of
> you who are using Acquisitions. ****
>
> ** **
>
> What decisions did you make when you started that you totally regret
> or conversely are thrilled with? ****
>
> ** **
>
> What do you wish with all your heart that you had done prior to start
> using the module?****
>
> ** **
>
> What do you wish you had known that you know now?****
>
> ** **
>
> Who do you wish you had involved that you didn?t?****
>
> ** **
>
> What steps is the Evergreen documentation missing or what assumptions
> does it make that it shouldn?t?****
>
> ** **
>
> Any other general words of wisdom for one who may be going into the
> fray are and will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> Respectfully,****
>
> ** **
>
> *J. Sara Paulk* Regional Director Wythe-Grayson
> Regional Library****
>
> P.O. Box 159, Independence, VA 24348 Phone-276-773-3018 / FAX
> 276-773-3289****
>
> http://wythegrayson.lib.va.us Email
> jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com<mailto:jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com> ****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
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Message: 2
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 12:46:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jim Frey <jfrey at pls-net.org<mailto:jfrey at pls-net.org>>
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Feature request: library settings to
diferentiate views of Patron Registration and Patron Edit screens
To: open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org<mailto:open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org>
Message-ID: <13e89e16-fa29-404c-bd74-d8af2f4abdd0 at rosebud.pls-net.org<mailto:13e89e16-fa29-404c-bd74-d8af2f4abdd0 at rosebud.pls-net.org>>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Evergreen v2.2 has a library setting to select "All Fields" (the default) or "Suggested Fields" as the view for patron data ("Default showing suggested patron registration fields "). In this version, it applies to both the patron registration screen and the patron edit screen. The ability to mask unnecessary fields (such as barred, active, claims-returned, etc) from the Patron Registration process is a valuable feature -- users shouldn't have to work around superfluous fields/widgets. However, when updating patron information, viewing all the fields as the default is best. As it currently stands, making the default "Suggested Fields Only" will probably confuse new users attempting to edit an existing patron's data. The general approach is good; just needs more settings/configuration.
Jim Frey
Systems & Emerging Technology Librarian
Pioneer Library System
2557 State Rt. 21
Canandaigua, New York 14424
Voice: (585) 394-8260
Fax: (585) 394-1935
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Message: 3
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 14:05:44 -0400
From: "Mary Llewellyn" <mllewell at biblio.org<mailto:mllewell at biblio.org>>
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ***SPAM*** RE: acquisitions redux
To: "'Evergreen Discussion Group'"
<open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org<mailto:open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org>>
Message-ID: <007f01cd650f$f34f7cc0$d9ee7640$@biblio.org<mailto:007f01cd650f$f34f7cc0$d9ee7640$@biblio.org>>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hi all,
We are a consortium with some libraries that used Acquisitions in our old system. (They are all public libraries, not academic.) When we migrated to Evergreen, Acquisitions had moved from being a preview to being a flawed, though functional part of the system. However, some of our acq libraries dropped using it because it was slow and clunky workflow.
However, since we've upgraded to Evergreen 2.2, we've seen a lot of improvements in Acquisitions. Most of our libraries use Title Source and upload their orders to Evergreen in a MARC file. In the past, our aggravation was that staff had to manually link each lineitem to the catalog, or risk creating duplicate records in the catalog. Since the upgrade, the uploading process works with the Vandelay loader to automatically match existing bib records and associate the lineitems with those bibs.
Since this improvement, a couple of member libraries have contacted me to get them started in using Acquisitions.
We are looking forward to further improvements, especially in the area of invoicing.
For more detail about how we use Acquisitions, I'm happy to share the documentation that I wrote for our libraries.
http://biblio.org/dbs/Acq%20Table%20of%20Contents.htm
Mary
Mary Llewellyn
Database Manager
Bibliomation, Inc.
Middlebury, CT
mllewell at biblio.org<mailto:mllewell at biblio.org>
From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org<mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org>
[mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org]<mailto:[mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org]> On Behalf Of Tara Robertson
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 12:42 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] acquisitions redux
Hi,
This is my perspective in using ACQ since January, mainly through managing tech services in small academic library. I would not recommend using ACQ at this point.
For me performance is the main issue. ACQ is dreadfully slow. We are in a urban centre, with a good ISP, nearby the data centre for our consortium and things were still brutally slow. The Sitka support folks have a workaround accessing some of ACQ through a web browser, which improves things quite a bit. Instead of being very, very, very slow, they are just slow. This was not a deal breaker for us, as we have a very small acquisitions budget (~$40k/year). However most of my staff using ACQ were quite frustrated and cranky. If I had known how poor the performance was I would've waited until the next fiscal year to use start acquisitions. I wouldn't recommend using ACQ at this point. I see the potential for ACQ to be awesome in the future (it's very flexible and will support so many types of workflows), but right now it isn't.
I've been wary to share my frustrations with ACQ on this list because I know that there are people who are considering migrating to Evergreen and that there are likely proprietary ILS vendor reps on this list who are looking for more fodder to scare their customers away from using Evergreen. As the software and our community mature we need to foster a culture where we can communicate frankly and help build the software and community that we want.
In that vein, I'm extremely grateful to the folks who've been working behind the scenes to flesh out development priorities, functional requirements, get some cash together to pay for development and to the developers who seem to be listening:
http://blog.esilibrary.com/2012/07/11/high-speed-2-3-acq-development/
Sitka has excellent documentation for ACQ, but I'm not sure if they are sharing it beyond their consortium. Perhaps someone from Sitka could share the link?
Hope this is useful,
Tara
On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 7:23 AM, J. Sara Paulk <jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com<mailto:jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com>>
wrote:
Appreciate responses and realize that there is some basic documentation out there. Let me take a different approach. Those of you who are using Acquisitions.
What decisions did you make when you started that you totally regret or conversely are thrilled with?
What do you wish with all your heart that you had done prior to start using the module?
What do you wish you had known that you know now?
Who do you wish you had involved that you didn't?
What steps is the Evergreen documentation missing or what assumptions does it make that it shouldn't?
Any other general words of wisdom for one who may be going into the fray are and will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Respectfully,
J. Sara Paulk Regional Director Wythe-Grayson
Regional Library
P.O. Box 159, Independence, VA 24348 Phone-276-773-3018 / FAX
276-773-3289
http://wythegrayson.lib.va.us Email
jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com<mailto:jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com>
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