Evergreen ILS Website

IRC log for #evergreen, 2014-12-30

| Channels | #evergreen index | Today | | Search | Google Search | Plain-Text | summary | Join Webchat

All times shown according to the server's local time.

Time Nick Message
04:23 sbrylander joined #evergreen
06:31 Griff`Ron|2 joined #evergreen
06:32 BigRig joined #evergreen
07:19 collum joined #evergreen
07:32 mrpeters joined #evergreen
07:34 rjackson-isl joined #evergreen
08:30 jboyer-isl joined #evergreen
08:32 ericar joined #evergreen
08:33 ericar left #evergreen
08:41 Shae joined #evergreen
08:42 mmorgan joined #evergreen
08:50 krvmga joined #evergreen
08:52 krvmga i have an opac search issue that is odd to me.
08:54 mmorgan krvmga: What are you seeing?
08:54 krvmga in our catalog at http://bark.cwmars.org , if i do a search for  "world war ii"  with a format limiter of Book(all), i get fewer results than if i do the same search using a more restrictive limiter of Book(regular print).
08:54 krvmga the reverse should be true.
08:55 krvmga if i do the search without the quotation marks, the numbers turn out the way i'd expect.
08:55 krvmga with the quotation marks, no
08:55 Dyrcona joined #evergreen
08:55 krvmga is there a quotation mark problem?
08:55 krvmga i don't know what's causing this.
08:56 krvmga the format limiter Book(all) is item_type(a,t)
08:57 krvmga the format limiter Book(regular print) is item_type(a,t) -item_form(a,b,c,d,f,g,h,i,o,q,r,s,z)
09:07 Dyrcona The quotes very likely change the search.
09:08 Dyrcona One would assume it turns it into a phrase.
09:08 Dyrcona berick: It turns out that I have not been running the fine generator on my new dev VM for the past ten days.
09:08 Dyrcona berick: Anything in particular I should watch for while testing your branch?
09:09 krvmga Dyrcona: i'm guessing that is so. what i can't account for is why there are more results with a more restrictive format filter.
09:10 mmorgan krvmga: I get more results in our catalog with book(all) - 6304 vs book(regular print) - 4192, so am not seeing the same thing
09:10 dbs krvmga: do you page through all of the results to find out how many there actually are?
09:11 dbs the "about" in "x of about y results" is truth, it's an estimate based on the sampling of the first set of matches it finds
09:11 dbs just like google estimates how many search results you'll get on the first page of results
09:12 Dyrcona Yeah, this is another place where Evergreen estimates.
09:12 Dyrcona Kind of like how the "hold queue position" is a lie.
09:12 krvmga mmorgan: is that with or without quotation marks?
09:13 mmorgan krvmga: With quotes
09:13 krvmga dbs: i haven't done that yet. i will do it now.
09:13 krvmga mmorgan: thanks
09:14 Dyrcona Also, you didn't mention if your search is subject, title, key word or what.
09:18 Dyrcona I take back what I said about the hold queue position. In that case it is the opposite.
09:18 Dyrcona It is too literal to be taken seriously. Holds don't necessarily fill in that order.
09:20 krvmga dbs: it looks like it's the estimate. as i page through, the "about" number adjusts upwards roughly every 1000 returns i go through.
09:24 rjackson-isl joined #evergreen
09:31 dbwells joined #evergreen
09:32 dbs Yeah, the estimate improves as you page through the search results. Just like Google.
09:32 dbs The bigger the sample size, the better the estimate.
09:41 RoganH joined #evergreen
09:54 krvmga dbs: i paged through both searches and got 5524 for Book(all) and 5217 for Book(regular print). this result conforms to expectations for the format limiters.
09:55 berick Dyrcona: if running with parallel=1 (from opensrf.xml), then the main thing to look for is reduced memory consumption.  beyond that, regardless of the parallel setting, it should be slightly faster ovarall since it skips no-fines transactions up front.
09:55 krvmga LPT - for quick paging through the results, just add the string ;page=<the page number you want> after the locg string in the URL.
09:56 krvmga LPT - don't use the last estimated page number because that will likely change. use a somewhat earlier number.
09:58 krvmga ;page=<your number> should be the last bit of the URL string
09:59 krvmga i'm curious, though, how the software actually makes the estimates.
10:01 Dyrcona berick: OK. I don't have a baseline for comparison at this point but I know it used to take hours. We'll see what happens.
