Category: Evergreen

Upcoming Training and Upgrade Sessions in November and December

Evergreen, Training

Training sessions in November and December:
(Online via Zoom)

November 19, 2 – 3 PM: List Maker: Making Bookbags of Selected Titles
Learn to use the List Maker to create a list of titles in the bookbag format, which you can share with patrons to make it easy for them to select titles, see what’s available, and place holds. This is a great way to create a list that matches titles from a book display, award list titles, staff picks, or titles related to any season, event or theme.    Here’s an example of the bookbag format: Snowy Days
Registration

November 21, 10 – 11 AM: Meet Me at the Corner of Cat and Circ
How does the system decide how much to bill a patron for lost material?  Why do we get so many alerts at the circ desk (or why don’t we get more?)  What does Age Hold Protection mean, and how is it set up?  What happens to missing and lost items — do they stay in the system forever?  How do parts work?  This session reviews how library loan rules work, and which elements of cataloging affect how circulation works.  It is aimed at both circulation and cataloging staff (especially the designated representatives) and administrators.
Registration

December 3, 10 – 11 AM: Making Most Popular Books Lists
Learn how to use circulation data to create lists of the books, DVDs, etc., that circulated the most for your library, in the past year (or any time period.) These can be as general as adult fiction, as specific as cookbooks or can be lists of the most popular authors based on the checkouts of their titles. 
Registration

December 5, 10 – 11 AM: Gemini AI: Hands-On Workshop
Gemini AI is Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot, available to everyone with a Google Workspace account at https://gemini.google.com. In this session, you’ll learn how Gemini (and other AI chatbots) “think” and what kind of tasks they can do as we work together through guided exercises and sharing screens.
Registration

Evergreen Upgrade Sessions:
(Online via Zoom)

NOBLE is upgrading to Evergreen 3.13 on Sunday, January 5. In these upgrade sessions, NOBLE staff will share the details of the downtime and provide an overview of new features to expect in the next release. Please bring along any questions you may have about the upcoming upgrade.
(Online via Zoom)

December 11, 10 -11 AM: Registration
December 17, 2 – 3 PM: Registration

Upcoming Evergreen 3.12 Upgrade – June 11

Evergreen, Executive Director's Report

NOBLE is pleased to announce the network is upgrading to Evergreen release 3.12 overnight on Tuesday, June 11.

Downtime Information

  • The tentative upgrade window is Tuesday June 11 between 9:00 pm and 12:00 am.
  • We will add messaging to the public catalog 1 week prior to the upgrade.
  • This upgrade will be much smaller than our previous one back in January. Because of the timing and reduced actual database downtime, we will not be building a backup authentication server.
  • During the downtime window, the following will be unavailable:
    • Circulation and other staff functions
    • Web catalog
    • Patron self services like placing holds, renewals and signing up for ecards
    • Authentication via SIP2 (Overdrive, selfcheck, Hoopla, museum pass, EZproxy etc.) will be unavailable for a portion of the upgrade window.

Previewing 3.12

NOBLE staff can log into the training system to get a first-hand look at release 3.12, which we will be using for training and testing the new release. Here’s how to login and set search preferences for the old and new versions of the staff catalog: Logging Into the Training System.

  • Please let us know if there are newer staff who can’t access the training system so we can add their accounts.
  • The training system contains a snapshot of NOBLE data so there are holds, overdue, bills, etc., with all patron information anonymized.
  • Feel free to test things, including adding, editing or removing patron, title or item information. Anything you add or change will be gone the next time we update the snapshot for the training system. Nothing will transfer to the production (live) system.

What’s Coming in Release 3.12 And Beyond (presentation)
Evergreen Release 3.12 Upgrade Session (recording)

 

NOBLE Upgrading to Evergreen 3.10 in January

Evergreen, Executive Director's Report

NOBLE is pleased to announce the network will be upgrading to Evergreen release 3.10 in early January. 

The upgrade will begin the night of Saturday, January 6. The system will be down from 6:00 p.m. Saturday until some time Sunday p.m. The system will be up and ready on Monday morning January 8.

Downtime Information

The extended outage for this upgrade is due to several factors:

  • The postgres database will be upgraded from 9.6 to 10. This involves dumping the entire database to a file, installing the new version, and importing the data back into the database. These steps take 4-5 hours each.
  • The operating system will also be updated which means that new application servers will be built.
  • Database scripts that add new features to the database are standard for most upgrades.

What is affected when Evergreen is down:

  • circulation and other staff functions
  • authentication via SIP2 (Overdrive, selfcheck, Hoopla, museum pass, EZproxy etc.)
  • web catalog
  • patron services like placing holds and signing up for ecards

We had a phone call with MOBIUS, our Evergreen hosting provider, about minimizing the effects of the down time and came up with a few solutions:

  • We will have a copy of the database put on a test system about a week before the upgrade. This can be used by staff to search for materials to get call numbers. We will send the URL to this system out the week before the upgrade.
  • Mobius will point the SIP server to the test system. We will pull the recently added patrons and import them so authentication will be available. Early in the upgrade and late in the upgrade the SIP server will need to be taken down, once to point to the test system and again to upgrade it and point it back to production.
  • Self check machines also use SIP and it will be important to not operate those during the down time. You don’t want transactions recorded on the test system.
  • Offline circ will be available to record circulation transactions. It is important to review Michele’s offline checklist prior to the down time.

Previewing 3.10

NOBLE staff can log into the training system to get a first-hand look at release 3.10, which we will be using for training and testing the new release.  Here’s how to login and set search preferences for the old and new versions of the staff catalog: Logging Into the Training System.