Soon to be launched -- LCPL's catalog review/rating system via Chilifresh

I'm so excited. In one week we are going to launch our catalog review/rating system via Chilifresh. I first heard about them in February on Horizon-L, and have been trying to push for it since. Lots of other Horizon libraries have signed on and it was only until last week my boss finally gave a go after we made sure we have the money to pay for it (the price is very reasonable, it's just that we were too short of money!).

Folks at Chilifresh have been very responsive even we are only still on free trail. I am so excited and hope that our patrons will like this new service. It would have been even nicer if we could do this in-house but we just don't have enough man-power or resources. Chilifresh is the second best thing! Easy to implement, takes me very little time to put it up and is quite flexible.

The more the better! But what happened if they are scattered all over the place!

We have our summer reading program going on at the library I work for. The library purchased the software/program from Evanced to handle the online reading logs, and reviews for the program. This is not in my area and I was never involved in the decision making process. Anyway it is up and running as it is, and as far as I know we have a pretty good turn out. Lots of patrons signed up online and posted their reviews.

On the other hand, I have pushed to purchase yet another catalog review/rating engine for our library -- Chilifresh. It can be easily integrated into our online catalog and is already very popular among some public libraries. Anyway, this will be yet another place for our patrons to post reviews.

Now here comes the question. What to do with these reviews posted on our Summer Reading Program after it ends. This was asked by a staff member on our staff blog. Are we simply going to just delete them? Keep them for next summer? Add them to our online catalog? (well this person does not know that this cannot be easily done)

The person asking the question does not know about the Chilifresh project I am working on but this person asked a very good question. It is a key to think about how we offer our services.

More is better, isn't it? More services to our patrons is of course better. But what happens if they are scattered all over the place?? Does that really offer much convenience to our patrons? Log in here to leave a review in our SRP... log in there to leave a review on our catalog...

This is not user friendly at all. More is not better when you are sending patrons all over the place to do things they should be able to do in one place.

I do not have a specific solution to the issue that our staff raised. I don't think that there is a way for Chilifresh to load the reviews we got from Evanced into their database so that they will show up in our catalog. We may have to manually do this if we want to preserve the reviews our patrons wrote for the Summer Reading Program.

If only we could have thought more about these two separate but yet similar services we are offering to our patrons and planned a better way to integrate them rather than offering both but at separate places. Personally I don't like the review section on Evanced. It looks pretty ugly. There is a rating system but it does not display. On the other hand, Chilifresh has a star rating system that displays right up front. The reviews look like they are part of our catalog. We get reviews from not just our patrons but from all participating libraries.

I don't know how my boss will answer our staff. I am just frustrated that we did not do a better planning job as we should have, and I feel like we do not have the vision to offer more integrated an user-friendly services to our patrons.

HIP icons

AW! I am working on adding some format icons to HIP today. Got part of it working, but for ebooks and large prints 2 icons were shown -- the book icon also shows in addition to the ebook icon or the large print icon. I looked at my config over and over again and couldn't figure out why the book icon shows up as well. AW!!!

So I decided to ask the Horizon-listserv for help. Great! Right after I posted my question, it was immediately buried under 10 other posts about SD's acquisition by Vista. And more posts about the acquisition are being generated as we speak. It's great that people are talking about this. But will someone ever see my post and answer my questions? :-( (weeping!!) I need help!!

And the upgrade/patching went very well

We were up at 9:02 AM this morning!! Some folks did not even notice that we were down. This is great! Several things were adjusted on the server. Ok, now we'll just have to see how the system performs when we are back from the holidays.

Clean up and other stuff

This is super!! I have finally cleaned up my drawers!! Threw a way a lot of old stuff left from people before me, so that I can put my own files into these drawers. Now I can find everything...(ok, maybe that's a little bit exaggerating!!) Great way to welcome a new year....

Tomorrow SirsiDynix Support will work with DIT to apply several patches to the Horizon server between 7-9 AM. They said it should take about 2 hours. I am hoping that by the time we are ready to open, Horizon will be up. Because of our slowness problems, I am putting a lot of hope into the patches and a few other things that Support plans on adjusting on the server. Hope slowness will go away in the new year!