Hi all
As some of you will know, I was quite vocal <g> at the EIUG in September, as
we'd been experiencing serious problems with the Millennium Materials Booking
module. It seemed to me that the Silver product could not have been thoroughly
tested, as the problems were so fundamental as to make the module virtually
unuseable for the purpose we wanted. I surmised that perhaps usage of the module
in the US might be fundamentally different to its typical useage over here, so
testing wouldn't have revealed the weaknesses/flaws which we discovered on day
one of our Silver upgrade. As a result (penance?!), I volunteered to coordinate
a summary of the main "issues" we in the UK have with the module, in order to
report back to III and see how the issues might be taken forwards.
At Exeter we have several issues/concerns/frustrations with the product. I know
the Materials Bookings module was developed to book "materials" (the clue's in
the name!) but we use it purely to facilitate the circulation of our
high-demand, very-short-loan-period "Temporary Reserve" book collection. Last
academic year we had nearly 30,000 bookings made on our system (mostly through
the webopac), and this year's stats are shaping up to be even higher. We're not
interested in creating "events", scheduling weekly bookings, etc. We just want
some nice simple things, e.g. We'd like the capacity to be able to have the
bookings automatically cancel when expired, or even better to be able to cancel
automatically a set time (to be defined by the library) after the booking start
time. We'd like to be able to stop students from booking several items
with identical start times when here they can only borrow two items at once
from the collection! We'd like students to be unable to book an item they've
already got checked out , with a start time immediately after their current due
time (we are experiencing an increasing number of people disputing fines because
they'd booked the item in question instead of renewing it). I could go on, but
I'd better not (yet!)
So, if you use Millennium Materials Bookings for circulation of a high-demand
book collection, please let me know. As a smaller group we can then (virtually)
get together and have a good old chat/moan, and hopefully come up with a
prioritised list of major problems/concerns, and even some constructive
suggestions for improvements.
Lesha
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Lesha Fossey MA MCLIP
Assistant Librarian, Circulation Services
University of Exeter
Stocker Road TEL: 01392 263878
Exeter FAX: 01392 263871
EX4 4PT E-MAIL: [log in to unmask]
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