October 2010 Archives

Ecommerce disbursements for August and September were sent out on Friday.  (The August disbursement wasn't finalized until after the September board meeting.) 

The amounts have been posted on the OWLSnet statistics page under Ecommerce.  Both the August and September numbers have been posted.  In addition, there is a link to the left of the title to the YTD Disbursement.  This lists all of the funds collected for your library so far this year, and what funds have been disbursed.






















All of the Ecommerce reports require the Extranet username and password.  Please contact the OWLS office if you need assistance logging in. 

If you're printing out the OWLSnet Directory, the following page has changed and should be updated:

*Page 12  KES  Menominee Tribal/County Library - Hours have been updated.

A couple of libraries have recently reported that they occasionally find items on their holdshelves that should have been on the clear holdshelf report, but were not.  If this happens to you, please let Laura at the OWLS office know as soon as possible.  She's been working with Innovative to fix the problem, and thought it had been resolved. 

When you contact Laura, make sure you include all of the information you can, including the barcode of the item and whether or not the item still has a pick up by: date. 

The September 2010 Monthly/YTD Circs and Renewals Report and the Checkouts and Renewals by Municipality Report have two significant changes.

First, renewals are now assigned to the original checkout agency, rather than the patron home agency.  This change was made to our system in the middle of September. According to the state annual report, renewals should be counted as circulations for the original checkout agency, and our reports will now match this definition.  We’ve looked at the data, and don’t believe this change will result in a significant change in circulation numbers for any OWLSnet library. 

Second, the renewals section now lists all renewals, both online and staff-initiated.  Previously, only online renewals were listed as renewals - renewals done by staff were included in the checkout numbers.  When comparing numbers, you’ll see that the renewal numbers are now much higher than on previous reports, and the circ numbers are lower.  For some libraries, this is a significant change, because they do a lot of staff-initiated renewals.  For other libraries, this change has a much smaller effect.

If you have any questions about these changes, please call or email Gerri at the OWLS office.

This month, Innovative changed the configuration of our system, to count renewals by the checkout agency, rather than by the patron home agency. 

Because of this, we've had to make adjustments to the spreadsheets and databases we use to produce the monthly circ statistics.  While we're making progress, the process is taking a bit longer than we thought it might.  We expect these statistics to be available early next week.

In the middle of last month, a change was made to the way we track renewal statistics.

We've finally implemented a long anticipated Innovative enhancement.  Renewals are now assigned to the circulating library, instead of simply to "online."  It will now be easier to see where an item was originally circulated, and we will have more accurate data for statistics.

In order for us to have the data we need for the circulation reports, a change was made to the Web Management Reports.  From now on, when you run a Cross Tab report, it will need to be run separately for checkouts and renewals.  The checkout numbers for these reports will no longer include the renewals.  This change does not apply to the regular Circulation Web Management Reports.  In these reports, the checkout figures do include renewals.