23.2 Release Notes

Highlights

IMPORTANT You may see changes in Security settings after this update, especially for reports. Contact your administrator to make sure you have appropriate access.  NOTE: If you are having troubles seeing the login window for Alexandria, try zooming out your browser (to 100%). We’ll handle this better in the next release!

We’ve heard a lot of comments and requests for us to not remove reports. Well, that’s easy—we haven’t been removing reports! We’ve been recreating them to run more smoothly and include better options. If you have a saved report that’s now marked as ‘Legacy’, look for a new version of that report and recreate your saved reports using the new selections and options. Some reports have been renamed. Coming soon: Betas will be available for Bulletin Board Builder and Reports in the next few months!

New and Improved

Utilities

• You can use the Remove MARC Tag utility to remove tags. Yay. Now when matching on a subfield term, you have the option to remove only the subfield, OR to remove the entire tag. So for example if you’ve added Accelerated Reader to a bunch of your books, and want to remove Reading Counts, well, now you can do so. (Alexandria Librarian only)

Patrons

• If an operator doesn’t have permissions to remove a patron, we now give them a better error message explaining what’s happening.

Circulation

• The Patron Lookup window is so popular! And so many of you noticed when we changed the shortcuts for selecting a patron! 😀 We’ve made some adjustments and it works better now. Keep in mind that for accessibility requirements the entire window has to be accessible via the keyboard, so pay attention to where the focus goes when you ‘tab’ or ‘enter’ in the window. You can now arrow through the results of the lookup, then press enter once to leave the list, and enter again to make the selection. We are confident that our awesome users will learn very quickly how the new window works!
• When you declare an item lost, or charge an overdue fine or discard fee, the patron email now automagically fills for you in the charge window!

Textbooks

• If you try to remove a textbook that has copies checked out, the ‘are you sure’ dialog may give you some indication of that. You can also check the copy list. We recommend handling all checked-out copies (i.e. declare them lost) before removing a title.

Fixed

General

• Some users were seeing issues in the Makeover where the footer was waaaaay below the fold and you had to scroll a lot. This is typically caused by a small display or a zoomed screen. But we want you to be able to zoom your screens. So we took steps to address this issue.
• The Makeover had some issues displaying currency symbols other than $, such as “CL$”, notably in the Copies tab of Items Management. These other currency symbols shouldn’t cause any issues now! We also took care of some oddities with the Replacement Cost and Purchase Cost fields.

Circulation

• Renewing items or changing due dates was causing the original checkout date to be changed as well. It wasn’t obvious until the Makeover Circulation which shows that original checkout date. So, we fixed that, and you should now be able to see the original date the item was checked out!
• When scanning an item already checked out to a patron, you get an alert asking if you want to check it in or renew it. This alert is supposed to have a sound, and the sound went missing. It had a little vacation. We’ve got it back at its desk now.
• The cursor wasn’t always returning to the command line after some actions and commands—usually when closing dialogs. We combed through and fixed a bunch of dialogs, so when you close them the cursor is back in the command line. Think we missed something? Go to help in the topnav and Contact us!
• Often when you are discarding items you are discarding a bunch for the same reason, whether that’s our standard reasons or a custom one of your own. The new Circulation window wasn’t remembering what you entered the last time you discarded, and that was inconvenient, but now it’s got its memory working. Keep in mind you can always keep the same reason by going into discard mode: enter dm in the command line, select your reason, and that reason will show next to the command line

Operations

• The Unpaid Charges Notice report was behaving poorly when it came to lost items, especially when paired with overdue charges for those lost items. We tested multiple scenarios a billion times and it’s all working now!!!
• The Titles Missing Information report for missing cover art was mysteriously including titles that…did have cover art. We found the issue (it was sneaky) and fixed it.
• Some operations come with files you can download, like reports and exports. Some don’t, like utilities and imports. When sending notification emails, we were including a link to download…something…when there wasn’t anything to download. So we fixed that.

Patrons

• The new Patron and Circulation windows were having some issues with patron barcodes starting with alpha characters, such as p50. Those issues are now resolved although we still recommend numeric barcodes. See more in Barcode Guidelines.

Researcher

• Once upon a time, Scout didn’t like hyphens. It discriminated against titles with hyphens and refused to search for them. One day, a savvy developer had a talk with Scout, conveying all of the many reasons why hyphens were cool. Nowadays, Scout likes hyphens. So you can search for spider-man.
• Bulletin Boards are now accepting of all date preferences. If you set your date format to European or ISO (in addition to USA), and you set bulletin/board show/hide dates in European or ISO format, Bulletins will understand and show/hide boards accordingly!