| Enhancement |
Submitted to IUG |
Submitted to Innovative |
Options Under Claims Returned and Lost Button in MilCirc
Within the Checkin Mode of Millennium Circulation, clicking
the Claims Returned or the Lost button displays a choice of three
possible actions to be taken with respect to tracking missing items. One
or more of these may run counter to the local circulation policy
of a library within a consortial system. It should be possible
to display or suppress any combination of these choices on the basis
of MilCirc logon (through use of an option group) or some other mechanism,
in order to prevent inexperienced staff from making an incorrect
choice. |
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Display Due Date and Call Number on Bills
It should be possible for a library to opt to display due date and
call number on bills, just as they are shown on overdue notices. Whether
this is to be done or not should be part of an option group.This
would facilitate manual checking of the shelves for billed items
before mailing the bill. It would also answer questions frequently
asked by patrons receiving a bill. |
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Patron Type Limit Is Too Low
The limit on the number of Patron Types is 255. This is too
low for a large, heterogeneous consortial system, particularly if
the system includes significant numbers of independent public libraries. While
work-arounds are possible much of the time, they can add complexity
and come at the cost of potential loss of functionality in other
areas. At least 1,000 Patron Types should be supported. |
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Add Flexibility to Reporting of Daily Statistics in MilReports
It should be possible to specify reporting dates with greater flexibility
in Web Management Reports. It should be possible to generate
stats for any of the the previous 7 day's activity. Most
restrictive is the inability of the system to generate statistics
for Friday's activity on a Monday. If there is an intervening Monday
holiday, statistics for Saturday and Friday both are inaccessible
on the next normal work day. |
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Allow Printing of Patron Barcode Numbers on Hold Slips
A new Option Group choice should be available that allows libraries
that need them to have patron barcode numbers appear on hold slips. This
is helpful in libraries where patrons are not required to carry
their barcode. When someone comes in to pick up an item that is
on the holdshelf, entering the patron barcode can be easier and
faster than doing a patron name search. The hold slip is
the perfect place to carry this information. |
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Provide View and Edit System Administrator Access to Option
Groups
Divergent settings are needed in proportion to the number of and
differences among libraries sharing an Innovative system on a consortial
basis. To the extent possible, system administrators need to
be able to view and edit the settings currently organized within
Option Groups and accessible only through the Help Desk. If
editing raises too many issues in the short term, simply providing
centralized means of viewing what the current settings are for each
consortium member would still be highly useful. |
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Enable More Flexible Generation of Hold Slips
It should be possible to defer printing of Hold Slips from within
Millennium Circulation, scanning barcodes and printing Hold Slips
at a time dictated by local workflow needs. This was possible
until Release 2001. Libraries could checkin large number
of items, setting aside those for which holds existed. Once
all the checkins had been done, a staff member could scan each
of the items that had been set aside, generating Hold Slips at
that point. With Release 2001, the error message Failure
to Determine Loan Rule Between .ixxxxxxxx and .pxxxxxxxx appears,
rather than the notification that the item was not checked out
and notification that a hold exists, accompanied by the offer to
print a Hold Slip. A return to the earlier behavior, or some
other mechanism by which staff might produce Hold Slips other at
than at the instant of checkin is called for. |
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Print Customized Header on Date Due Slips
It should be possible to print a customized header at the top of
Date Due Slips. Three lines of up to 40 characters should
be sufficient for each member of a consortial system to specify
Library Name, Phone Number and Web Address. An option of
up to 6 lines would be even more flexible. Option Groups
would be an acceptable mechanism for implementing this feature. |
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Status of Billed Items That Are Renewed
Within INN Reach, when an virtual item becomes overdue and goes to
the 'billed' stage, and is then renewed by the borrower's
library, the virtual item retains the 'billed' status. Only
when they are checked in by the lending library does their status
change to 'returned'. As a result, one can have multiple
items, all circulating properly, that continue to carry a
false and misleading status when viewed in the INN Reach
OPAC. We propose that the action of renewing a virtual item
change its status to that which would have resulted from renewal
prior to the item going overdue. |
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X |
Scope Access To Patron Database
For those of using Millennium Circulation in a consortial environment,
it would be helpful to have a limit button to limit searches of the
patron database to only the patron records affiliated with one home
library. Furthermore, once that patron location limit was activated,
