Thursday, February 15, 2018
On Tuesday February 13th, an update was pushed out by the WISCAT platform vendor, Auto-Graphics. This update provided additional information when downloading statistics -- specifically, the username of the patron or staff member who placed a request is now visible in the Request Records report in the Activity and Request Reports section of the Statistics menu.
Another new option, which is not fully deployed at this time, will give borrowers the option to indicate with a check mark whether or not they would like their requests to be filled by out of state lenders, which involves shipping costs. This feature will eliminate the need for borrowers to indicate in their borrower’s notes that they don’t want out-of-state lenders. We are still awaiting additional functionality options from Auto-Graphics before making this live across all WISCAT accounts. Additional information will be provided on this feature once it is fully functional. For the time being, we ask that borrowers continue to indicate in the Borrower’s Notes field if they do not want a request to go out of state.
In other WISCAT news, we are happy to report that searches are now performing considerably faster than in recent months. The WISCAT team worked with Auto-Graphics, Wisconsin libraries, and ILS vendors to update and optimize many of our live connections to library catalogs, resulting in faster searching. If the configuration parameters for live connections to your catalog (known as Z39.50 connections) change, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can ensure our connections are up to date and running smoothly and quickly.
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Written by Gail Murray, Resources for Libraries & Lifelong Learning