Syrup in the Fall
Graham Fawcett
Now that summer has passed (hope you had a good one!), I'm returning
to the Syrup project and would love to hear from the list-members.
What priorities would you like to set for the project? What sucks
about today's Syrup, and what do you love? How can I help you to play
with Syrup, or to set up a test installation?
Best,
Graham
Dan Scott
Hi Graham:
Thanks for the question. I'm still on leave, but I think the major
problem that we have with Syrup at Laurentian (and the reason we're
not using it) is that it didn't hit the basic requirements we had
outlined for the management of physical items at
http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=feature:academic_reserves
- specifically, supporting workflows for moving physical items on and
off reserve. A suggested workflow for physical items is somewhat
buried under the Instructors requirements: "to place existing physical
items on reserve, an instructor should be able to simply search for
the item in the library system and add it to one of their courses with
a specific loan period. The rest of the applicable workflow (recall
item, generate a reserve pull list, place the item on reserve with the
new location and / or loan period) should be hidden, with the
exception of being able to see the status of each item in their course
list"
Right now in Syrup, you can search for physical items and list them as
part of a reading list, but you can't say "Now go forth and get all of
those items from wherever they may currently be living (stacks, or
lying on a prof's desk) and get them moved over to the new reserves
shelving location and change their circulation modifier so that they
now have four-hour reserve loan periods". I think Evergreen could
support most of this, with the exception of recalls, today: we could
put the items in transit & change their circ modifiers so that they
show up on transit lists, or perhaps place them on hold for the
reserves desk so they show up on holds pull lists, and when they get
checked in to the reserves desk they would show up in the catalogue as
being available from the reserves shelving location & the circ
modifier would ensure that they get the altered circulation rules that
we desire.
Instead, we're using bookbags to list physical items in an entirely
separate interface (http://biblio.laurentian.ca/reserves/), and staff
have had to generate their own lists of items to pull from the shelves
and manually change the loan periods & locations on each item.
We'd far prefer to use Syrup, but we simply can't at present.
--
Dan Scott
Laurentian University
Dan Scott
> 2009/9/15 Graham Fawcett <graham.fawc...@gmail.com>:
>
>
> > Hi folks,
>
> > Now that summer has passed (hope you had a good one!), I'm returning
> > to the Syrup project and would love to hear from the list-members.
> > What priorities would you like to set for the project? What sucks
> > about today's Syrup, and what do you love? How can I help you to play
> > with Syrup, or to set up a test installation?
>
> Hi Graham:
>
> Thanks for the question. I'm still on leave, but I think the major
> problem that we have with Syrup at Laurentian (and the reason we're
> not using it) is that it didn't hit the basic requirements we had
http://groups.google.com/group/syrup-reserves-discuss/t/68f8809cc68a06de?hl=en
where one idea had been to use buckets - bookbags can be surfaced as
buckets, for what it's worth, but this would be record buckets and it
would still mean that someone would have to go through the list of
records, list all of the local copies associated with those records,
determine which records did not have copies that were already in the
desired reserves location / did not have the desired circ modifier,
and then throw those copies into a copy bucket to modify their
location & circ modifier. And possibly then generate a report that
lists the items that need to be moved to their new location. Lots of
work, which Syrup should be able to save us from (I hope!).
Graham Fawcett
Thanks for responding, especially while you're still on leave!
On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 9:42 AM, Dan Scott <den...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the question. I'm still on leave, but I think the major
> problem that we have with Syrup at Laurentian (and the reason we're
> not using it) is that it didn't hit the basic requirements we had
> outlined for the management of physical items at
> http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=feature:academic_reserves
> - specifically, supporting workflows for moving physical items on and
> off reserve. A suggested workflow for physical items is somewhat
> buried under the Instructors requirements: "to place existing physical
> items on reserve, an instructor should be able to simply search for
> the item in the library system and add it to one of their courses with
> a specific loan period. The rest of the applicable workflow (recall
> item, generate a reserve pull list, place the item on reserve with the
> new location and / or loan period) should be hidden, with the
> exception of being able to see the status of each item in their course
> list"
Right, of course. The 'Notify Circ of Wanted Items' feature in Syrup
is unfinished. I would be glad to work on an Evergreen implementation
of the workflow. I think we've got some good modularity in Syrup, and
we should be able to accommodate Evergreen without tightly coupling
Syrup to it.
Let me re-read the dokuwiki requirements, and let's sort out the
details of an Evergreen integration. If there are Evergreen-general
and Laurentian-specific details that we can tease out, all the better,
so that we can support more EG-using institutions.
In short, I'd like to make this a short-term priority. Let's flesh it out
when you have time.
> Instead, we're using bookbags to list physical items in an entirely
> separate interface (http://biblio.laurentian.ca/reserves/), and staff
> have had to generate their own lists of items to pull from the shelves
> and manually change the loan periods & locations on each item.
