From the President's Desk

Welcome to 2009! We here at COMPanion Corporation hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. In 2008 we experienced tremendous growth and are excited to welcome all of our new customers to the COMPanion family. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any concerns or suggestions, as we utilize your input for future product enhancements. At the start of a brand new calendar year, we are reminded of just how grateful we are for your loyalty, and intend to reciprocate by continuing to provide you with the best customer service and products in the industry for many, many years to come.

Thanks
Bill Schjelderup ∞

Product Announcements

Perma-Bound Books, a division of Hertzberg-New Method Inc., has been a leader in the book rebinding industry for 43 years. We currently offer our customers over 110,000 titles, backed by one of this industry’s largest inventory of books at around 5 million copies. In addition to our advancements and standards in binding, Perma-Bound continually strives to offer our customers the best in new features, functions, and programs on our website, our unique icatalog topic search program; our Collection Analysis and Planning program, which can analyze an entire collection for free; our continuously updated correlated title listings for State Standards for teaching; and many more. To learn more about Perma-Bound Books, the features listed above, and many additional offerings, please visit our website at www.perma-bound.com/Alexandria. ∞

Alexandria Tech Tips

What’s the difference between a Hard Due Date and a Period Due Date?

A Hard Due Date, set on your individual item policies, is most commonly used for things like textbooks where someone will have an item checked out for the entire school year. They’re used instead of a loan period and when you set a Hard Due Date it grays out the loan period box on the items screen.

The Period Due Date is used as a way to get your collection back into the library before running inventory at the end of the school year. As long as the patron policy has the option checked “Apply Period Due Dates” then any items check out by that patron policy are subject to period due dates. You set them in the Calendar section of preferences by clicking twice on the day you want all items returned to the library. The Period Due Date overrides the normal loan period so if, for example, you had a patron check out an item with a 14-day loan period the day before the Period Due Date it would be due the next day, not two weeks later. Items checked out on the Period Due date itself will revert to their normal loan period, so be sure to close the library down to patrons as of that date. ∞

COMPanion Tradeshows

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

Kaaren's Corner

By Kaaren Linton, Librarian/Alexandria Trainer

WAN, CU, MDS???

Text message? Alphabet soup? No, in Alexandria, these acronyms represent different Alexandria options available to school districts. Alexandria offers distributed union, central union, multi-data station, and single-site systems for libraries. This diversity allows Alexandria to provide a perfect automation system to fit everyone’s needs.

At some point in time, your district may contemplate changes for the way library automation is handled in your district. Being aware of the multiple ways Alexandria can be set up for your district can help you to make wise choices.

In any of these system options, you have the ability to search the collections of the other libraries by setting the Address Books in the Administration Global Preferences.

Distributed Union (WAN)

For years, Alexandria has had the option of running as a Distributed Union system that is often referred to as a Wide Area Network (WAN) configuration. With an M license, this is an add-on feature; however, with an A license, it is included in the license.

In this configuration, each library’s database resides on a computer at that library site and the librarians operate autonomously setting their own policies and preferences. Inter-library loan is not so easily accomplished as on a Central Union system, but it is still possible.

Central Union

The best example of a Central Union system is to think public library system where there are multiple libraries, but only one database containing patrons and items. Alexandria has provided some specific school-oriented features to its Central Union system. For instance, you may set your preferences for the Researcher to show all titles available in the system or just those owned by your library, and holds and reservations may be limited to the items owned by the school library instead of patrons from all areas of the district being able to put holds on any item owned by any library within the system.

The advantage of a Central Union system is the ease of sharing resources via inter-library loan (ILL) because all items are in the same database. Your district tech support personnel will see the advantage of having only one computer necessary to act as a Data Station and only one person needs to handle the Backups, Archiving and Rebuilds.

The disadvantage of a Central Union system is that librarians generally feel a loss of autonomy since this system works best when there is community agreement on policies and many preferences must work the same way everywhere. Having a committee to discuss and resolve issues is valuable to making this system run smoothly. Another issue is that barcodes must be unique across the entire district and any duplicate barcode issues will need to be resolved before switching to this type of system.

Multi-Data Station

The Multi-Data Station system is a favorite of both techs and librarians. The easiest way to explain this type of system is to say “condo living” for libraries—one computer, but multiple, separate databases for each library with the libraries retaining control of the way they operate. Techs love that only one computer is needed to serve as a Data Station for all libraries and that saves money since additional computers are not needed to serve as individual Data Stations and it saves time for them because they are only maintaining the one Data Station/Server. As mentioned, librarians love it because they retain the ability to set policies and preferences for their library independently from the other libraries and they don’t need to worry about issues such as using the same barcode ranges as other libraries.

One concern is that the district tech responsible for the Data Station must truly understand the necessity for daily backups of the various data folders, how many must be retained and the need for these to be stored off-site. The Alexandria utility, Rebuild, should be run once a week on this type of system, but the Scheduled Events preferences will make this so easy for the tech to set. The only other minor disadvantage is that all libraries must update to the newest version of Alexandria at the same time. ∞