CODI 2005 – Day One (pm)

For the afternoon, I headed to the Corinthian sessions…
Overview of Corinthian Modules (Jolynn Halls)

  • Horizon 8 brings a few terminology changes – the major one being that locations are now called “agencies”. Agencies can be at a much granular level than a location and they work in a heirarchy that allows sub-agencies to inherit their settings from the parent agency. So, changing a setting at a top level agency also changes the settings in the sub-agencies.
  • All types of records (item, bib, borrower, etc) support “record ownership”, so that audit trails of any changes can be viewed.
  • Calendar exceptions can now be set to repeat automatically (e.g. you just need to set up Christmas Day once).
  • Day End as we know it has gone, and you have much more control over how scheduled tasks (which run on the server) execute – for example, you can set Horizon 8 up to generate hold notifications every hour. As these tasks all run on the server, you don’t need to have a dedicated workstation running 24/7 anymore.
  • All of the CIRC rules have been brought together into a single place.
  • Custom block types – new types can be easily created.
  • All of the interface labels can be easily changed – e.g. “patron” can be changed to “borrower”. Different agencies can use different terminology (e.g. one could have “students”, another “patrons”).
  • Staff accounts can be set to expire on a specific date – useful if you have student workers.
  • The security role manager now supports a hierarchy/tree structure, making it much easier to set up roles and also to allow “read only” access to certain tasks / modules.
  • Indexing has been built into the Horizon client, and it’s also much easier to index everything.
  • Cataloguing sees much more control over the import process, with many more options for overlaying.
  • For CIRC, there’s the ability to display borrower photographs. Also, borrower details are now based on the vCard standard (e.g. separate fileds for first name, surname, etc).

Corinthian System Administration and Overview of Security (Shelley Neville, aka The ACQ Queen)
Some of Shelley’s presentation repeated things Jolynn had covered in her session (see above), so I’ve missed those out…

  • You can create sub-administrators for each agency (aka location).
  • There’s a new feature called a “protected domain” – this basically defines the data(base) areas relevant to each agency, e.g. you can set it up so that location A can’t change location B’s data.
  • No need to set up a different agency/location if you want to have different CIRC rules for a portion of the stock (e.g. at Huddersfield we currently have a separate Short Loan location because the CIRC rules need to be different than for the main stock).
  • Creating new agencies is easy, as they automatically inherit the settings from their parent agency – from there, you can easily go in and make any relevant changes (i.e. exceptions).
  • Staff can log in with a common login, but you can set up certain transactions to require the staff member to log in using their own username/password. For example, you could log your CIRC desk PCs in using a common login, but to override a fine, the member of staff would need to authorise it by entering their own personal login. That means you get a proper audit trail.
  • Almost everything generates an audit trail, so you can easily see who broke/deleted things.