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  1. The Situation: Our library's room checkout suddenly shorted to a hard limit of 6:00pm. I discovered that last year's spring break hours were listed in the Hours Open table and last year spring break occurred earlier in March.

    The Problem: Entries in the Hours Open table do not include the year. If the year was included, hour checkout issue wouldn't have been an issue.

    Solution #1: Add the ability to include the year to Hours Open table. Default to the current year but have the ability to change the year.

    Solution #2: Revamp the Hours Open table. Modifying the Hours…

    6 votes

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  2. Problem:
    In the current version of the Sierra system, restricted or sensitive bibliographic records can only be suppressed from the public catalog but remain visible and accessible to catalogers within the system. This visibility creates the risk of accidental editing, publishing, or mishandling of these records, particularly:

    • Restricted Records: Some records are sensitive or confidential and should not be visible to all catalogers.
    • Records Under Review: Records undergoing auditing or verification need protection from edits until the review is completed.

    • Recommendation:
      Introduce a feature that allows the System Administrator or Cataloging Supervisor to hide specific bibliographic records within the Sierra…

    9 votes

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  3. Sierra queues the hold for paging at the time the hold is placed, based on the data the hold was placed with. If the hold is modified after that (by changing the Not Wanted Before date), those changes don't update the paging queue, and Sierra will continue to page as if the hold had not been modified.

    10 votes

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  4. Staff need an easy way to make an item "damaged" when performing check-in. The current damaged workflow requires staff to be in the patron account.

    All of our libraries have book drops, and every day, damaged items are returned. It doesn't make sense for library staff to stop their process, review the item record, and then review the patron account details in order to mark an item as damaged.

    Can the "Mark Damaged Items" button that appears in the checkout function (checked out items) screen be added to the check-in window. I have attached an image where we would like…

    3 votes

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  5. We'd like to see a date/time stamp on the "Restart a process/terminal" display in the Admin Corner and be able to sort by it. We sometimes run out of licenses because staff don't sign out of their SDA sessions at the end of their shifts, and we have to contact Innovative and request that connections older than the current day be closed. It would be helpful to be able to do this ourselves. Currently, we can preemptively reset all connections early in the morning before staff arrive, but if a problem arises during the day we don't want to cause…

    7 votes

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  6. For volume records, it would be helpful to have 'volume' listed as an option in Admin - Settings - New Record Templates (see attachment). When adding volume records, it would be helpful to have the desired 'volume' template appear in the same way our item record template appears. Currently we have to always select the volume template we want to use. All the other options are listed and it would be nice to have 'volume' listed as well.

    4 votes

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  7. Currently the Record History report for Bib Records in Sierra contains a list of record changes, the login that made a change, and when it was changed.

    However, if the change to a bib record was attempted with a login without the required permissions, Sierra will ask for a login with elevated permissions and allow the user make a change once logged in. In this case, the Record history will record the first login (without required permissions), instead of the elevated login needed to make the change.

    Problem: Record History report for Bib Records Record History report for Bib Records…

    5 votes

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  8. The Invoice Summary that is sent after posting invoices only lists the voucher number. Our Finance department has to go through the Invoice Register and match the invoice number to the voucher number to know what invoices should be paid. This is very time consuming, and susceptible to human error. Please consider adding the invoice number to the Invoice Summary.

    15 votes

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  9. It's great to be able to add a single item to a review file from the item record page. It would be even better if we could add multiple items from the item summary page.

    6 votes

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  10. Idea: Create an additional notice type, Hold Pickup Reminder/Courtesy, that can be configured to send a reminder notice to patrons that they have a hold ready for pickup that is about to expire, similar to the courtesy notice for checked-out items.

