What’s New

The RSAcat Mobile App is back online for both Android and iOS.

Complete functionality including search, holds, bill pay, and viewing accounts on the mobile app on Android and iOS has been restored. If patrons uninstalled the app, they will have to reinstall it to begin using it. Links to download the app are below and are already posted to everyone’s RSAcat homepage’s sidebar.

• RSAcat Mobile on Android
• RSAcat Mobile on iOS

Patrons that did not uninstall the app will have it working again as soon as they open the app. The app will have saved the previous login state, so if the patron had logged off, then they will have to login again. If they remained logged in, then no new login should be necessary.

Please report any new issues to the RSA help desk at

Outage Background:

Last week, SirsiDynix announced that they’ve come to terms with the 3rd party developer of our RSAcat Mobile app (BLUEcloud Mobile in Sirsi terms) to get service restored. The app has been down for all SirsiDynix customers world-wide since late November.

The app’s features should now all have resumed working for patrons.  We will soon be modifying the message text on the main pages of RSAcat (in a browser) to both link the app once again and remove the outage notice.

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.

Subject: Updated RSA Library Delivery Codes list – 22 Sep 2023

To: Member library staff who process items for delivery

The Bottom Line:

We have updated the RSA Library Delivery Codes list with a couple additional bits of information.  You can always see the most up-to-date list on the RSA Support Site here: https://support.librariesofrsa.org/about/member-libraries/

We have also created a version specifically to print out and use when you are filling out labels for delivery.  Get that list here: https://support.librariesofrsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/RSA_Library_Delivery_Codes-09-22-2023.pdf

Background:

The list has an entry right at the top for RSA Cataloging and Staff requests.  It’s the same as the AG_ALS-PDC listing a bit further down the list.  Having it listed at the top again was a frequent member library request.

We also added in the user barcode you should be using to check items out to the three RSA Union Listing libraries who request items.  We hope this helps libraries to process items more quickly and lists everything needed right there.  It also acts as a reminder that holds for these three libraries are checked out to that user ID, labeled and put in a bin rather than put into transit in workflows.

Thank you.

We’re happy to share that as of this week, this support website is live at the following domain!

support.librariesofrsa.org

There are a few more steps involved to getting the site into more of our member’s hands. However, if you are reading this you are among some of the first to be using it. Your feedback is extremely important. Please let us know if something isn’t working how you think it should by contacting Member Services through the RSA Help Desk.

We can be reached through the usual email — though we ask that you please include “New RSA support site” in the subject.

Feel free to offer your suggestions on how we might improve the new site by using the help desk email address above.