January 2018 Newsletter

A message from Brendan Gallagher

Here at ByWater, we have been talking about mission moments during our weekly staff meetings.  “ Mission Moment. This is an opportunity for my colleagues and me to share stories about the impact our work has on our own lives or those of the people we serve. ”  ( Great Storytelling Connects Employees to Their Work , Harvard Business Review - September 25, 2017 ) I wanted to share one that happened recently. With the last batch of upgrades there was an upgrade that changed the database tables for our metadata. The importance of that change is it opens the door for Koha to ingest different formats of metadata instead of just the MARC format. The catch was that hundreds and hundreds of reports needed to be updated to use the new metadata table. Barton saw the issue and created a plan to get the rest of the staff here at ByWater to double check and fix all of the reports that fell into this category for all of our partners. I thought this was a great mission moment for our whole company, since we all wanted to make sure your reports still worked after the upgrades. I was proud of everyone here for showing our gratitude by putting in that extra thought and care for all of our partners, when other companies would not have shown that level of care. We are interested in hearing what Mission Moments inspire you at your library! Share those with us at outreach@bywatersolutions.com.

Ontario Library Association Super Conference 2018 The ByWater Solutions team will be exhibiting at the  Ontario Library Association (OLA) Library Super Conference 2018  from January 31 – February 3. We will be available at booth 325 to answer your questions. Come see what’s new, say hello and explore  Koha !

Librarian of the Month

Each month, ByWater recognizes a librarian for their hard work and positive impact on the community. This month is Myka Kennedy Stephens. Myka is the Seminary Librarian and Assistant Professor of Theological Bibliography from Lancaster Seminary in Pennsylvania. She has presented at numerous conferences, sharing her story about the transition to not only Koha, but other Open Source alternatives for her institution. She is a true advocate!  Do you work with someone who goes above and beyond to make your library a better place? Nominate them for a Librarian of the Month Award! Nominate Today!

Inventory - Part 1 In this Koha tutorial Kelly and Jessie will walk you through uploading a file of barcodes in the inventory tool. This is part 1 of a 2 part series on using the inventory tool.

Inventory – Part 2 In this Koha tutorial Kelly and Jessie will walk you through using the inventory tool to run a inventory breakdown of a library, shelving location or itemcallnumber.

Editing Frameworks This Koha tutorial will show the basics of editing and deleting fields in a specific MARC Framework to better suit your library’s needs when cataloging.