Conference Reviews

Program

CODI Member Presentation Handouts and Slides 

11/27/2007 — The SirsiDynix Presentation Handouts and Slides have been posted to the same site as the member presentation materials. If you do not have the current user name and password to access these, please contact me offline.

General Session — SirsiDynix Overview: This session was opened by Gary Rautenstrach, SirsiDynix CEO. He openly acknowledged that 2007 had been a disruptive year, especially for customers, and that he wanted to restore trust and confidence, improve how the company does business, improve communication, and do right by Horizon customers. The company believes the strategy change is right for the long term. Sites can remain on Horizon for a while – the company is committed to maintaining the software for the next four to six years, and will give an end-of-life announcement twenty-four months in advance. However, the only upgrades that will be produced for Horizon will be bug fixes – no enhancements. New upgrade packages have been put together for current customers who wish to move to Symphony. Matt Hawkins, SirsiDynix COO, continued the session by discussing and demonstrating a snapshot of the new Client Care portal. Talin Bingham, CTO, discussed the “user experience strategy” the company is seeking to develop. This strategy involves a search engine for faceted searching.

General Session — Product Updates: Jolynn Halls, director for Technical Product Management, discussed the status of product development. Beta testing of Horizon 7.4.1 and HIP 3.09/4.13 began 10/22/2007 at five sites. General release is expected at the end of 2007. There are approximately 350 bug fixes in Horizon 7.4.1 and nearly 700 bug fixes in HIP. The Horizon 7.4.1 client has been certified for use with the Microsoft Vista operating system. Horizon 7.4.2, which will provide support for the Sybase 15 database management system, is scheduled for general release first quarter or early second quarter of 2008. Web Reporter 1.5 is targeted for general release at the end of 2007 and is tied to Horizon 7.4.1. Maria Laude, Library Systems Engineer, discussed the status of Symphony. Twenty-five sites are now beta testing the product. Half of the test sites are local installs while the other half are hosted by SirsiDynix. Berit Nelsen, Vice President for Technical Product Management, emphasized that performance, reliability and scalability were the key factors for the Symphony architecture. She reviewed supported server operating system platforms. SQL access will require a full Oracle license as opposed to an embedded one. An API subscription service will be available, but is “not a necessity.” Extended information fields will allow local fields to be created for storage, display, and reporting.

Data Recovery: Theory and Practice: John Craig of Alpha-G Consulting reviewed transaction concepts and what happens to record a transaction. He demonstrated the steps needed to perform an up-to-the-minutes database recovery.

RSS and “New Items” Web Service: Troy Jennings, Electronic Resources Specialist at Sioux City Public Library described the process he uses to generate a new titles list, create a web page, and generate an RSS feed. The technical services folks in his library enter barcodes into a Microsoft Access database which he then uses to query and link with data from the Horizon database. He uses a macro to run several queries, then generates and HTML page, complete with RSS feed.

SirsiDynix’s Roadmap for “User Experience” Solutions: Jolynn Halls and Talin Bingham further elaborated on the plans for faceted searching and additional plans for searching functionality. SirsiDynix is partnering with Brainware to create the search engine. Not only will faceted searching be included, but keyword and fuzzy searching, single and multi-byte character sets, and a customized look and feel via CSS templates will also be supported. A number of differentiators were outlined, including record updates being pushed from the ILS to the search product for indexing, fuzzy matching, pattern recognition, and dynamic categorization. Future plans include indexing of local, internet, and non-MARC data, support of API services for customer who want to locally expand the offerings, support for reviews and end-user rankings, and support for expert and end-use tagging.

Preparing Your Data for SirsiDynix Symphony: Tracy Moyers, Manager, Data Services, reviewed some pre-implementation activities that libraries can do to clean up their data in advance of upgrading to Symphony. He also gave an overview of the data services portion of an implementation to show where the data cleanup would most benefit the site to achieve a successful conversion.

SirsiDynix Symphony Architecture: John Dickens, Vice President of Software Development reviewed the various product names, server configuration, operating system platforms and database options necessary for Symphony. He also discussed various reporting options and API tools that could be used.

SirsiDynix Symphony Upgrade for Libraries: Jennifer Millikan, Project Manager, reviewed a sample schedule for a Symphony upgrade and implementation from start to finish. She provided some tips for success throughout the process and stressed that communication is key.

OPAC Choices in SirsiDynix Symphony: Bryan Erwin, Technical Product Manager, demonstrated several sample renditions of EPS. He highlighted several display options that can be used.

General Session — Keynote Speaker: Roy Tennant, Senior Program Officer for OCLC Programs and Research, shared his “Library Software Manifest”, in which he gave a numerous, but pointed look at the library software market, the players in that market, and the relationships between those players. He outlined a number of consumer rights, consumer responsibilities and shared responsibilities between vendor and customer.

CODI Business Meeting: Information was shared concerning the Board’s activities during 2007. Of note was the announcement that there would be no 2008 CODI conference; rather a joint conference with UUGI will be held in Dallas, Texas in April 2009.

API – Why Is It a Good Investment?: Mark Witteman, a Senior Technical Adviser in Client Care, discussed the API package and the services that SirsiDynix offers as a part of that package. Pre-requisites for a workshop were outlined, along with a description of the tools, documentation, and consulting services made available as part of annual API subscription.

Horizon 7.4 Enhancements: Jolynn Halls detailed timetables and requirements for release 7.4.1 and 7.4.2 of Horizon in 2008. She highlighted new enhancements throughout different modules of the system. There are over 350 bug fixes between Horizon 7.3.4 and 7.4.1, and about 700 bug fixes between HIP 2.1 and 3.19. Draft release notes will be made available the week after the conference.

List Mania: Creating Web Content and Feeds with JTRSS: Jie Chen and John Harper of Data and Stuff, Inc. shared how Taylor’s JTRSS utility was used to create a new titles list web page and generate an RSS feed for that page when updates are issued. The process shared was about their learning experience as they tried to create what they wanted. The best thing to them was that other than time invested; the cost to achieve the end products was free.