Blogging will be short this week, as (a) there are lovely real-life things going on at home, (2) my library director has gone crazy at work, and (iii) there isn’t really a third opportunity for YHB to write for this Tohu Bohu.\n
I will, however, report that I have survived another evil webinar. While I suppose that there is some comfort in knowing that it is not just some sort of blind stupidity on the part of circ here that prevents us from writing useful and accurate reports, it would be nice if the thing that prevents us were not simply that the report-writing module does not work properly. Gr.\n
Also, when I was complaining about web training the other day? I forgot to mention that high-pitched giggling is not good trait in an on-line trainer.\n
But here’s the thing: once a month, in order to do the billing, we here in circ need a sheet of paper for each patron that is being billed, which should have on it all outstanding fines for overdue books, and the titles, bar code numbers and call numbers of those books, as well as the amount of the fines and certain information about the patron. In our old system, which I won’t name, although it does have the same name as a series of heliosphere probes, in order to get this information, we printed out a list of items, and then printed out individual sheets for each patron, and then hand-wrote the call numbers<\/i> because there was no way to create a report that would give us what we wanted. Well, and actually, it was that creating such a report would have been incredibly laborious and annoying, more so (believe it or not) than doing it the way I’ve described.\n
Well, that was crazy. And it was, I’m afraid, typical of the report-writing problem in our old system.\n
Now, however, we have left that software behind, and we have a new, new, new ILS. My hopes for this were high, but my particular hope for convenient and easy report-writing were high. That would make our lives ever so much easier.\n
In our shiny new system, we cannot actually get a list of items that require billing. Well, not an accurate list.\n
Does that seem like a flaw?\n
Because to me, it seems problematic.\n
But leaving aside the accuracy of the list, there’s this: we cannot create a report that has both book titles and the name of the person who has them out. The two pieces of information—patron name and item title—cannot appear in the same report. They just can’t. We can get the book’s ISBN number, should it have one, on the report with the Patron name, but not the title. Or the call number, for all of that. \n
And the thing that really, really astonishes me is that ours was the third session by our webinar host, and the first time that issue had come up.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Gripy Blogger gripes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196,198],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hatchet-job","category-libraries"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18850,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12308\/revisions\/18850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}