10:01 * berick nods
10:07 Dyrcona berick: Looks like I've parallel=6 for fines and holds. Probably just copied the config from production.
10:09 berick Dyrcona: in that case, make sure you you have my latest patch (commented in LP yesterday)
10:09 berick otherwise, there will be no difference
10:10 Dyrcona Yep. cherry-picked it this morning.
10:10 berick k
10:10 berick to be clear, the code has minimal effect on parallel > 1 instances
10:11 berick well, depending on the # of no-fines circs, it may be more than minimal
10:12 Dyrcona I should count how many no fine circs we have vs. total circs.
10:12 Dyrcona Of course, my dev. database is 10 days out of date, so I'll have more overdue things than normal.
10:36 Griff`Ron joined #evergreen
11:03 abowling joined #evergreen
11:03 abowling left #evergreen
11:08 Dyrcona Well, that's good. It finished in about 1 hour, little under.
11:09 Dyrcona That's on 10 days of catching up, too.
11:35 akilsdonk joined #evergreen
12:03 jihpringle joined #evergreen
12:23 bmills joined #evergreen
12:28 kitteh_ joined #evergreen
13:00 nhilton joined #evergreen
13:00 nhilton_ joined #evergreen
13:24 cfarley Late yesterday I mentioned problems I was having with placing holds though OPAC.  I reviewed all my apache logs and opensrf and can't find any errors.
13:24 cfarley One thing I noticed is that if I click advanced options under the Place Hold Screen I get the following message "This item does not have any formats available for holds placement"
13:25 cfarley Does that give anyone ideas of where I can look to resolve my issues.
13:27 RoganH Is this a new system?
13:27 RoganH Have you gone through the checking holds policies, checking that items are holdable / not reference etc...?
13:29 RoganH The majority of the time people report holds issues to me the issues isn't technical but either cataloging or policy based.
13:31 cfarley What is the most nonrestrictive way to have hold policy set, without any policy at all?
13:34 RoganH We're a consortium so I've never made that kind of policy in practice but you could make a very simple policy that said don't use strict ou match, set the owning library as the top level and for all users and all item types.
13:35 RoganH But to answer the literal question there isn't a way to have a hold policy without a policy but you can have a very simple very broad policy.
13:37 Dyrcona It's actually a good idea to start with such a rule, and then add limits from there.
13:39 cfarley If a rule isn't allowing me to place a hold, should I get a message at all?
13:39 RoganH Evergreen tries to give you feedback so you'll get messages for many things.
13:40 cfarley currently when I click the Submit button on the place hold form, it reloads the page, no error of any kind.
13:40 Dyrcona cfarley: Yes, you'd get a message on screen that the hold is not allowed according to the rules or something like that. Not that there are no holdable formats.
13:40 Dyrcona Look closely. It will look just like the place hold screen but should have some text in red.
13:41 RoganH The holdable formats message sounds a bit like the message you'd get when there aren't any items eligible to fill the hold but I don't recall exact wording.
13:43 cfarley Hmm, ok, figuring out some things here.
13:43 Dyrcona Yeah, I'm not sure where that would come from either without digging into the code.
13:43 cfarley It seems to be releated to pickup location
13:55 cfarley So the Pickup location is only showing our Catelog, one time it loaded our system and branches, when I selected the correct branch it placed the hold correctly.
13:57 bshum Hmm, maybe an autogen & apache restart required
13:59 bshum I've seen that before though. Where not selecting a proper pickup lib causes hold placement to fail out.
14:00 * bshum thinks there's a bug ticket for that
14:03 Dyrcona Probably just autogen.sh, though an apache restart or reload won't hurt.
14:03 cfarley bshum:  Thank you, all locations are showing correctly after autogen and apache restart
14:05 nhilton_ joined #evergreen
14:06 bshum cfarley: Oh good, glad that worked.
14:09 cfarley So an recap for other who might make the same mistake.  We are a small "library"  with a single physical location.  Setting up evergreen we created a catelog and that was mostly a placeholder and then two system, one for our active library and one for our archive. We then made branches for different physical locations inside our library.  This worked fine except that on OPAC we didn't want...
14:09 cfarley ...our users to see the systems or branches, so those were made invisible on opac.  This is what broke the hold function.
