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308 results found

  1. Libraries use Decision Center to determine what is not circulating or what has been at the Branch for a long time without circulating.

    The new "item status date" added in Sierra 6.0 could help Decision Center identify items that were moved to a branch but have not been checked out (eg. items get to the new branch by using CIRCA's item status change from "checked in" > "in transit" > and then are checked in at the new branch)

    Reports that would benefit from this would be the Maintenance Report or any report that lists a "created date" and "last…

    7 votes

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  2. We're interested in evaluating how well our Floating Collections are performing to see if it's benefiting specific locations or ranking specific location codes preferably, but not necessarily limited to, change of circ or transit wait time post-float at branches to determine what should and shouldn't float for that branch going forward based on past performance. Besides the drought report in Decision Center, this information appears to be lacking. We'd like for reporting capabilities to be added to its data to help inform decision-making in terms of tweaking Floating Collections location codes to keep and which to return to non-Floating going…

    7 votes

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  3. As a consortium, our system has hundreds of location codes. We appreciate the new functionality to add locations to scopes ourselves, but it is cumbersome to scroll through the list of hundreds of branch entries each time to find the code you need to add. It would be helpful if there was search functionality, where you can type in the code, and it brings up the corresponding entry in the branches list for you to select.

    6 votes

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  4. Staff assisting any customers who cannot pickup all their ready holds at once, would benefit from seeing and sorting the expiry date of holds in the patron's holds list. This will assist with preventing their holds from expiring and being placed again.

    6 votes

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  5. 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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  6. Support team told us Sierra isn't designed to supply hold request date for cancellation notices. Please consider add it. thanks

    6 votes

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  7. The Item Code 1 field was going to solve all my statistical issues. I thought it had 5 characters and each character could be 0-9 which meant I could assign a meaning to each character. For example, the first character indicates agency (1 for CPL, 2 for ADL, 3 for BKM) and the second character indicates audience (1 for adult, 2 for young adult, 3 for juvenile, 4 for other) and the third character, format, etc. HOWEVER it turns out that the largest number this field can hold is 32767 which is weirdly random and very limiting when you want…

    6 votes

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  8. Our library would like the option to have the return address for bills reflect the address of the patron's home library (as defined in the patron record) rather than the owning location of the item. The current setup (using the owning location of the first item on the bill) means that when patrons check out items sent from another branch to fill a hold, they can receive a bill from a library that they may never have been to. While patrons can visit any of our locations to resolve a bill, we would prefer the bill to reflect their local…

    6 votes

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  9. Enhance cybersecurity by not revealing the api methods through the swagger interface to unauthenticated users. For example, a potential hacker can view the swagger interface which shows all methods and explains how to use them. This is an issue on all api endpoints including the iii sandbox. My idea is to only reveal the swagger methods to authenticated users.

    https://sandbox.iii.com/iii/sierra-api/swagger/index.html#!/patrons

    6 votes

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  10. At this time it is apparently possible to retrieve the patrons Reading History via REST API sorted by date (oldest first or newest first). The most requested API enhancement request for us is to be able to retrieve the patrons Reading History via REST API sorted by Title. Another enhancement request is to be able to retrieve the patrons Reading History via REST API sorted by Author. This would be useful since users may have hundreds of items in the reading history.

    6 votes

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  11. When creating a new customer record from scratch, or when updating & finalizing those submitted through our online application, we have staff perform some checks to prevent duplicate records.

    They'll begin by searching the Name index to make sure that there's no pre-existing record for the same name. Then as backup, they'll try searching by birth date or phone number.

    However, when you search by birth date or phone number, the results do not come back in alphabetical order, making things a bit harder than they should be for frontline staff. See example image where the search for the DOB…

    6 votes

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  12. Our patrons are curious about their loan history. They would like to sort it by author or title in addition to the checkout date. We have told them to export it. But exporting the checkout history loses the checkout date! Could more sorting possibilities be added to the catalogue and checkout date added when exporting?

    6 votes

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  13. Skip certain MARC subfields when preparing data for SIP2 connection.

    Specifically:
    When Sierra needs to send information to display an item title on a patron-facing device (automated materials handler, self-checkout kiosk, etc.) via SIP2, it currently appears to concatenate all occupied subfields of MARC field 245 and remove the delimiters. This means that certain information not intended to be patron-facing can end up appearing in the title the patron sees on screen (e.g. "880-01 Desu nôto 2..." appearing instead of just "Desu nôto 2...", where "880-01" is not actually part of the title, but rather a reference to another field…

    6 votes

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  14. Searches of Innovative databases that contain authority records using Z39.50 search do not return authority records.

    The ability to search for an authority records would contribute to the quality of the database and make it easier to generate linked data.

    6 votes

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  15. Currently, the bibs, holdings, and orders APIs do not return the expanded Locations fields for records with multi locations. The multi location value that is returned is useless without the expanded values.

    6 votes

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  16. Currently, when a patron is logged into their Encore account and they place a request, the system will default to their home library for the pickup location. If they want to pick up somewhere else, they have to manually choose that option from the dropdown menu.

    We want to keep the home library field limited to physical library locations, but allow for alternative pickup options that aren't specifically a home library (community pickup location, or hold lockers, etc). Right now, if you want to pick up somewhere other than your home library, you have to choose from a dropdown option.…

    6 votes

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  17. We'd like autorenew to look at the overdue count of the item rather than the patron HLOVERDUE (highest level overdue) when determining if the item should be renewed. This might be best implemented as a toggle in Admin Corner.

    Currently, if the patron has a billed item, autorenew will cite the patron block for HLOVERDUE when blocking other items that would otherwise renew. In our system, we prefer to use the item's overdue count rather than HLOVERDUE for autorenew. When a replacement bill is on a patron record, they don't understand why autorenew has stopped working for their patron record.…

    6 votes

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  18. It is sometimes helpful to see who created, updated or deleted a record. Catmaint provides a lot of detail but doesn't cover many record types. I propose the following solution, which doesn't have particularly burdensome storage requirements:

    1. Build a many-to-many table with an id primary key column, a timestamp, a code indicating the C-R-U-Uprevious-D record operation and foreign keys linking to record_metadata.id and to iii_user.id.
    2. Backfill this new table using the available timestamps in record_metadata, catmaint and any other table like catmaint which might provide record edit history.
    3. Rename record_metadata and drop its four *_gmt timestamp columns. Yes, this creates…
    5 votes

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  19. Today our Payment History file reached 9,999 records which is close enough to the 10k record capacity that the attached error message was displayed. Fortunately the staff member had the presence of mind to screen-capture this error dialog today so I could read its message verbatim, but this isn't always the case. It would be helpful for an error of this severity to be written to the System Messages log viewed using the web-based Sierra admin app.

    Given the low variety of error messages written to that log, there must be all kinds of similar messages which are not logged,…

    5 votes

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  20. Ability for patron to add money to their Sierra patron account (via self-check) to pay for future fines, fees, and printing. We are looking to go mostly cashless, but some patrons aren't able to get credit cards (like our young patrons here after school). Our self-check machine takes cash, which would allow patrons to print and pay fees/fines with cash, even if the staff doesn't have a cash register.

    5 votes

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