God yesterday was a long day! The day started with problems with our interlibrary loan system. We had run a script to delink user records from items borrowed in order to protect user privacy. Unfortunately, while the script work the way it was written, it had some nasty unanticipated side effects. Ones I didn’t catch when I tested it on a test data-set. Argh, the only way to truly test is to create a mirror test environment, which in this case isn’t possible. Rather than restore the database from a backup the SQL server admin and I ran a bunch of scripts to correct the problem. I’m still working on updating the script so it does exactly what I want it to. Although as I told the ILL staff I don’t expect it to be a perfect solution. There will be downsides of some sort that will crop up later that are the result of other system abnormalities. For the moment things are working and we will see if my script modifications helped.
The afternoon was spent tracking down a issue between SFX and our catalog. Our catalog doesn’t always create an accurate OpenURL to pass to SFX. In the case of multiple 020 or 022 fields it doesn’t pass any ISBN/ISSN information. In the course of this investigation I got thinking alot about SFX targets and what ISBNs should be loaded for e-books. If you only loan the e-book ISBN users who click on the SFX link in the paper copy won’t find the e-copy. Vice versa is true as well. Yet another issue of getting users to the appropriate copy! I don’t know a whole lot about FRBR but I think that it was meant to solve some of these issues. In the meantime, I am considering loading both sets of ISBNs into the target for our Netlibrary books. That way users will get the e-copy regardless or whether the are looking at a record for the e-copy or paper copy. Has anyone else done this? Is there a downside to doing this?