it should stay activated for the entire Millennium Circulation session
on that particular workstation. |
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Patron History Option
Within a consortial system there may be libraries that it useful
to have access to a history of items checked out. This
could be implemented as a series of barcode numbers in a variable
field in the patron record. This capability should be option
groupable, so that only libraries that choose to will collect
this information. |
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Separate Print and Close Buttons
Separate the "Print" and "Close" buttons
on the upper portion of the Millennium Circulation screen. With
them currently next to each other, it is too easy for circ workers
to mistakenly close the transaction record when they mean to
print it. |
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Renewing Items On Hold
Millennium Circulation will not allow renewals for items on
hold. It would be preferable when attempting to renew
such items, if a warning dialog box was presented with an option
to override and renew anyway. |
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Single Override Action
When items are being checked out for a patron and s/he nears
or reaches her limit for maximum number of items allowed, only
one dialog/warning box should be presented, and that should appear
when an item is scanned that will exceed the checkout limit. If
the limit is overridden, all subsequent checkouts in that session
should proceed with an automatic override. (Millennium is currently
set up to provide dialog box warnings that begin when the patron
is within two items of the limit and continue through each subsequent
checkout.) Making this changed behavior an option groupable
choice would be acceptable. |
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Make Search Limit "Sticky"
For those of us using Millennium Circulation as part of a consortium,
it would be helpful to keep the "Where item is located" limit
in place for the entire Millennium Circulation session, rather
than resetting it each time the user enters Search / Holds mode. |
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More Info During Checkin
When checking in materials within Millennium Circulation, it
would be helpful if both material titles and barcodes were listed. This
would make it much easier to identify problems with scanning
or for circ workers who are interrupted in the middle of a check-in
routine to determine where they left off. |
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Label Printing
Ten print queues for the printing of labels is far too few for
a heterogeneous consortial system. This number should be
increased to 75 or 100. Or, better yet, enhanced and individually
customizable label printing functionality should be added to
Millennium Cataloging. |
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Put Local Templates At Top of List
It would speed up creation of bib and item records on the fly,
within large consortial systems using Millennium Circulation,
if it were possible to specify by login in (option group) which
template(s) would appear at the top of the list. If this
cannot easily be done, the list of templates should at least
follow standard Windows behavior by presenting templates in alphabetical
order and by allowing the user to jump to a position in
the list by typing the first character of a template name. |
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Order of Choices in Search Type Pulldown Menu
Ideally, the order of choices in the list of search types in
the Search / Holds mode of Millennium Circulation should be settable
on a login / option group basis. Failing that, Barcode
should be made the 3rd choice after title and author, making
it much easier to find than at its current position near the
end of the list. |
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Optionally Drop Honorifics From Patron Name Indexing
Names that end in ", Jr.", ", Sr.", ",
III", ", MD" and similar designations make searching
by patron name difficult. A Millennium Circ search for "Smith,
John" will not even display "Smith, Jr, John" on
the browse list. Needless to say, searching for "Smith" alone
on a system of any size would be very slow. This could
be fixed by creating a Circulation Option that would create a
generic name from characters up to the first comma concatenated
with character from after the last comma and index name for searching
on the basis of the generic name rather than the literal name. This
would cause a search on "Smith, John" to display all
these names together: "Smith, Jr., John", "Smith,
Sr., John", "Smith, MD, John", etc. |
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Display Item Status In OPAC Checkin Box Display
Libraries that circulate individual issues of magazines cannot
take full advantage of the compactness of the OPAC checkin record
display if they wish patrons to see the availability of individual
circulating issues. Both the summary information from the
checkin record and a potentially very long list of item records
must be shown. Consortial systems can end up with extremely
long item lists or messy schemes involving multiple bib records. This
problem could be resolved by making it possible to link individual
item records with individual checkin boxes such that the display
of checkin box information in the OPAC would include status of
the individual item in addition to the usual checkin box data. Once
users are able to drill down to get circulation status info from
the checkin box it will be possible to suppress item records
from display in the OPAC and thereby improve the appearance and
understandability of the OPAC display. |
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