InfoSoup Development Blog

Several people have asked about the PIN retrieval feature that was supposed to come with the last upgrade to Millennium. I spent time trying to configure it in staging (http://www.infosoup.org:2082) - it's still up, if you'd like to see it, just go to the My Account page - but there are some problems with III's implementation of this feature so I haven't moved it over to the live version of InfoSoup. We have a call in to Innovative to see if they can resolve the issues I found, but I haven't heard anything back from them.

We know this feature would be incredibly helpful to all of you and to your patrons, so we will pursue making this work as soon as Innovative can resolve the issues we reported.

Thanks for your patience!
Beth

We have discovered a bug in the lastest upgrade that affects InfoSoup. In the last version, when you logged into your account you would stay logged in until you logged out. Now it appears that when you click on any "start over" button in InfoSoup after you have logged in, you are logged out without asking to be. Gerri has a call in with Innovative on this, and we'll keep you posted on what we find out. Just wanted you to know about it in case you have patrons asking why it's functioning this way.

An Appleton Public Library patron recently made the following suggestion:

Would it be possible to put ratings on the brief display of the search results? It seems you now have to go from the brief display to the long display to see the rating. But I think patrons who are interested in ratings would find it useful to see them right away on the brief result, as a guide to what long records they might want to look at.

This was, indeed, possible, so I set it up in staging. What do you think? Good? Bad? Post your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks,
Beth

In a previous post, Just try to stay logged in!, I reported that there was a bug in the last upgrade that would cause the user to be logged out when they clicked on the Start Over button after they were logged in. I'm happy to report that this has now been fixed and should no longer be a problem.

This was one of the major problems with the My Lists implementation. While My Lists is still not very intuitive, it's much more usable now that you're not logged out every time you try to save something to a list. Please take a look at My Lists in staging again and let me know what you think. If it's better now, we could release it with an instructional screencast.

I look forward to hearing what you think! Thanks,
Beth

We discussed the PIN retrieval feature I mentioned in this post at the AAC meeting today. Innovative has not responded to the call we put out at the beginning of September. The consensus at AAC was that this feature is important to us and our patrons, so we should implement it regardless of the problems that exist with it (mainly with display problems). I will add some requested text to the form and will remove duplicated buttons and text (a temporary fix I came up with) as discussed.

For those of you who weren't at AAC today, please take a look at it again in staging on the My Account page and let me know what you think. If you don't see any problems with using it as is, I'll make it live in the next few weeks.

Thanks,
Beth

There is a new option for search limiting that may be helpful to patrons using the Reading History feature in their patron accounts. Once you perform a search (when you're logged into your account) you'll see a new limit box in the search widget at the top of the page that says "Limit to titles which aren't in my Reading History." When you check that box and re-execute your search, it removes titles that appear in your Reading History from the search results. This could be handy if you have a favorite author, for example, and you'd like to only see those titles you haven't already read in your search results.

The consensus at AAC was that this is a nice feature and we should add it to InfoSoup. For those of you who weren't at the meeting, what do you think? Please look at it in staging and post your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks,
Beth

• Audiobooks changed to Audiobooks (all formats)
• Audiobooks MP3 changed to Audiobooks on CD MP3
• Audiobooks overdrive changed to Audiobooks Overdrive WMA
• Music on CD & cassette changed to Music (all formats)
• Music overdrive changed to Music Overdrive WMA
• Videogames and software added