Monday, April 20, 2009

Aleph2Banner: The Problem

The Aleph2 Banner project is an attempt to automatically export book vendor payment information from Aleph into our Banner financial systems. Our current process has library staff enter this data into Aleph, then pass paperwork to the library business office where it is re-entered into Banner and then, entered one final time into an Access Database for reporting purposes. The work performed by our business person on these tasks is said to average about 20 hours per week. If we could automate this task, we stand to make a huge impact on our workload.

With some direction from FCLA, we've found a report (ACQ-16) that we believe can take the place of our Access database report but it will requrie Acquisitions and Serials to complete the budget information in Aleph. Up until now, they have not entered assigned budgets which meant that the report shows a negative balanace after the first payment.

Other issues include the use of library specific codes for the vendors that do not match Finance's vendor codes and the fact that purchases made with our PCard are automatically entered into Banner so they will have to be bypassed somehow in the export or import process.

The projet team includes Serials, Acquisitions and Systems with support from ITS, Fianance and FCLA. Our goal is to implement this new process for the start of the new fiscal year, July 1 2009. Over the next few weeks we hope to make subtantial progress which I will document here.

Friday, April 3, 2009

LibX and Acquisitions

Ever since Robb Waltner took over Acquisitions, we've been looking at ways to modernize the book ordering process. Robb is a great manager and has some excellent ideas including the use of Blackwell's Collection Manager. Unfortunately one of the useful features of CM doesn't work properly for us. CM has the ability to use an open url to quickly search our catalog for duplicate titles. Hopefully this will be corrected in the near future but, in the mean time, I've put together a little toolbar using LibX. LibX is a site that allows you to build a toolbar for Firefox or IE that searches your catalog. I built one a long time ago but didn't see the use. Fortunately, Robb did. Try the UNF versions of the LibX toolbar if you would like. It's pretty raw but it allows you to search UNF Mango as well as drag and drop terms to Google Scholar. There's even a shameless link to this blog. Hey, if you don't like it, make your own.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Laptops Return to XP, Students Save Time!

Back in February I wrote about the good and bad of Vista on the laptops. Well, as it turns out the bad outweighs the good and our laptops have returned to WindowsXP. When it was all said and done, speed mattered most. Here are some numbers that should make it easy to understand. Starting up our laptops took 53 seconds with XP, 73 seconds with Vista. That's over 37% longer to boot up with Vista. Login times were worse. It too one minute and 35 seconds (1:35) for XP to log in and get a useable browser one screen. Vista took two minutes and fifty seven seconds (2:57) to do the same. That's more than 86% longer. Overall from off to ready to use, XP took 2:28 to Vista's 4:10 (~69% longer). Yep, close to 5 minutes from the time you check out a laptop to the time you get to use it not including the amount of time it takes to type in a user name and password. Heaven forbid you mistype or have to reboot. This was just unacceptable and the return the XP seems to be just fine with the students. In fact, I've not heard any complaints about XP or the rollback to Office 2003. Now I see why Dell charges users to downgrade to XP. I still wouldn't pay it, though. :)