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Library aaaaarrrrrgghh
Shall I just cut right here?
So the Evergreen consortium finally got the approval for the grant from the State Library. Oh, they tried to kill it, when it finally occurred to them that it had the potential to be a large contender to prevent libraries from going along with the State Library's own proprietary- and expensive- resource. But through sheer stubbornness, the COOL deal made it through. Even though after the fact, the State Library decided they would not allow any OTHER libraries to have grants to migrate into the system. Which, you know, ASSHOLES, SLO, YOU ARE ALL ASSHOLES. But I digress.
Then came the reckoning. At this point, we are expecting to go live with the new system in place March 15th. There will be a 3-day window of zero patron activity on the system (the boss is hoping we can close for at least a couple of those days, to give us all intensive training). More damaging for us, though, is the THREE WEEKS of zero circulation activity. Yep, as people return items, we will not be able to check them in for three weeks. And they will just have to pile up in back. We will be able to check things out (on the dummy program that exists for when we have power outage issues that affect the server), but no renewals. I really think that one will be nearly too damaging to recover from. I don't think we will have much of anything left for people to check out by the time we get to that third week.
Of course, every item in the collection will have to be retrofitted with a new barcode and cataloguing attached to it, not sure how the scheduling of that is set. I am not looking forward to having to deal with a 14-digit barcode when we're used to just 8 digits. I'm also not looking forward to replacing every patron's borrower's card. I am very sad to have to give up my own card, it was a very low number and I enjoyed the proof that I have been there from the beginning of the electronic age (for us).
Then, today I discovered that, in a complete reversal of what the consortium started out to do (which was, in a nutshell, use the open source Evergreen system to create something that Ohio libraries ran, keeping the money in Ohio), the contracted host for the COOL program decided that, not only could they NOT, in fact, host it themselves (subcontracted to some other Ohio server farm), but they were not going to provide tech support or handle the data migration, either. Those tasks they subcontracted to some place out of state.
Which, you know, What. The. FUCK? Why is the consortium giving them any money at all, since they are doing nothing themselves? The computer guy (who was the one to start the ball rolling in the first place) told me about it. He was obviously trying NOT to hate on them, since, as he said, at least they were willing to admit they were in over their heads. But he was not happy, either.
BUT! Next week is the intensive training (apparently they feel they CAN host the training. Just, you know, not anything else. Idiots). The boss offered to let me go on Wednesday, when they will be training on cataloguing. I jumped at the chance- even though I am back to waffling over whether or not I will take my retirement this June.
And, in non-Evergreen-related news, I have finally achieved detente with LibreOffice and the printer, for making CD labels. Oh, yeah, it's still buggy, and it takes approximately five times as long as WordPerfect did. But, I am actually getting usable labels at the moment. I only print ten at a time (one sheet of labels), partly because I don't trust it to stay OK. And, yeah, to move the printed labels to the keeper file, I have to actually copy and paste each label, one by one, since LibreOffice makes each label a table. So, more than ten makes me bitchy and twitchy and easily confused. Plus, you know, you can't have two documents open at the same time, you have to keep switching them back and forth.
Man do I miss WordPerfect.
And today's rover1 tasks were not bad. Unlike earlier this week, when I was nearly in tears from the pain on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday. We'll see how tomorrow goes, I'm rover1 for four hours then. It's the miserable days that make me think I have got to get out of there.
And I think that's enough of that.
So the Evergreen consortium finally got the approval for the grant from the State Library. Oh, they tried to kill it, when it finally occurred to them that it had the potential to be a large contender to prevent libraries from going along with the State Library's own proprietary- and expensive- resource. But through sheer stubbornness, the COOL deal made it through. Even though after the fact, the State Library decided they would not allow any OTHER libraries to have grants to migrate into the system. Which, you know, ASSHOLES, SLO, YOU ARE ALL ASSHOLES. But I digress.
Then came the reckoning. At this point, we are expecting to go live with the new system in place March 15th. There will be a 3-day window of zero patron activity on the system (the boss is hoping we can close for at least a couple of those days, to give us all intensive training). More damaging for us, though, is the THREE WEEKS of zero circulation activity. Yep, as people return items, we will not be able to check them in for three weeks. And they will just have to pile up in back. We will be able to check things out (on the dummy program that exists for when we have power outage issues that affect the server), but no renewals. I really think that one will be nearly too damaging to recover from. I don't think we will have much of anything left for people to check out by the time we get to that third week.
Of course, every item in the collection will have to be retrofitted with a new barcode and cataloguing attached to it, not sure how the scheduling of that is set. I am not looking forward to having to deal with a 14-digit barcode when we're used to just 8 digits. I'm also not looking forward to replacing every patron's borrower's card. I am very sad to have to give up my own card, it was a very low number and I enjoyed the proof that I have been there from the beginning of the electronic age (for us).
Then, today I discovered that, in a complete reversal of what the consortium started out to do (which was, in a nutshell, use the open source Evergreen system to create something that Ohio libraries ran, keeping the money in Ohio), the contracted host for the COOL program decided that, not only could they NOT, in fact, host it themselves (subcontracted to some other Ohio server farm), but they were not going to provide tech support or handle the data migration, either. Those tasks they subcontracted to some place out of state.
Which, you know, What. The. FUCK? Why is the consortium giving them any money at all, since they are doing nothing themselves? The computer guy (who was the one to start the ball rolling in the first place) told me about it. He was obviously trying NOT to hate on them, since, as he said, at least they were willing to admit they were in over their heads. But he was not happy, either.
BUT! Next week is the intensive training (apparently they feel they CAN host the training. Just, you know, not anything else. Idiots). The boss offered to let me go on Wednesday, when they will be training on cataloguing. I jumped at the chance- even though I am back to waffling over whether or not I will take my retirement this June.
And, in non-Evergreen-related news, I have finally achieved detente with LibreOffice and the printer, for making CD labels. Oh, yeah, it's still buggy, and it takes approximately five times as long as WordPerfect did. But, I am actually getting usable labels at the moment. I only print ten at a time (one sheet of labels), partly because I don't trust it to stay OK. And, yeah, to move the printed labels to the keeper file, I have to actually copy and paste each label, one by one, since LibreOffice makes each label a table. So, more than ten makes me bitchy and twitchy and easily confused. Plus, you know, you can't have two documents open at the same time, you have to keep switching them back and forth.
Man do I miss WordPerfect.
And today's rover1 tasks were not bad. Unlike earlier this week, when I was nearly in tears from the pain on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday. We'll see how tomorrow goes, I'm rover1 for four hours then. It's the miserable days that make me think I have got to get out of there.
And I think that's enough of that.