    Relevance: When you place an order for pickup at most other businesses, you are sent a reminder email before the pickup deadline that the item is ready for pickup. Libraries would benefit from a similar option, especially those that use hold pickup lockers where there is limited space for holds. This way, if a patron decides they don't want…

    23 votes

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  11. We'd like to be able to limit access to the Login Names & Parameters section of the Admin Corner (especially the Limit Network Access tables) via permissions. Certain functions, such as load tables, require certain staff members to have access to the Admin app, but having the login names and parameters unrestricted leaves an unnecessary hole in security. There are other functions in Admin Corner that require separate permissions and prompt users to enter their credentials, but not this one.

    7 votes

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  12. Problem: The text of emails sent when using the Approval and Denial notifications in Recommends cannot be currently altered. We would like to be able to provide more customer friendly email templates to patrons that allow us to explain why an item was denied or what the process is for items that are approved.

    Impact: Being able to communicate with our patrons at the outset of the process will save staff time by not having to have go back and forth with customers over email to explain processes and reasons for purchase requests. Additionally it will improve the customer's experience…

    3 votes

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  13. For some fragile items that we don't want to put in transit (e.g. telescopes, vinyl records), we want to be able to limit check-ins to the owning location. We can communicate these limits to patrons on our website and through signage or labels, but we'd like there to be an option within Sierra to generate a pop-up (with an option to override) so staff are alerted to tell the patron they have to bring the item back to another location.

    7 votes

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  14. I recently wanted to run a search for all records that matched certain criteria and did not have an 856 field. However, Create Lists does not currently have a "lacks field" option. It would be very helpful to be able to search for records that do not have certain fields.

    19 votes

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  15. I would like to add an optional parameter to the Sierra API endpoint for checking in items to allow for backdating those transactions as you can within in the client as it may help with automating some projects.

    For an immediate example, I have identified a number of items that were not removed from the checkout table correctly due to locked patron records, where the were placed in transit and I can see a time the checkout ought to have occurred via the in transit message. I would like to write a script to correct these failed checkins once they…

    4 votes

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  16. PROBLEM: When I search for an item via F3 Search/Holds, after finding the desired item and clicking to place the hold, a popup screen appears called "Search for patron." If I don't have the library card number but instead type in a name, and there is only one matching result, there is no way to preview whether that patron account is truly the correct one or not. Plus, for libraries with multiple branches, it is helpful to see the preferred pickup location.

    SUGGESTED SOLUTION: in other areas/screens, there is a small i (info) button that one can hover their cursor…

    4 votes

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  17. Our consortium would like an automated way to update the encoding level to help with managing load profiles that use the encoding level priority function. It would be very helpful to add an API endpoint for updating all the MARC Leader fields. The 008 MARC field can only be used for updating some of the Leader fields.

    3 votes

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  18. In the print/send orders function, it can be easy to accidentally upload an order to a vendor multiple times. As a means to mitigate this error I propose a two part feature.

    As a first step, the system should provide some indication when viewing the orders to ftp queue if an order has already been ftp'd once. I could see two methods for accomplishing this. 1) Add a column to the queue display for sent date, taking the most recent date present that has been appended to the ISBN pick field in a record from having been previously sent. 2)…

    27 votes

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  19. Improve diacritic searching in Sierra to include Semitic languages, especially Arabic! We have a fair number of Arabic books in out collections, and a large Arabic community, but Sierra support for Arabic characters does not seem complete. We often find that Arabic letters in Sierra is replaced by a white square, which seems to mean that the character is not supported. The names appear fine in Vega but the non supported letters do not seem to be indexed in the search results. This is an important language for members of our community and support for it is important in our…

    7 votes

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  20. Each week staff go into Create Lists and repopulate a designated review file with current data from a system-generated list. Two examples of system-generated lists include the OVERDUE ITEMS and PURCHASE ALERTS files. It would be great if our site could schedule Sierra to identify a specific list number and replenish or refresh the contents of it with most current system file's data. This would make the task fully automated. It's important to our system to be able to designate which list or review file number to use for each system-generated file job, however. We are a consortium and our…

    1 vote

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