From the President's Desk

Season’s Greetings! At this time of year, it seems that our thoughts turn to family and friends and are filled with good wishes for them — health, wealth, happiness, etc. You are not just our customers, you are friends and part of the COMPanion family. All of us at COMPanion hope that your holiday season will be joyous and that the coming year be even better than this year.

See you in January!

—Bill Schjelderup
President ∞

Holiday Season Reminders

A couple of things to remember for the holiday season:

1. Setting closed dates—with many libraries being closed extra days during the holiday season, be sure to set those days as CLOSED in your Calendar Preferences. This will prevent items from being due on days when the library is closed, which will potentially avoid creating unwanted overdue items. Most Policies are set up to not charge fines on closed days, but you’ll want to check your Policies to verify how it is set up.

2. Setting period due dates—for the upcoming new year, if you have not set your Period Due Dates in your Calendar Preferences, now would be a good time to do so. It is important to set these due dates in advance, before items get checked out. This will help when you reach the end of the school year. It will make sure that items don’t get checked out longer than you want them to so ultimately your items should have a due date during the last days of school. ∞

Kaaren's Corner

By Kaaren Linton, Librarian/Alexandria Trainer

New Year, New Version of Alexandria, and New Training Opportunity

Students of American history study the westward expansion. This great movement that brought pioneers to the West did not happen all at once. The first pioneers forged the way and learned many valuable lessons that were passed along to those that followed and that made their trek a bit easier. Alexandria users have begun the great migration from version 5 to version 6. We, at COMPanion, have tried to accommodate the needs of both groups of users by having the Tip of the Week instructions given for both the 5.5.6/5.5.7 versions and version 6.0.0. Starting this month, however, the tips will be solely about v6 features so that you can learn something new each week about this awesome software.

Realizing that the transition from an Alexandria v5+ version to v6 may be somewhat daunting and wanting to make that change as painless as possible, the trainers are preparing to offer some online presentations for our current v5+ customers that will help them become familiar with major changes in v6. Starting in January 2010, there will be a series of four webinars that will introduce our v5 users to the major changes in Preferences, Researcher, Reports and Utilities, and Patrons and Items. The series will be repeated monthly from January through April with each topic presented during one week of each month. Realizing that no one day or time slot can meet the needs of all our customers, we have decided to give each week’s webinar topic at four different times each on a different day of the week. We feel that this will enable more users to participate on a day and time that will work best for their schedules.

These webinars will be more a true presentation instead of the normal webex training because we will not be able to answer questions during the presentation. It will be necessary to sign up in advance and, since we expect many v5 users will want to participate in these webinars, you need to fulfill the requirements for switching to v6 prior to signing up.

To do so:
• Go to: www.goalexandria.com/updates/index.html

• Click on the “Alexandria 6.0.1” update link. This link will take you to www.goalexandria.com/updates/redirect_alex_6.html

• When you get to this page, click on the “Current Alexandria v5 Users” button which will take you to www.goalexandria.com/v6.html

• Fill out the form, which will then open another web page—www.goalexandria.com/v6thankyou.html—which will allow you to download the demo, and view a small video.

Filling out the form allows us to have your contact information and get you on the list to receive the new registration codes for v6 when the time comes to make the switch to v6 and will qualify you for these webinars.

Attendance will be limited, so, if a district wants all its librarians to attend and those librarians are able to meet at one location, then, only one librarian needs to sign up and then she can log in to the presentation on a computer attached to a projection device and all can watch. Individual librarians may register just for themselves and even join the webinar from home.

Look at your schedules for 2010 and join us if you can!

∞

COMPanion Tradeshows

Click here for the list of tradeshows COMPanion will be attending for the rest of the year!