The Shoemaker and the ILS

Do you remember the story of the Shoemaker and the Elves? While the shoemaker slept, little elves visited his workshop and made shoes from the materials he had left on his workbench.

While we are snacking and blogging and learning bits and pieces about Millennium, there are elves working hard among us! Today's I Luv Snacks update brings you an all-access pass to the behind-the-scenes of the migration project.

From the "enough to make you go cross-eyed" department, Julie A. recently combed through 50,000 (yes, 50,000) patron records to look for problems. Among the amusing typos she found were "Libertyvile" and "Vernon Ills."

Katie has been hard at work on an Introduction to Millennium class. There's a lot to learn, but with Katie as our guide, I think we can all be pretty confident that we will be pros at this!

A whole battalion of elves (Mary A., Carol H., Dave, Sonia, Heather, Jan H., Eileen, and many others) have begun spot-checking the data in the Millennium online catalog. The first load of all of our bibliographic records and item information resulted in all the call numbers displaying backwards. That's just one example of why we need to check lots and lots of records to make sure everything's correct. Since Geac PLUS and Millennium are different programs from different companies, they don't do everything in exactly the same way. Innovative (the company that makes Millennium) has had to do some guessing about the best way to "translate" our Geac data into Millennium-ese. Sometimes the guesses are right and sometimes they result in things like backwards call numbers, and need to be fixed. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 records (just a tiny cross-section of our database, which I believe has over 200,000 records) will need to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb between now and the end of next week. Yikes!

Lauren has been working with elves from all departments to determine the circulation parameters for the new system. Every detail, from the loan period for an item, to the fine per day overdue, to the statistical categories we use to analyze library use by different parts of the community, must be confirmed, and then entered into Millennium.

Pam Sk. has been doing more than I can possibly describe. She is keeping us (and Innovative) on schedule, assigning tasks to committees and committee members, reading lots and lots of user manual pages, and trying to ensure that our bibliographic records, item information, and patron data get plugged into Millennium properly so they will work properly.

Erin has been working on the December Ins & Outs newsletter, which will contain our first official notice to patrons about the change to a new system.

Laura H. and Andrea J. (oh, wait... that's me) have been creating make-believe item records and pretend patrons for trainees (that's you) to use in the Millennium training classes that begin next week. Lots of cutting and pasting for me... I tried to choose titles that would keep you entertained in class. The Penguin Who Knew Too Much, anyone? How about How Do You Spank a Porcupine?"

We're getting there, but there's a lot left to do! Stay tuned for more updates.