March 20, 2012

Fourteen more Pennsylvania libraries go live on Evergreen

The Cambria County Library System, our largest system yet, migrated to Evergreen last week. Four libraries in the system - Cambria County Library in Johnstown, Cresson Public Library, Highland Community Library and Portage Public Library -- went live Monday, March 12. Five additional libraries - Beaverdale, Ebensburg, Lilly-Washington, Northern Cambria, and Patton - went live Wednesday, March 14, and the remaining five libraries in the system - Carrolltown, Gallitzen, Hastings, Nanty Glo, and South Fork - came up on Friday, March 16. Check out the map at the HSLC Evergreen website to see which libraries are next.

Generating URLs for Canned Searches

The VuFind public catalog is designed to facilitate the creation of canned searches. These are searches that you can embed in an HTML link on your website. Canned searches, just like regular ones, can be scoped to show only works which are owned by a particular library. To define the URL for a canned search, use VuFind's Advanced Search function. Once your search is returning the results that you want, you may copy the URL from the location box in your browser.

For instance, you can search for works about children and dogs, which are held by the Susquehanna County Free Library. The search screen looks like this:

The resulting URL looks like this:

http://evergreen.palibrary.org/vufind/Search/Results?join=AND&bool0[]=AND&lookfor0[]
=Dogs&type0[]=Subject&lookfor0[]=Children&type0[]=Subject&lookfor0[]=Susquehanna+
County+Free+Library&type0[]=institution&submit=Find&illustration=-1&daterange[]=
publishDate&publishDatefrom=&publishDateto=

You could use the URL as shown and it would work. However, since it did not specify a year of publication or a preference regarding illustrations on the Advanced Search screen, the URL can be shortened by removing some of the unnecessary parts.  The unnecessary parts display above in red. The resulting URL looks like this:

http://evergreen.palibrary.org/vufind/Search/Results?join=AND&bool0[]=AND&lookfor0[]
=Dogs&type0[]=Subject&lookfor0[]=Children&type0[]=Subject&lookfor0[]=Susquehanna+
County+Free+Library&type0[]=institution&submit=Find

The HTML tag for this search looks like this:

<a href="http://evergreen.palibrary.org/vufind/Search/Results?join=AND&bool0[]=AND&
lookfor0[]=Dogs&type0[]=Subject&lookfor0[]=Children&type0[]=Subject&lookfor0[]=
Susquehanna+County+Free+Library&type0[]=institution&submit=Find" alt="Search
Susquehanna County for works about children and dogs">Children and Dogs at Susquehanna</a>

To make it easy to see what was added to turn this into an HTML link, the HTML parts display in blue. Paste the link into your HTML page and you are ready to go.

One hint to help you define scoped searches: you can use any of the location fields (Region, Library District, Library Group, Library Institution, or Library) to define your search scope. However, all of these search types require an exact match to return results. In other words, you must put the region, district, group, institution, or library name into the search box exactly as it appears on the Advanced Search Scoping screen.

Circulation Corner: Anatomy of a Patron Record

Migrating to a new library system is a bit like moving to a new neighborhood: you need to shop for groceries, mail packages and get prescriptions filled just as you did in your old neighborhood so you need to find the grocery store, the post office and the pharmacy, but you're not quite sure where they are located. You need a guide - a local business directory, a good Google search or a friendly neighbor - to tell you where things are.

Similarly with a new library system, the same library functions and patron information are available to you as in the old system but they are displayed and accessed in different ways and sometimes use different terminology. Two new documents have been posted on the HSLC Evergreen website that will help you navigate the process of adding a new patron to the HSLC Evergreen Library System. Anatomy of a Patron Record explains the different fields on the Register Patron form in the Evergreen Staff Client and is guided by the HSLC Evergreen Library System Patron Record Policy. Your library may have additional requirements for patron registration beyond the HSLC Policy, such as the type of identification that can be accepted before issuing a library card. The system handles these local requirements by entries in the Library Settings Table completed by Local System Administrators for each library.

Support

That's it for this issue. The HSLC Evergreen News is published on the first and third Tuesday of the month to keep you informed about the progress of the HSLC Evergreen project.

If you miss an issue of the HSLC Evergreen News or wish to read previous issues, you will find them at http://www.accesspa.state.pa.us under News & Tips. If you have received the HSLC Evergreen News from a colleague and wish to subscribe directly, please visit http://www.accesspa.state.pa.us and click on the View All tab, then Subscribe to the HSLC Evergeen News.

-- HSLC                      support@hslc.org