14:11 RoganH Always take advice with a grain of salt (or from me with a whole salt lick) but I think long term using branches for locations inside your library is going to cause your more trouble than you want.
14:11 RoganH The only times I do that is when they have really distinct rules from the rest of the building like a special archive area.
14:12 RoganH I'm sure you can get it to work but down the road you may regret it.
14:12 bshum It's not unheard of though.
14:13 RoganH bshum: to play anti-devil's advocate, just because you've heard of it doesn't mean you'd want to do it :)
14:14 RoganH It's a slick setup if you're willing to say that long term you'll live with any issues that arise.
14:14 cfarley We just stumbled into it, not really knowing the best way to set things up for a small organization such as us.
14:14 bshum RoganH: Might also depend on what legacy system they're emulating.
14:15 RoganH bshum: bah.
14:15 bshum Or at least, that was the case for two systems that I know of who use org units as locations, not just physical distinct entities.
14:15 bshum But yeah, I getcha ;)
14:15 RoganH bshum: personally, I think emulating an old system is a dangerous trap
14:16 RoganH bshum: it's like taking a short cut across quicksand "this really wasn't the faster way to get there"
14:16 cfarley I think I was going to try to operate without branches, but it wouldn't let me delete the ou
14:17 collum A dangerous trap, but a smidgen of librarians don't like change.
14:17 bshum collum: Understatement of the year?
14:17 bshum What little is left of 2014 anyways
14:17 RoganH collum: bah
14:17 RoganH It's not librarians, humans as a whole don't like change.
14:18 Dyrcona cfarley: Evergreen pretty much assumes you have Consortium -> Systems -> Branches. You can change that, but things might crumble at the edges.
14:18 RoganH But sometimes short term change is less painful than the illusion of stability that falls out from under you.  It's actually management's job not IT's to tell the front line that.
14:18 jcamins RoganH: true, but only librarians are going around configuring ILSes, as a rule.
14:19 cfarley Dyrcona: is there a suggest way to set things up if you don't have those levels?
14:19 RoganH jcamins: I'm just saying you see change adverse attitudes everywhere, not just libraries.  Change over any big central system in any organization and you'll see it.
14:19 Dyrcona cfarley: Yes, pretend that you do. :)
14:20 Dyrcona cfarley: You edit the org. unit types directly in the database, but I'd advise against it.
14:20 jcamins RoganH: I know, but I was picturing Joe Average worrying about shelving locations, and it amused me.
14:20 Dyrcona It's one of those things where you have to know what you're doing, or you'll fubar your org tree.
14:21 RoganH jcamins: :)
14:21 cfarley I have two another things I wanted to mention.  1. the upgrade documentation for 2.6.4 has all the commands for 2.6.1, so if someone is a mindless zombie and just copies and pastes for the documentation it will not actually upgrade them to 2.6.4
14:22 cfarley not that I did that...:)
14:23 bshum cfarley: Yeah, upgrade documentation and procedures could use some love.
14:23 bshum They're generally written to be guides, not exact steps.  Given that we're not updating them thoroughly.  Add that to the long list of "we could use more volunteers for that" :\
14:24 cfarley Also the troubleshooting guide linked from the bottom of the installation instructions is also outdated and uses "/openils/bin/osrf_ctl.sh"
14:24 Dyrcona Add to that that every system ends up being different, 'cause someone downloaded something in a different place, etc.
14:25 Dyrcona cfarley: That last one is worthy of a documentation bug, methinks.
14:25 bshum Definitely.
14:25 bshum Admittedly a pretty old page too
14:25 cfarley The guide has helped me out many times, updated or not.
14:25 bshum Last changed 2012-10-15, bleh
14:26 bshum And it's only in the 1.6 docs
14:26 bshum This is probably something that needs porting to the master documentation
14:26 bshum And relinked
14:27 Dyrcona Oh. I don't condone anything other than the README for installation, but I'm pretty much alone in that.
14:27 cfarley Thank you all, you have been very helpful.
14:27 cfarley All my users have been complaining that they can't place hold, now we'll see how many of them actually use it.
14:28 sarabee joined #evergreen
14:28 RoganH Helpful?  Take that back, people will lose their jobs over this!  (sorry, obviously wanting to channel Groucho today)
14:29 bshum cfarley++ # good luck, hope it goes better for your users :)
14:29 cfarley RoganH: don't worry you weren't helpful at all.
