Recently in Reports Category

A couple of vigilant librarians (thanks, Kristi and Rita!) have noticed that the daily activity reports for Friday, July 11th and Saturday, July 12th, are incorrect.  I've talked with Innovative and it appears that the daily report process failed to run Thursday night.  Thus, Friday's daily circ stats are actually a duplicate of Thursday's and Saturday's stats include both Saturday and Friday numbers. 

Innovative assures me that this will not affect the monthly numbers, and that the problem is no longer occurring.  Also, since this issue has happened before, they are referring it to the programming department to investigate further.

If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to call.

The April Checkouts and Renewals, Checkouts and Renewals by Municipality, and Interlibrary Loan Lender/Borrower Statistics and Interlibrary Loan Statistics Consolidated by Library have now been posted and/or emailed to your library. 

However, because of the problems we experienced with the April statistics, there are some discrepancies in these reports and with the online Web Management Reports.

Checkouts and Renewals
Both of the Checkouts and Renewals reports reflect an accurate total number of checkouts.  Unfortunately, municipality and renewal detail for April 15th is missing, and had to be estimated.  Checkouts that could not be accurately assigned to a municipality were assigned to the municipality that checks out the most items at your library.  For example, the checkouts for Algoma on April 15th that could not be assigned to a specific municipality were all assigned to the city of Algoma.  Renewals that could not be assigned to a specific municipality were added to the municipalities that renew the most items online.  For most libraries, these estimated numbers are very small, and generally range from 2% to 5% of the total checkouts and renewals for the month. 

These are the most accurate numbers that we are able to provide, and these will match the official circ numbers we’ll provide at the end of the year for the annual report.

Interlibrary Loan Lender/Borrower
The Interlibrary Loan statistics are missing all data from April 1^st through April 3^rd.  We were not able to retrieve this information, so are posting the statistics as-is.  Please keep in mind that while three days are missing from the statistics, they are missing for all libraries, so the stats are still useful in comparing lender/borrower numbers and looking at lender/borrower ratios for individual libraries. 

Web Management
The Web Management Circulation reports are missing all data from April 1^st through April 3^rd.  (The one exception is the Hourly Circ report.  The April Hourly Circ statistics are correct for the month of April.) Because of this, data from any of these reports will not match the data from the Checkouts and Renewals reports posted on the OWLSnet statistics page. 

I apologize for the delay in producing the stats, as well as for the missing data.  While the glitch that caused this problem was outside of OWLS control, we have taken steps to increase our chances of being able to retrieve old data, in the event this problem occurs again.

A new report has been created - Items in Processing with Holds.  This optional report is emailed every month from the OWLS office. Each library who requests it can receive a list of their items with a processing status, and holds either on the item or bib record. This report is intended to allow the library to expedite the processing of new items with holds, and is most useful for libraries using the Acquisitions module.

Currently, Appleton and Door County libraries are receiving this report.  Please call the OWLS office if you would like to start receiving this report.

All of the monthly reports that are not posted on the OWLSnet Statistics page have now been converted to an email format.  The most recently converted reports include:

• New patrons report
• Short Loan List
• Discarded Items Statistics/Report

The only remaining reports that are still mailed are the quarterly Linked Patrons report and the annual Patron Purge report.  If you have questions about any of these reports, please don't hesitate to contact Patty or Gerri at the OWLS office.

Starting today, the monthly Checkouts and Renewals by Municipality report will be emailed instead of being mailed.  Some libraries have been re-entering the data from this report to create their own custom reports, so in order to eliminate that extra work, the report will be attached in two formats - pdf and xls.  If you wish to view or print the report, please use the pdf format.  If you wish to import the report into excel, please use the xls format.  

Since this report was originally mailed either to the director of the library or the person responsible for statistics, we used the email address of the person who is currently receiving the report. If you wish to change who the report is emailed to, please contact Patty Hankey. 

Patty has reposted the Should be Short Loan Report again after we discovered a problem with the report. The report had a problem with item status - some items that should have been on the report were not included, and other items were included that shouldn't have been. I apologize for this - I think it's fixed now and the problem should not re-occur. However, should you notice anything not-quite-right about this report (or any others) please don't hesitate to contact me.

We're continuing to make progress moving the mailed reports to email.

The Search Shelves (Claims Returned, Missing and Billed) and the Too Long In Transit reports will now be emailed to your library email accounts. If you have questions about these reports (or comments), please let me know!

The Should Be Short Loan report was updated today (August 16th), and will now be updated on a weekly basis. When the updated report is posted, you'll also receive an email in the library email account as a notification.

An observant librarian (thanks, Barbara!) noticed that yesterday's emailed Search Shelves report was not the Search Shelves Before Billing report, but actually an old version of the Search Shelves Claims Returned... report. Mea culpa!

I believe the problem has been fixed, so today's Search Shelves Before Billing actually contains the data for yesterday's report as well as today's. If you have questions, please let me know.

Again, my apologies!

Starting tomorrow, we're going to start emailing the Search Shelves Before Billing report.

For months now, we've had requests to email reports to libraries, rather than mail them. We wanted to do this shortly after migrating, but haven't had an acceptable way to accomplish this until now. We've just purchased a new software program that allows us to easily email reports, and will be working on converting all mailed OWLSnet reports to email.

Since most of these reports are time-sensitive, we prefer to send these to the library email account (which is accessible to multiple staff members), rather than a personal account which may not be monitored when someone is on vacation.

The library email accounts are in the format:
lib@mail.owls.lib.wi.us (where lib is your van code) OR
lib@mail.nfls.lib.wi.us (where lib is your van code)
and are also used for bookclub holds, patron replies to notices and OWLSnet forms.

If you have problem accessing your library email acount, please call or email Patty Hankey at the OWLS office.

If you have any other questions about emailing reports, please call or email Gerri Moeller at the OWLS office.