Reports and Display Items

It is possible to run a report to show the usage of items that have been used in a display.  However, in order to do this the initial set up must be correct.

Every item that is to be used in the display must have an accession note added to its record.

• Go to the accession record of the item and click on the Notes tab
• Add a line for the start of the display (see no. 2 in the image below) - you must enter the Event as Displayed, the start date of the display, and finally in the Notes box the name of the display.

• If you have also set the Status of the item to Display you will find that a 'Found' event is added when an item is issued (see no. 3 in the image above).

Running the Report

The report you need can be found at:

• Cataloguing menu
• Reports
• Usage (recalculated) of displayed items

It will prompt you for:

• Display date
• Display title/name

PLEASE NOTE: Before you run the report the recalculate usage function in Heritage must be run.  Please contact me when you need this to be done and let me have your start and end dates as appropriate.

Overdue Serials

There is a report in the Serials menu which will give the details of titles which are overdue and it will also prompt you to limit it by site.

• Serials menu
• Reports
• Overdue issues, by title, with selected site...

This will provide a list of issues which can be checked against your actual holdings before claiming for missing issues with Ebsco.

Heritage Cirqa - new system out later this year

IS Oxford will be releasing their next generation of the Heritage software in 2011, probably in summer.  It will replace both Heritage and Heritage Online and be a single version of the system.  It can be accessed remotely from anywhere by any workstation that has a good internet connection.  The functionality and user-interface will be unchanged but reports and batch processes will fun faster as all data retrieval and the majority of processing will happen on the server (rather than being subject to the client-server network bandwidth restrictions.  An improved job scheduler will allow for the running of reports as a background process rather than one that ties up a workstation.  The new model will allow IS Oxford to offer a “hosted” implementation to libraries.

This could help with the slowness issues experienced particularly at MW.  It sounds like an exciting development and one, perhaps, where we are among the early uptake.  I will be keeping abreast of developments and announcements regarding the new system.

Item Requests

Items that are to be requested for a student or member of staff should always be placed on Heritage - unless there are exceptional circumstances which make this impossible (there should be very few of these).

If the item is needed quickly you should still place the request on Heritage but then it is OK to phone the holding site to see if it would be possible for them to pick the item of the shelf to get it 'In Transit' asap.  If the timing is right this could mean that the item is in the courier bag a day earlier and consequently arrives at the collection site sooner.