14:29 cfarley :)
14:29 Dyrcona The Unhelp Desk?
14:29 RoganH cfarley: thank you
14:29 RoganH Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
14:30 RoganH (sadly that does actually fix it a lot of the time)
14:31 Dyrcona @dunno
14:31 pinesol_green Dyrcona: Message root @ server God....Universe going down for reboot....
14:31 Dyrcona Not the one I wanted, but it will have to do.
14:31 RoganH @dunno
14:31 pinesol_green RoganH: http://scientopia.org/blogs/scicu​rious/files/2013/03/cousin-it.png
14:31 RoganH 404 on that one now
14:33 cfarley One more quick question, is it possible (or advisible) to enable Volumes and Copies on a Catelog and not use systems or branches?
14:33 nhilton joined #evergreen
14:35 RoganH I'm concerned I'm not grokking what you're asking but volumes / copies aren't directly related to your org unit setup.
14:35 RoganH So, yes.
14:35 Dyrcona cfarley: Not sure I understand the question. Are you asking if you could just use the consortium as your only org. unit, the answer is a qualified yes.
14:36 cfarley So I'm saying, hide everything below the catelog and effectively ignore them.
14:37 Dyrcona Yes, but a lot of things expect there to be a tree and go up and down the tree looking for settings, etc.
14:37 Dyrcona So, 1 mistake can throw that off.
14:37 cfarley I see, maybe I'll have to do some testing
14:38 Dyrcona If all you do is allow the top org unit type to have volumes/copies and users, and then just use that org unit type as your only org. unit, you should be OK.
14:39 Dyrcona Testing is always good, preferably in a separate installation from production.
14:55 cfarley I just noticed that my Catelog and system levels are greyed out in the Pickup location dropdown box on the place hold screen.  Does anyone know what is needed to get these enabled?
14:57 bshum cfarley: I believe that's controlled via the type of organization unit that's employed.  There's a flag on the org unit type that sets it as allowing volumes and copies. If the unit type doesn't allow that, then they're typically not eligible as hold pickup locations.
14:57 bshum Generally speaking, it's assumed in the stock setup that the top level and system levels do not actually house copies of materials.
15:01 cfarley bshum:Still greyed out after enabling volume and copies, rerunning autogen and apache.
15:02 bshum Be careful about turning on that option though, cause it means that catalogers can create volumes/copies in those org units if they have the permissions to do so.  And you could end up with stuff cataloged and owned at the wrong levels of the library
15:02 Dyrcona cfarley: Any time you mess with org units, you have to run autogen.sh.
15:02 mmorgan bshum: Is it the "Can have volumes and copies" or the "Can Have Users" that controls what shows as a pickup location?
15:02 Dyrcona And, you should use the -u option when you do so.
15:02 bshum mmorgan: My expectation is that it's the can have volumes/copies
15:03 bshum Based on what I remember from the tt2 files for hold placement
15:03 RoganH bshum: I think you meant "you _will_ end up with stuff cataloged and owned at the wrong levels of the library"
15:03 Dyrcona If you only setup 1 org unit, then you can't have wrong levels of the library. :)
15:03 Dyrcona It's a bad idea to go messing with that after you've got a working system, though.
15:04 RoganH Dyrcona++
15:46 Dyrcona @dunno
15:46 pinesol_green Dyrcona: Go away, or I'll replace you with a very small shell script!
16:29 * mmorgan curses lp 1368754
16:29 pinesol_green Launchpad bug 1368754 in Evergreen "Adding copy locations in staff client allows empty name field" (affected: 3, heat: 14) [Undecided,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/1368754
17:01 nhilton_ joined #evergreen
17:02 pie_ joined #evergreen
17:02 pie_ Hey guys, has anyone ever used usemarcon or have access to some conversion tables/rulesets?
17:03 mrpeters left #evergreen
17:07 pinesol_green Incoming from qatests: Test Success - http://testing.evergreen-ils.org/~live/test.html <http://testing.evergreen-ils.org/~live/test.html>
17:08 mmorgan left #evergreen
17:37 nhilton joined #evergreen
18:34 RBecker joined #evergreen
20:36 rjackson-home joined #evergreen
20:57 edoceo joined #evergreen
22:07 bmills joined #evergreen
23:14 RBecker joined #evergreen

| Channels | #evergreen index | Today | | Search | Google Search | Plain-Text | summary | Join Webchat