Software upgrades and manual chargeouts

Please read this entry and leave your initials in a comment.

Sorry everyone, it looks like the date has changed again, to this coming Thursday (July 12th); the catalog should be available from Friday on, but charge out functions may be unavailable for the whole weekend.

We are going to be getting an upgrade to Voyager, which as you probably know is the software that we use to check books in and out (among other things). This is going to be a huge pain, but it has to be done.

What it means for you: On Thursday and Friday, all Voyager functions will be down. This means all books will need to be charged out manually (I will make sure we have a fresh supply of manual chargeout sheets). Please fill out the manual chargeout sheet completely -- this means you need to copy down the book title, book barcode, patron name, patron barcode, date and time. The online catalog will not be working either while the upgrade is going on, so that means you will not be able to look up titles in the MCPHS/FLO catalog on Thursday and Friday. If you have any questions about doing manual chargeouts, ask me (Kyle), Marcie, or anyone else in the access services office.

Why: The Voyager software needs to be upgraded periodically. This upgrade will solve some problems you may have noticed, such as the way the online catalog sometimes displays several identical images of the cover of a book and squashes all the text over to the side of the page. It would be great if we could upgrade Voyager at a time when school is not in session, but we share our catalog with several other schools and it's very hard to find an upgrade time that works for everyone. (This time works great for me, because I will be out of town on Thursday and Friday, but that's no help for everyone else, of course.)

Sorry about the inconvenience, and thanks in advance for your patience!