IIRC, a bookbag URL can be pasted into the physical-item search field
in Syrup, and the contents of the bookbag will be pulled from
Evergreen as the search-results (bypassing Syrup's Z39.50
search). It's cryptic and non-intuitive, of course -- I added more as
a proof of concept than a proper integration. I doubt it would help in
Laurentian's workflow, but I thought it might be of interest. Maybe
this could be fleshed out into a nicer UI action ('pull one of my EG
bookbags into this Syrup site', or from the EG side, 'push this
bookbag into one of my Syrup sites').
Best,
Graham
Graham Fawcett
I'm trying to picture a perfect-world Evergreen/Syrup integration,
where such an integration doesn't require much (any) work on Evergreen
internals, and doesn't prevent Syrup from being used with other IL
systems. Specifically, I'm asking for the perfect Evergreen/Syrup-at-
Laurentian integration. Dream big!
On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 10:05 AM, Dan Scott <den...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As an aside, this is related to an earlier thread on physical items at
> http://groups.google.com/group/syrup-reserves-discuss/t/68f8809cc68a06de?hl=en
> where one idea had been to use buckets - bookbags can be surfaced as
> buckets, for what it's worth, but this would be record buckets and it
> would still mean that someone would have to go through the list of
> records, list all of the local copies associated with those records,
> determine which records did not have copies that were already in the
> desired reserves location / did not have the desired circ modifier,
> and then throw those copies into a copy bucket to modify their
> location & circ modifier. And possibly then generate a report that
> lists the items that need to be moved to their new location. Lots of
> work, which Syrup should be able to save us from (I hope!).
I am guessing that a 'record bucket' contains MARC records, and a
'copy bucket' contains copy records, yes?
(Can we assume that physical reserves items are exposed as MARC
records? I'm thinking of oddball volumes that profs leave at the
Reserves desk, but might not appear in a catalogue.)
Is it fair to put the burden of record-to-copy refinement upon a
librarian? We're not expecting a professor to select a copy. Can this
part be automated, or guided by automation?
> ...I think the major problem that we have with Syrup at Laurentian
> (and the reason we're not using it) is that it didn't hit the basic
> requirements we had outlined for the management of physical items at
> http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=feature:academic_reserves
> - specifically, supporting workflows for moving physical items on
> and off reserve. A suggested workflow for physical items is somewhat
> buried under the Instructors requirements: "to place existing
> physical items on reserve, an instructor should be able to simply
> search for the item in the library system and add it to one of their
> courses with a specific loan period. ..."
Searching in the library system fits with your bookbag approach. Do
you want to keep Syrup's separate search interface? At Laurentian,
does it make more sense to just have an 'import bookbag into Syrup'
facility? (I can't see the harm in keeping Syrup search as well, but
maybe you see a good reason for disabling it.)
> The rest of the applicable workflow (recall item, generate a reserve
> pull list, place the item on reserve with the new location and / or
> loan period) should be hidden, with the exception of being able to
> see the status of each item in their course list"
So let me see if I've got this straight. We assume that the bookbags
find their ways into Syrup, and that Syrup is the definitive source
for 'what Reserves needs'. For each request from Syrup, the library
needs to:
* discover available copies (incl. alternate sources, like ILL?)
* put a hold, recall or other modifier on the 'most-available' copy
(and if no copy is available, then inform the prof)
* track the transit status of the copy (at a user-friendly level:
"requested", "in transit", "at desk", "unavailable")
* perhaps send out alerts if the items don't arrive "at desk" by the
required time
* change the location and circ-rules of the item when it arrives at
reserves
* upon completion of Reserve use, put the item in transit back to its
permanent location.
It hits me that much of this is not only Evergreen-agnostic, but
Syrup-agnostic too. Would it make sense to write a service that sits
between Reserves and ILS, and wire Syrup and Evergreen to each side of
it?
If my little workflow is correct, then:
* Can we automate (or support) the discovery of the 'most-available'
copy? Must a librarian eyeball each request, or just the hard cases?
* How would we track the association of a copy with the original
request? Could each request relate to a unique record-bucket (with
the title in it) and a copy-bucket (which starts empty)? When the
record bucket is emptied, and the copy-bucket is filled, it means
that a copy has been selected? Or is that silly?
* Given a copy ID, could you write a general 'send this copy to
Reserves' action, and a 'check-status-of-Reserves-request' function?
Or, will Syrup need to understand Evergreen internals, and know
about things like circ-modifiers and holds, and when to choose
which?
More questions will follow, Dan, but that's a start.
I throw down my gauntlet to our fellow list-members, too. Whether or
not you're using Evergreen, if you'd like to describe how Syrup ought
to integrate with your ILS and implement your Reserves workflow, then
stand up and state your demands! (No guarantees it will get done, of
course, but fortune favours the bold.)
Best,
Graham