Audience: Everybody

Action: Information Only

The Bottom Line:

SirsiDynix will be installing the latest version of their software on RSAcat this Sunday, Oct 22nd, starting around 8 PM.  The upgrade is expected to take 4 to 6 hours to complete.  After it is completed, a full system harvest and processing need to complete prior to showing complete search results.

We have a SirsiDynix consultant standing by for Monday morning in case anything odd happens Tony and Kendal can’t figure out.  Normally there are a couple minor things we need tweaking or rebuild, and many of the various widgets we’ve added over the years will need to be reworked a bit.

Background:

This upgrade will fix many issues we see on the backend, and many smaller things patrons might have noticed.  It also tweaks the screen layout to make it more responsive on mobile devices and meet updated accessibility standards.   After the upgrade is complete, it will require some additional time on our part next week to tweak the CSS files and widgets to fully re-integrate the RSA look-and-feel.

Major issues fixed include:

1 – Preferred pickup library changing to the first library in the list bug.

This has been an issue for a bit now.  If your library closed for more than a few days and we removed it from the list to block new hold pickups there, RSAcat might change that library’s patron’s pickup library.  Also, sometimes if the patron clicked anything else in the RSAcat My Account, Personal Information tab, Preferences screen, it would often set the default pickup library to Alpha Park.  

This has been fixed so that if the patron’s preferred pickup library is no longer available, the patron will be prompted to select a new preferred library when saving their My Account preferences.

2 – Allowing ALL records to be sorted by pub date, not just a select few.

To provide more search flexibility to patrons, the sorting of search results is no longer limited to a configured size, regardless of the sorting option selected. Previously, only relevance was sorted without limits.  RSA’s limit was something like 300 to 500 records max.

For example, rather than limiting the sorting to the first several hundred results, RSAcat will now handle sorting for all of the search results for a specific author, even when thousands of results are returned.

3 – Date range display for continuing resources

To prevent confusion over whether or not a publication ended in the current calendar year, date ranges for continuing resources have been enhanced to append the  message “(Ongoing)” to the date range display.

For example, the date range display for a continuing resource that began in 2005 would appear like this: 2005-2023 (Ongoing)

4 – New ‘Continue my work’ popup display for patrons

RSAcat will now better detect user activity, and timeout messages only appear when no user activity is detected. Any user activity detected prompts the session timeout counter to reset. When no user activity is detected, the session timeout messages appear as configured for your library’s profile.  Many of you will not notice this.  On the backend it’s a huge win because I’m constantly getting kicked out in the middle of something and losing all my work when I take a phone call.